The Duo Deliver the Sonos Verdict

You'll set up your Sonos system by giving each ZonePlayer a name: "Master Bedroom," "Living Room," "George," or what you will. You'll then use the controller to decide what music you want where and even how loudly it plays. Steve tried playing various songs in different rooms and playing the same song in multiple rooms (great for parties!): it all played smoothly, even when the network was busy with other traffic.

But there's a catch to that omnipotent controller, notes Angela: whoever has it--or a PC with the controller software--has total control over the system. Even if you press the mute button when you go to bed, your kids could wake you up by unmuting the player from the remote, since there's no on/off switch on these boxes. Yes, notes Steve, but other than that it's a great design--even better, perhaps, than that of the IPod.

That's not to say Steve didn't find a few glitches in testing. In some ways, your first ZonePlayer is kind of redundant. You're supposed to hard-wire it to your router, but if you do, then that unit probably lives where your router does, which is near your computer. But if you already listen to music on your computer, you don't really need the ZonePlayer there. And that, dear reader, is why the co-host with the studio apartment did not test the Sonos.

Angela did, however, spot a problem even without benefit of testing: the Sonos can't handle most files with digital rights management technology, which amounts to any file you buy from ITunes or most of the other big online music stores. That's a real pain, agrees Steve: if you've got a big collection of stuff you bought from ITunes, you're not going to be happy with this. On the upside, he says, the Sonos can work with a so-called NAS--network attached storage--which is basically a stand-alone hard drive with its own case, power source, and ethernet cable. Such drives go for about $240 for a 120GB model, making them just about right for a moderately sized music collection.

So's the Sonos. The company says the unit can handle 30,000 tunes now, and it's planning ways to increase that capacity later on. At that $1,200 price point, the Sonos is not the music manager for everyone. But it demonstrates the kind of design sensibility that will only get cheaper--and it's a product that somebody clearly thought long and hard about before releasing it into the market.