Sonos – how have I lived without you?!?

I wrote in my last post that soon after installing Memeo I couldn’t figure out how I had lived so long without it. I had a similar – in this case instantaneous – experience last night after installing my new Sonos. I’m not entirely clear why I waited to long to buy one (actually I am clear – I’m cheap and Sonos isn’t exactly inexpensive) but now on the long side of my buying decision, whatever benefit my frugality brought me was completely dwarfed by the sheer joy and excitement I had about 15 seconds after setting up my system.

Because my house was not wired for speakers and because of my aforementioned penurious nature I had cobbled together a suboptimal system that involved broadcasting music around the house with a low power FM transmitter (to a series of Tivoli receivers placed in various rooms). This worked ok in the living room where the receiver was about 5 feet from the transmitter, but not so well in the other rooms of the house where static was common when a person or dog walked in the wrong place (despite my hack to boost the transmitter power). Even in optimal conditions, I lost much of the low and high end audio clarity.

Enter the Sonos, which couldn’t be easier to set up (despite an errant trip to Radio Shack for an adaptor it turned out I didn’t need – note to self: look at the jack before heading out the door since you probably don’t need anything that isn’t already in your box of spare wires/adaptors). I plugged everything in and the system found each of its piece parts. I quickly set up an account, linked in my existing Pandora and Rhapsody accounts, and in about 5 minutes was effortlessly streaming audio around the house (and running around from room to room saying things to my wife like: “look – I can mute just this zone!” and “watch how easy it is to change music!”).

WOW – why did it take me this long to make the jump? If you love music you’ll love Sonos. And if you know someone who needs a hacked FM transmitter, let me know . . .