Joshua Herzig-Marx

Last night at dinner my mom asked my about MP3 players. The truth is, I’m not a fan. MP3 players are fussy – you need to use special software to add music or other audio files or you need to know where to find the files on your computer. Batteries wear out. Controls are clumsy. And streaming audio isn’t supported.

Apple has gone a long way towards fixing these problems with their iPod and iTunes combination and if I were to suggest a player for my mom it would be the 2 GB iPod Nano. But she doesn’t listen on headphones, doesn’t mind the radio in the car, and would be annoyed at carrying a little device around and plugging it in to speakers in each room.

My parent’s music listening lifestyle must be a fairly common one–they aren’t urban nomads and lead most of their life at work and at home with only limited time spent in transit. At home they move around the house a lot, enjoy having music on, and have different but overlapping tastes in music. Sometimes they’d want to listen to same music throughout the house and sometimes they’d want their own music to follow them around. My mom’s pretty web savvy, listens to Internet radio and has the vague (and probably correct) idea that there are podcasts she’d want to listen to.

They’re the perfect market for the Sonos music system. It’s an ingenious blend of networked music players (some models with high quality digital amplifiers and others with clean stereo and digital line outs) that connect to your network to play electronic audio files and connect to the Internet to play streaming audio. Their proprietary wireless mesh network allows the synchronized playing of the same audio file or stream across one or more “Zone Players”. But they aren’t limited to playing the same music. Each player can play its own audio, or any combination can be synced any number of ways.

Here’s an example. In my parent’s house, they’d probably want one for the kitchen, one for their bedroom, one for my mom’s office and one for my dad’s office. Let’s say they both brought some work home over the weekend. My dad is upstairs in his office, listening to FLAC rips of Joshua Bell playing a Mendelsohn violin concerto. When it’s time to start making dinner, he finishes the movement, turns off the stereo upstairs, and picks up the next track in the kitchen. Meanwhile, my mom has been listening to Science Friday, which she had missed last week. Since she’s moving back and forth between her bedroom and her office, she has the streaming feed playing in both rooms. By the time she’s ready to help with dinner, she still hasn’t finished. She pauses Ira Flatow in mid-sentence, heads downstairs, restarts the stream in the kitchen, turns off both players upstairs, and enjoys a nice dinner.

One other handy feature is to replicate a synchronized input at one player to multiple other players. So, for example, if a player were located by their digital cable tuner, they’d be able to play those cable radio stations throughout the house. Alternately, CDs could be played throughout the house with no ripping and encoding necessary.

Users like my parents need an essentially transparent day to day experience. That isn’t to say that they wouldn’t be willing to invest in up front setup (for example, mounting speakers, configuring audio streams and podcasts, ripping music CDs) but once setup is complete, actual usage should be trivial. Achieving this will depend on two technologies: the controller and configuration capability.

The controllers appears similar to the iPod. A large wheel, used for scrolling, is supplemented by a set of hard and soft keys. The screen is color and medium resolution. The built in battery lasts a few days between charges (the device sleeps to save power) and you can purchase additional charging cradles to leave around your house. Much like cordless phones, there’s a trade off between the convenience of carrying the device around with you can the convenience of always knowing where your controller will be. At a minimum, households will want a controller for each active listener. I don’t know how easy it is to join and separate different players.

Configuration of audio sources, such as files and streams, should also be easy. New files should be added to the Sonos system when saved into known folders. Both file structure and tags should be supported, and there should be some method to optionally not fill your track listing with uncharacterizable junk. iTunes is apparently very good at this, and Sonos reportedly integrates with iTunes.

I’ve convinced my father in law to get one – we’ll see how well it works.

Disclaimer – a former coworker used to be director of QA for Sonos at their Cambridge, MA office. He couldn’t get me an evaluation unit. I tried not to hold a grudge.