Hi,

I am organising a Sonos set up for the old man. Not a tech head, lives in an old farm house with very thick walls. He already has a decent Cambridge audio set up which is wired up to cover two rooms. His music is stored on cd and iTunes on his toshiba laptop. He has an iPad which he can use as a remote for the system.

Whatever I get him needs to be low maintenance and faff free, has has neither the patience nor interest to fiddle with anything tech like.

I wanted to check what I needed to get him set up, as I have never been able to justify getting one myself

First you will need to get all the music he wants to listen to off the CDs.

Then you will need a music library that is accessible to the Sonos – you can keep the music on the laptop but will need to switch it on or keep it running whenever he wants to listen to music. I don’t use itunes, so can’t say whether Sonos can access it as a music library. I’m sure someone else can.

You may need to get a Sonos Boost if the thickness of the walls causes problems with wifi signal propagation.

Personally, I’d ditch itunes, rip the CDs to a lossless and open format like FLAC and buy a small NAS system ( ideally Synology or Qnap ), but that is maybe overkill and influenced by the fact that I think itunes is the work of the devil.