[Closed] Wireless music - Sonos Play 1 or Audio Pro Addon T3?

Sonos Play:1 is plenty powerful and great sounding. We've got one in our kitchen and it's brilliant.
Check that it supports all the music services you want, and pick one up this weekend whilst they're down to £150!

I've now got five Play 1's plus a PlayBar under the TV. They are perfect for smaller room.

Play 1 in a 25 m2 living room works great for me. Just upgraded to a playbase, and bought another play 1 for upstairs... My biggest plus for Sonos is that it just works, always. Can't comment on other options though. Do I have a Sonos problem?

Ok, cheers. I'm a wireless music novice so what's the best source to use, and can we also wire a Play 1 (or similar rival) to a CD player too? I have some Black Diamond speakers to use if poss - will they sound better than the Sonos? Ta again.

I'd think carefully about what you want to do...

In my experience, Sonos works best as a direct source of the music, i.e. the Sonoses (Soni?) stream the music from the web themselves. You need a streaming subscription to do this - so Amazon Music, Google Play, Spotify, Deezer etc.

It's pretty good at this. But the sound quality across the services is variable, and you'll have to pay a premium to get a service that streams in high quality. For these, Sonos sounds good, but a bit 'engineered' to me.

Not as good as playing directly from a CD through a decent amp and speakers. However, it is way convenient. Just type in a track or playlist and off you go.

If you have a load of digital music yourself, then you need to connect a hard drive or PC permanently to your network to listen through Sonos (unless it's all on your phone). I've found this to be much less slick, and frankly quite annoying sometimes - it loses the source of the music and you have to faff to find it again.

I've resorted to the streaming services out of frustration.

If you have some speakers to listen through, you'll be looking at another system from Sonos known as Connect (£349) or Connect Amp (£499). That's a big outlay compared to a simple One. And only the £499 Play5 has a 'line in' / Aux socket. You can't plug speakers into a PlayOne.

Finally, if you want to listen to iPlayer Radio on Sonos, forget it. You can listen live through TuneIn, but there seems to be some great conflict between Sonos and the BBC about allowing you to listen to iPlayer Radio services, even though the cheapest own brand TV's have no problem including an iPlayer TV app. Grrr.

On balance, if you just want to listen to streamed music from the web, I'd go with Sonos One.

If you don't want web-based content I'd think about alternatives, especially if the content is already on your phone as bluetooth is much less faff than a Sonos IMHO.

I had a Sonos Play 1, nice design worked flawlessly, sound was absolutely bobbins. Replaced it with some active speakers and a chromecast audio - sounds much, much better, but much more faffy and frustrating.

Good info there Andrewreay, I am due to move early next year and would like to kit the house out so audio from phones, tablets or laptops can be played on separate speakers around the house. I didn't realise this would be impacted if the music was streamed as opposed to played from hard copy.

The new Sonos app is awful! But the system just works. (five networked devices in our household). The Play 1 sounds vastly better than the Amazon Echo. Buy with confidence. The three and five are not appreciably better (have one of each), and the connect needs AV.

I don't own a Sonos 1, but stayed in a hotel that had one.

I was quite disappointed by the quality of the sound.

However listening to full on surround Sonos setup in John Lewis, it sounded great, but it only used Sonos 1's as surrounds and 5's I think as the main.

At home I've got my 20 yr old Hifi system linked via a Bluetooth thing to my phone running ITunes. Sounds way better, although you can hear the poor quality bit rate of itunes

[quote=Andrewreay]If you have a load of digital music yourself, then you need to connect a hard drive or PC permanently to your network to listen through Sonos (unless it's all on your phone). I've found this to be much less slick, and frankly quite annoying sometimes - it loses the source of the music and you have to faff to find it again.
I've resorted to the streaming services out of frustration.
I've found this can be prevented by assigning the source (NAS box in my case) and all Sonos speakers static IP addresses - seems to keep it all together well.
Another trick is to use the app to schedule a regular re-scan of the source at some convenient time (I chose 3am).

[quote=funkydunc]I don't own a Sonos 1, but stayed in a hotel that had one.
I was quite disappointed by the quality of the sound.
Probably they didn't use the Trueplay setup. You need an iDevice running the Sonos app to do it but it really makes an appreciable difference to the sound quality.
It's a one-off thing but obviously needs to be re-done if you move where the speaker is located.

We have a sonos 2 and the only gripe I have is that you have to subscribed to spotify to use the streaming service.

Have it set up to stream off my external HDD off the PC too. Works good.

I was quite disappointed by the quality of the sound.

They aren't Hi-fi by any means. We have a Sonos 1 and the sound quality is well below the Marrantz Hifi or even our iMac. It's always on and convenient though...

If you can stretch the budget slightly the Bluesound Pulse Flex is worth a look. Similar size to the play one but much better sound quality and way more versatile. Has quite a few inputs and can be made truly portable with a battery pack

[url= https://www.sevenoakssoundandvision.co.uk/p-15875-bluesound-pulse-flex-hi-res-wireless-speaker-system.aspx?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIu9DQk_He1wIVDRHTCh3oHQqxEAQYASABEgI9pvD_BwE ]Pulse flex[/url]

I have two sonos systems in different locations and can't say I've seen the play back / streaming issue.

Each system has a nas with my ripped itunes library on it that indexes daily at 2am.
Apart from sonos firmware updates I find it very stable and perhaps need a reboot of the sonos devices once or twice a year.
Access to spotify as a premium subscriber also just works.

The interface is reasonably slick and easy to navigate all in all despite the cost the ease of use make it worthwhile.

Though with Amazon Alexa, Google Home and Apple looking to get in on the market there could be some changes ahead.