Sonos pumps up the music

While the $13-billion home audio market has been shrinking at a rate of 5% to 7% a year, a little Santa Barbara company has found a to grow sales of its home music devices by 50% this past year.

Sonos, while little known to mainstream listeners, has gained a sizable audience among a wealthier clientele who want to play their digital music collection from anywhere in the manse -- wirelessly.

Today, Sonos is coming out with its second generation system. The new ZonePlayers work much like the ones that debuted in 2005, except they are smaller and more powerful. The $999 starter kit (did we mention this is for affluent types?) comes with a player that hooks up to a broadband router, a ZonePlayer and a wireless remote.

Once the system is set up, it wirelessly ferries music via Sonos player attached to any existing stereo system or speaker anywhere in the house. (Customers can buy extra players for up to 30 additional rooms.) Users control the music using a touch screen remote that can summon music to any room in the house where Sonos players are set up.

The Sonos system grabs music from any personal computer hard drive that is linked to the home network, but it can also queue up tunes from online music services, including Rhapsody, Napster, Sirius and Pandora. And the remote control comes preset with 800 Internet radio stations.

The privately owned company aspires to be the equivalent of Bose for the digital music age. It has sold 350,000 of its first generation players to a cult-like following of customers, some of whom go on to rig up their kids' bedrooms, garages, Jacuzzis, pools and bathrooms. So while the home stereo market is singing the blues, Sonos is busy building its digital bridge over troubled waters.

-- Alex Pham

Photo courtesy of Sonos

Comments

[Roger]

I have my whole music available by using apple airport express and airtunes fom my itunes.. pumping music to different speakers in different rooms of my house.. Without the use of a remote, what is so different about Somos? My apple router costs 50 bucks (cheaper on craigslist) and the wiring is cake with the stereo.

PS. Somos is the future of home entertainment.. but currently I am doing fine.

[Mike McGranahan]

i second the thrust of Roger's comment. itunes, wifi, airtunes/appletv, iphone+remote app... much less cost, much more functional.

[Mike McGranahan]

you can also use the remote app on an ipod touch, in addition to the iphone.

[Sonos User]

Does your Airport give you Internet access to extensive online music services, allowing you to stream not only your own library but also anything you want from services like Rhapsody? Can you control the music zones in your house remotely without having having to run upstairs and sit in front of your computer during a party when you want to either change the playlist or put on music someone else wants to hear that you don't have in your own library? Sonos does. With due respect to the apple airport workaround, it's simply that. It's a wireless bridge. Sonos is a music system that gives you freedom and access beyond your own iTunes; the technology inside the Sonos box goes far beyond being a simple router. Fully respecting the Airport for the simple solution it provides, it's definitely not the same thing.

[Evelyn]

We have had the first-generation Sonos for a year now, a gift from our self-confessed geek-son and it is one of the best gifts we've ever received. While we do have a music library stored in our computer, most of the time, we stream in classical music from other parts of the world--Paris, Austria, Germany--you name it. This is truly going global, thanks to the internet.
You can program the system so it can wake you up from Paris, help you sleep from Switzerland, etc, etc. If you're learning new languages, you can get total immersion and, of course, if you want to hear world views about current world events, those are accessible, too.