Sonos Digital Music System

The Sonos Digital Music System is as dramatic improvement to the distribution of audio digital entertainment content throughout the home as the Kaleidescape Digital Video System is to the residential distribution of high quality DVD content. Both share the following important characteristics:

Outstanding User Interface
The Kaleidescape Digital Video System has won numerous awards for its intuitive and graphic user interface. Video distribution solutions benefit from the fact that a monitor is turned on when you want to watch a movie and Kaleidescape takes full advantage of this by developing a beautiful remote controlled interface that works on any large screen viewing monitor. Whole house audio systems face a challenge in that homeowners do not want to turn on a television to control and watch the music they are listening to – especially if it’s in a room without a TV screen. The Sonos remote control system uses a wireless “iPOD like” remote that lets you see the cover art of the album you are listening to, read the name of the song and gives you full control of the audio source (volume, mute, skip, return, etc.) in any of the home’s listening zones.

Digital Content Storage and IP Distribution Architecture
The Kaleidescape can stream encoded DVD movies flawlessly to up to seven (7) different movie players around the home from its multi-terrabyte server over standard Cat5 wiring and an Ethernet 100BaseT switch. The Sonos Digital Music system can stream WMA, WMV, MP3, AAC (MPEG4) music to up to 32 different Sonos ZonePlayers receivers throughout the home over its 2.4Ghz “SonosNet” wireless or wired connections. To ensure the quality of service for audio connections from ZonePlayer to ZonePlayer, Sonos has developed a wireless “802.11g-like” protocol called SonosNet. A non-trivial technical hurdle that the Sonos engineering team solved was the need to synchronize digital music to all the hubs. A musical lag when you are playing the same song in each room is not acceptable.

Unlike Kaleidescape, which requires storing the digital DVD movie content on their own server (due to digital rights management requirements), Sonos can use whatever hard drive in the home contains the digital music. They recommend that a network storage drive be purchased so that it always remains on as the digital music storage vault for the home.

In addition, Sonos adds the ability to add a local analog source to each of their ZonePlayer receivers. This is an incredibly useful feature because each ZonePlayer can act as a source to the whole house music system. Picture a scenario where a guest arrives at your client’s “Sonos-enabled home” with their iPOD, connects it to the Sonos ZonePlayer in the family room and your client wants to hear the iPOD music in their master bedroom. The Sonos ZonePlayer will encode and stream the iPOD music from the family room ZonePlayer to the Master Bedroom ZonePlayer where it is decoded and played back through the master bedroom sound system. One feature missing in this example is the ability to control external input audio sources from a remote location because the ZonePlayer receiver does not provide any IR or RS232 control of these external sources. Also, the Sonos system currently does not have any in-wall keypad audio control solutions. To solve these issues, we found that the Sonos Digital Music System connected to a “traditional” analog whole house music switching system is a match made in musical heaven.

Marriage with Existing Whole House Audio Systems
While the Sonos Digital Music System can certainly stand on its own as a distributed whole house audio system – there are several benefits to integrating it with the more traditional analog based audio distributions systems like those from Russound, Niles or Sonance. Using the Sonos ZonePlayer as one of the line source inputs to, say a Russound system, you can take advantage of the in-wall keypad controls of the Russound system to select audio sources and provide source control for a given room and still enjoy the benefits of Sonos’s great wireless graphical controller when you select the Sonos input on your Russound keypad. Here’s an example:

You have a client that wants to have an AM/FM tuner, satellite music, XM radio, and digital music as sources to a whole house audio system. You design this Russound 4-source system as you normally would with the appropriate input sources and IR control but now you use the Sonos ZonePlayer (connected on the network to a network storage drive that has the digital music) as an input for the digital music instead of, for example, using the audio out of a computer that contains the digital songs. The benefit of this approach is that the homeowner can now fully see and control the digital music they are listening to in any room of the home (or even in the backyard) from Sonos’s wireless remote – a greatly improved interface over what you usually find on whole house audio controls (unless you move all the way up to the much more costly Crestron or AMX control solutions).

The new Sonos Digital Music System is as revolutionary to the distribution of whole house digital music as the Kaleidescape system is to the whole house distribution of high quality digital video. With an exceptionally easy to use remote, the flexibility to listen to thousands of digitally recorded songs throughout the home and the scalability to easily add new wireless music receivers and remote controls to the home – I predict the Sonos Digital Music System will be a very popular product for new and existing homes.

(reprinted from Residential Systems Magazine)