Sonos Android Review

What is Sonos?

Let's get this out as follows: Sonos is not cheap. You will spend at least several hundred dollars to the most basic Sonos system running. This is the hard part. The question we asked ourselves "What, exactly, do we pay?"

The review of the Sonos system, we send a pair of Sonos ZoneBridge S5 $ 399 and $ 99. The S5 is an autonomous system of five speakers unit. Counts as "high performance all-in-one wireless music system that offers clear, powerful sound. Just plug it where you want music and enjoy it." And that's pretty much there. It comes with two cables - one for power adapter and an Ethernet cable. The first is on the wall, naturally, and the second on your router to connect your home network. That's all you have to go. It is an emulation of ethernet, also with two ports, so you can run CAT5 to S5 and continue on a laptop or other device. Nice.

The sound quality is really good. Be nice and loud without distorting, the bass is pretty full (though not as good as if you have a real subwoofer), and is truly able to meet the relatively normal-sized room.

ZoneBridge really opens things, though. Connect to the router, and it's WiFi hotspot, so you can put the S5 - or up to 32 Sonos devices, in fact - anywhere else within range. S5 is a lightweight that you can easily move from room to room, or outdoors head - wherever a Wi-Fi network.

For our test, we had an S5 in the room, and about 45 meters in the living room, both connected wirelessly.

Setup

There is a desktop component of this. You have to register and download the Sonos Sonos Desktop Controller. He did a good job, crossing to ensure it is properly connected and configured your music library. And you can have your local music is a real computer, or Network Attached Storage, which is how we roll. Best of all - you do not need skills in the real network. It is plug-and-play.

And finally, the key point of all this effort just - the controllers. You can operate the system with the Desktop Controller or buy a $ 349 equipment away from Sonos, and that's fine. But Android (and the iPhone and IPAD) controller, for our money, it is the way to go - because it's free. Check it out.

When you're all set up, you have direct control over the music library, and a healthy dose of radio on the Internet as local radio stations, Pandora, iheartradio, Last.fm, Napster, RDIO, Rhapsody, SiriusXM, et al. It is not short of things to listen to.