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Darn the new Sonos S5. With this review falling in our busy pre-Christmas period where piles of kit awaits review, the last thing we needed was something so joyfully brilliant that we just lie around playing track after track. For Sonos has taken its smart-as-a-tack networking music system and added just one thing — a standalone speaker unit.
The transformation is extraordinary. Because at $699, the S5 ZonePlayer makes a lot of iPod speaker docks look pretty silly. For starters, there’s nothing at the price that sounds better. It has five Class-D-driven drivers — the two tweeters fire slightly sideways through the curved front grille to create a good stereo image, while two 7.6cm midrange units and a 9cm bass speaker produce such richness that we actually checked the EQ settings (without getting up, through the controller) to notch the bass down. In fact we found the system comes with ‘loudness’ on as default, which many users will like; we thought things fractionally clearer without, particularly in the corner position that the S5’s angled edges fit so well.
So number one — great sound. Number two — nothing does such a good job of indexing your music collection as Sonos. Give the S5 an Ethernet link to your home network, and it will index your iTunes collections on any computer (Mac or PC), it finds Windows shares and NAS drives, then quickly generates (and regularly updates) a comprehensive artist list. And whereas most media playing systems stall on certain file-types, Sonos really does do the lot, including high-quality rarities like FLAC and OggVorbis. The only gap we could find in its arsenal was Real Audio capability, handy mainly to access BBC Listen Again content.
There’s not much in the way of buttonry on the S5 — just volume and mute, in fact. So you need a controller. The new Sonos handheld CR200 (below) is a beautiful touchscreen marvel, but Sonos also gives away its App for iPhone or iPod touch (see above). Already got one of those? Then you’ve got a free controller. And if you haven’t got one, you might prefer to buy a $289 iPod touch instead of the $599 Sonos controller — think what else you can use it for.
Either controller browses not only your shared music, but also internet radio, last.fm (which streams music programming based on an artist of your choice) and potentially other music providers like Rhapsody and Napster, if you can circumvent their current refusal to offer free services to Australia.
And so you end up like us, on a hot Sunday afternoon, scrolling through your touchscreen, which handles long artists lists with an ease unknown to most similar systems thanks to a rapid-access alphabetical scroll on the righthand edge of the touchscreen. Select tracks or iTunes playlists, add songs to the queue; you can even search through your network by folder.
Meanwhile this is just one ZonePlayer. You can build a Sonos system of up to 32 zones, should you have such a mansion to hand. Only one of them needs an Ethernet connection because the others will talk to each other through their own Wi-Fi mesh, which is entirely separate to (and generally more reliable than) your own Wi-Fi if you have it (you don’t need it, and indeed the ZonePlayers can replace it, since their Ethernet sockets will supply a network connection to anything nearby).
So an S5 in each room? Or the smaller ZonePlayer modules — the ZP120 has amps inside so you just add a pair of stereo hi-fi speakers. The ZP90 provides just analogue or digital pre-outs which you can feed into an existing amplifier, receiver, anything with a suitable input.
And every Sonos controller or iPhone can control the entire system, as can any PC or Mac running the free Sonos controller software. Zones can be combined and synchronised (and synchronised properly, another rare feat); all zones can play the same thing or something different in every room. Each ZonePlayer has an auxiliary input — and any other ZonePlayer can play any auxiliary input!
What’s wrong with it? The virtual text-entry keys on the Controller 200 touchscreen are just a tad small for our thick fingers. If you’re going to stream a lot of internet radio or music services, remember to watch your ISP data allowance (with heavy use you might pull 3-4GB a month).
And er, that’s it. There is, to be frank, nothing else we know to touch the Sonos system’s ease of use and intelligence, and for most users, the S5 is the perfect expandable introduction. Don’t think twice.
MYM: Playback Systems
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