I looked at both when I needed to replace my audiotrons (a now-defunct
precursor product). I ended up going the squeezebox route and am quite
happy (I now have 5 of them around the house with a variety of
amps+speakers and powered speakers). I continue to hear good things
though about Sonos so you probably wouldn't go all wrong if you ended
up there (but you might take a look at olive audio if the sleekness
factor is high on your list of criteria).
If you search you'll find a fair amount of info comparing sonos and SB
on this forum. Some data points:
- audio quality - nobody seriously claims that the actual audio quality
from sonos is better. Take a gander at he audiophile forum attached
hereto for more on this.
- plug and play - this is where sonos has an advantage. For those who
are not willing to tinker at all sonos is probably the safer route. I
am not a programmer but I kind of like to know how things work so I get
some pleasure out of fiddling a bit with the whole thing.
- proprietary - this cuts both ways. For Sonos this allows them to
provide a 'complete' out of the box solution. It also means that they
are completely responsible for every piece of the puzzle--good from a
support perspective, maybe not so good from an innovation and product
development perspective. THE SB approach is to just do what they do
and rely on all the other extent stuff (PC, LAN, routers, amps, etc.)
to get a working system. This can make troubleshooting more difficult
with the SB for someone who doesn't understand much about their PC or
their router or their LAN etc. It also makes it possible to really
advance one piece of the puzzle dramatically as per the new
controller.
- remote - the Sonos remote is no longer 'better' than the SB
controller. It may be the case that as a matter of taste some might
prefer one over the other but there is no longer any way for Sons to
claim 'better' on a fact basis. As a matter of my taste I think the
form factor of the SB controller is MUCH better--to me the sonos remote
now seems clunky and old fashioned--you need to use two hands, it
doesn't really fit in your pocket, etc. There's also a number of
hardware elements of the controller that are not yet in use. A good
bet that it will keep getting snazzier over the next 6-12 months.
- Multi-room - This another area where it appears that there really is
a difference between SB and Sono--but it is only in one particular
subset of use which may or may not matter to you. There are two layers
to a multi-room system: synced or independent. Functioning
independently (playing different music in different rooms from a single
source) the SBs work great. Syncing (playing the same music in more
than one room) also works well with the SBs as long as you are playing
music from a music source on your LAN. So the material difference
comes if you want to sync music from internet sources (internet radio,
pandora, rhapsody, etc.)--here it appears that Sonos works better.
Again, I've got a 5 room system working now and if functions splendidly
for me because the only time I want to sync all 5 rooms is when I'm
having a party and then I don't want to rely on internet connectivity
anyway so will play playlists from my server anyway (which works fine).
If this is important to you check out another thread on this specific
topic.
Overall, I do not agree with the 'sonos is better but it's also more
expensive' Money wasn't particularly an issue for me when I made my
decision. I like the SB approach better ('just do what we do and do it
really well'), I get a charge out of the community that exists around
the product, I like a number of the plugins developed by the community
and I think the controller is now way better (again, for my taste) than
the sonos remote.
--
cshaida
------------------------------------------------------------------------
cshaida's Profile: http://forums.slimdevices.com/member.php?userid=1981
View this thread: http://forums.slimdevices.com/showthread.php?t=47145
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