Sonos Digital Music System

Reviews: Multimedia

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Richard Poelling
Kurtis
Sonos
Nov. 13, 2006

Specifications

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Setup

Obviously, for installing the device I thoroughly read the instructions and properly setup the device! yeah right. Like most people, I pulled these out of the box, and just started plugging things in. Instructions are for when things DON'T work. You don't know if something isn't working unless you try it out. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Basically, I plugged a single ZP80 into my network and then plugged it into my stereo receiver using the standard RCA type connections. I fired up the remote and walked through the setup of the ZP80, which essentially entailed pressing the mute and volume up buttons simultaneously. Once that was done, my remote found the unit and I could play music. The music I was initially connected to came from my Infrant ReadyNAS which uses standard uPnP to access a media share. Browsing by way of the remote allowed me to get music in a matter of seconds. There is nothing better than instant gratification.

Now I had the unit hooked up, but I had this unsightly Ethernet cable running to my receiver. Since the ZP80 bundle contains two units, I decided to plug the second unit into my network at the equipment rack. After plugging in the unit and carrying out the same setup steps as before, I now had two units visible on my remote. Since I wanted to essentially transfer the streaming connection from one unit to the other I figured I would probably have to shut the whole system down and unplug one as the other finds the stream. I could do that, but I didn't. Instead, while streaming music, I just unplugged the network cable from the unit mounted near the receiver. There was about a 2 second blip in the music, but that was it. The receiver unit was now working wirelessly with the unit mounted at the equipment rack and the switchover was essentially seamless.

For comparison purposes, I also received one of Sonos' ZP100 units, which has a built-in amplifier, something the ZP80s lack. The main difference between the ZP80 and ZP100 is that the ZP80s do not have this amplifier so you have to plug the ZP80 into either a powered amplifier or use powered speakers. The ZP100 also contains a 4 port Ethernet switch compared to the ZP80's 2 ports. Also for my own testing purposes, I received a pair of Sonos' SP100 loudspeakers, which I hooked up to the ZP100.

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Page 1: Introduction
Page 2: First Looks
Page 3: Setup
Page 4: Testing
Page 5: Conclusion

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