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Sonos unveils its smartest speaker ever with their new Play:5 (Hardware Zone)

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The new Play:5 comes in a choice of white or black.
The new Play:5 comes in a choice of white or black.
Sonos was arguably the first to hit the scene with multi-room audio, but there were some limitations in their earlier products – you needed an additional Sonos Connect unit to reliably play to multiple speakers, and the speakers didn’t feature HRA (High Resolution Audio) support at the moment, leaving them behind competitors like Lenco and Sony.
Well, that’s all changed with the new Play:5 though, and despite the lack of change in naming, the new speaker is being described both as “the future of Sonos” and as their “smartest speaker ever”. We were told that every single part of the speaker is designed by Sonos, with the aim of delivering a world-class speaker product that fits readily into people’s lives.
Every driver is custom built.
Every driver is custom built.
The Play:5 has six custom-designed drivers that are perfectly synchronized, with three mid-woofers for smooth mids and deep bass, and three tweeters for crystal clear highs. All of them are powered by dedicated amplifiers, and that allows the mid-woofers to create sounds as low as 27Hz. For reference, that’s about as low as the Sonos Playbar goes, which is pretty impressive when you consider how much smaller the Play:5 is.
The new Play:5 speaker gives a focused, intense sweet spot in vertical orientation.
The new Play:5 speaker gives a focused, intense sweet spot in vertical orientation.
The drivers have been specially designed so the speaker can work equally in three orientations – vertically, horizontally, and as part of a stereo pair. When placed as a stereo pair in horizontal orientation, the Play:5 speakers offer a large stereo image for better room-filling capabilities.
When placed vertically though, the Play:5 speakers offer a focused, intense sweet spot for more intimate listening, something we noticed when we were treated to Firestone by Kygo. This is a dark, moody track that picks up the beat pretty quickly, and we were quite impressed to hear the clarity in the speakers on some of the higher electro synth notes, as well as to feel the deep thump of the grounding bass beat.

Design updates

 The buttons on the original Play:5.
The buttons on the original Play:5.
The touch sensitive LED buttons on the new Play:5. You can also see that the overall design has a more new-age look and feel to it.
The touch sensitive LED buttons on the new Play:5.
You can also see that the overall design has a more new-age look and feel to it.
The new Sonos Play:5 features touch sensitive controls unlike the buttons on the old model, these work with smart sensors within the speaker to ensure that the volume-up button is always oriented properly, making it easy to use regardless of how you choose to place the speaker. The speaker grill is curved to optimize the speaker’s acoustic projection for a large sound stage, while the grill features almost 60,000 holes to ensure transparency of sound. Even the “Sonos” label is perforated, which goes to show the extent Sonos has gone to optimize the capabilities of the Play:5.
Even the label is perforated for optimal sound transmission.
Even the label is perforated for optimal sound transmission.
Compared to the old Play:5 speakers, the new Play:5 speakers are a bit shorter and slightly narrower, but also quite a bit deeper too. It features a polycarbonate shell that reduces wireless interference and allows the Play:5 to endure high-humidity conditions like kitchens and our tropical climate, so that should mean the speaker can last a lot longer.
From the side it's more evident: the new Play:5 speaker (foreground) is definitely deeper and shorter than its predecessor (distant background).
From the side it’s more evident: the new Play:5 speaker (foreground) is definitely deeper and shorter than its predecessor (distant background).

Performance: Old vs. New

 

Interestingly enough, Tat Chuan Acoustic had a Play:5 from the old series present, and switched between the old and the new Play:5 set to let us hear the difference. Clearly, the new Play:5 speakers demonstrate better resolution and clarity over the entire audio range of the speaker. Vocals on the old speaker sounded a little muddy in comparison, and the low bass notes lacked the detail brought forward by the new speakers, so evidently Sonos has done quite a bit of work between generations!
They look similar, but sound vastly different.
They look similar, but sound vastly different. 
Next up was a more interesting demonstration: Tat Chuan invited a local singer by the name of Deon to perform one of his tracks live – after we heard it play on the Play:5. The idea being is to show that the Play:5 was capable of rendering audio so realistic that we would barely be able to tell the difference. We took a short listen to the track (Winter), and then Deon took to stage to perform it live.
The result? Well, there is a certain palpable energy to a live performance that comes from both the vocals and musical instruments of the performers that doesn’t quite translate to recordings, so that was definitely lacking from the Play:5’s rendition, but otherwise, we must say the little speaker performed most admirably. Here’s a short video clip of the test so you can judge for yourself:

Trueplay gets your system going the right way

We all have different rooms and spaces, so Trueplay helps you get optimal audio without special equipment.
We all have different rooms and spaces, so Trueplay helps you get optimal audio without special equipment.
A new feature in the Sonos app that will soon be available to all Sonos speakers, Trueplay is a piece of audio tuning software that uses the microphone on your iPhone or iPad to capture test tones emitted by a Sonos speaker. The system uses these tones to analyze how sound reflects off all the different surfaces in the room and then calibrates your speakers so they take these into effect. The end result is that your audio will be optimized for the room your speakers sit in so they sound their best. That’s an important innovation as now you won’t need to be an audio engineer or spend thousands of dollars to fix your room to get the best sound, simply run the app, follow the instructions, and you’re done. It’s certainly a useful feature, and we’re glad to hear that it will be slowly rolled out to all Sonos products.
At the end of the day, we have to say the Play:5 really did impress us, so we’re eager to put it in our labs to see how it stacks up against the rest of this year’s competition. Multi-room audio is certainly heating up, and that can only mean better sounding music to the ears of audio lovers every where.
The Sonos Play:5 will be available at all authorized retailers from 25 November for S$999.
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Blog by Hardware Zone (http://www.hardwarezone.com.sg/m/feature-sonos-unveils-its-smartest-speaker-ever-their-new-play5)

 

Listen on Sonos: Five New Music Services (Sonos)

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Deezer Elite, TIDAL, 22tracks, Mixcloud, and Saavn are the latest music services available to stream wirelessly on Sonos.

Since 2005, we’ve added 60 different music streaming services worldwide to Sonos, and we’re taking this opportunity to highlight the five newest ones so you can continue with your music discovery at home. As your options increase, you can enjoy the one service of your choice or the few that will allow you to listen and explore exactly how you want to in every room of your home.

Using our universal search feature, you can explore across all your services at the same time—quickly and easily. Whether you’re into services like Spotify, TuneIn, and SoundCloud or explore live sessions on Daytrotter and tastemaker playlists on Shuffler.FM, it’s all there.

Today, we’re sharing five new services on Sonos: Deezer Elite, TIDAL, 22tracks, Mixcloud, and Saavn. Each one of which offers a range of features like high definition audio formats, handpicked station and playlist creation, and a new region of music discovery on Sonos.

But how do you decide which one to try first? Think of the list of music services as a musical choose-your-own-adventure.

In search of a higher quality stream to appreciate the details in your favorite tracks?
Check out Deezer Elite or TIDAL. Both offer CD quality (16- bit, 44.1kHz, FLAC lossless) music streams so you can hear every detail, including that faint metallic ringing from the crash of cymbals and extra resonance from each strum of the guitar with both services.

  • Deezer Elite, exclusively available for listeners on Sonos, offers subscriptions for $9.99 when purchased for a year or more and $14.99 when purchased monthly. The regular service price is $19.99.
  • TIDAL’s high-definition streaming subscription costs $19.99/month.

Not in the mood to build a playlist or just want someone else, like a professional DJ, to select your music for you?
22tracks offers playlists curated by local DJs from Amsterdam, Brussels, London and Paris, while Mixcloud offers a new take on radio with huge collections of radio shows, Podcasts and DJ mixes. These aren’t your top 40 type of music discovery services. They cater to DIY music enthusiasts looking to get their hands dirty searching for that perfect song. Both 22tracks and Mixcloud are free and available globally.

Been searching for your favorite tracks in every corner of the world?
Then we recommend the Indian-language and Bollywood songs brought to you by Saavn. They offer everything from newest songs to the hard-to-find classics with a catalogue that includes millions of tracks waiting to be streamed wirelessly throughout your home. The SaavnPro subscription is available to all globally for $3.99/month.

Across all of your services, are you sick of hearing your kid’s latest pop anthem?
You can now add multiple accounts (up to 32) and easily toggle between them to keep your personal listing uniquely yours. Just because you’ve added your personal Spotify account, for example, doesn’t mean that everyone else in the family needs to alter your finely tuned playlists with their favorites.

To explore these and the additional services available on Sonos, select “Add Music Services” within your music menu on the Sonos App. Stay on the lookout for more as we’re always adding new services in both beta and general release.

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Blog courtesy of Sonos
(http://blog.sonos.com/music-on-sonos/listen-on-sonos-five-new-music-services/)

Sonos Play:5 is one of Oprah's Favorite Things 2015

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oprahFavThings2015_P5

Oprah has recently revealed her famous list of Favorite Things for 2015 and she says this year’s 87 gorgeous gifts “just might be the most versatile and fun ever.”

Not surprisingly, the all-new Sonos Play:5 gained an audience with the great O herself. As she sat through the exclusive presentation of the all-new Play:5, she had to have this in her list this year. Here’s what Oprah has to say:

“For the music lover in your life, the crème de la crème of wireless speakers delivers sound quality like no other by analyzing a room’s acoustics and adjusting accordingly. Tunes can be played from a streaming service or a music library from a smartphone, a tablet, or a computer.” — Oprah

oprah_sonos_insta

You can get your hands on these too.
Pre-order now here.

 

How Sonos Outshines Apple in Home Audio (NYTimes)

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Sonos should have been roadkill beneath Apple’s tires.

The Santa Barbara, Calif., start-up was formed by a software entrepreneur, John MacFarlane, in 2002 with a plan to reinvent the home stereo for the digital age, not long after Apple came out with a steamroller of a product, the iPod, that did the same thing for portable music.

At an industry conference, Steven P. Jobs, the late chief executive of Apple, warned Mr. MacFarlane that he might sue Sonos for the design of its stereo remote control, which used an iPod-like click wheel for browsing a music collection. Later, Apple came out with a speaker system for its portal music player, called the iPod Hi-Fi, that signaled its interest in Sonos’s bailiwick, home audio.

But here is Sonos a decade later, a private company that approached a quarter-billion dollars in revenue last year, about double its sales the prior year. Sonos is that rarest of birds in the technology world – a small consumer electronics company (as opposed to Apple and the mostly Asian firms that dominate the business) that had to build sales the old-fashioned way: by hustling its way into stores rather than relying on the viral marketing that defines many Internet hits today.

The biggest reason Sonos has survived though, is by doing what Apple does: paying attention to the little things. “The company we are constantly learning from is Apple,” Mr. MacFarlane said in an interview. “They get all the details right.”

Sonos arguably gets more details right about home audio than Apple does, as I learned while reacquainting myself with the company’s products over the past few weeks. The company’s most visible products, now sold in Target and other mass-market stores, are integrated speakers and amplifiers, likes its $299 Play:3, which connects to your home network and plays music from your iTunes music library or from Spotify, Pandora and other Internet music services. Sonos shines far brighter if you add a speaker (or two — each speaker can work either as a single stereo unit or in a pair, with left and right channels sent to each one). Sonos can send music to speakers in multiple rooms simultaneously, for when you really want to rock out. Alternatively, you can send different music to different rooms, so rocking out can be tailored to each listener.

Years ago, I cobbled together a similar whole-home stereo system using two $99 Apple products – the AirPort Express and Apple TV – that I hook up to traditional stereo systems. With this set-up, I can use an Apple technology called AirPlay to stream music stored on my computer to different rooms simultaneously. An Apple app for the iPhone and iPad, called Remote, lets me pick what I want to listen from anywhere in the house.

There are drawbacks that leave this system lacking compared with Sonos, though. Apple’s Remote app can’t power up my stereo receivers, and although you can change the volume of music from the app, that only works well if my receiver’s separate volume controls are at an appropriate level. I usually have to run around to different rooms fiddling with my stereo gear to make sure everything sounds right.

With Sonos, I could sit on the couch with my iPad or iPhone (the company makes remote-control apps for both) and it all just worked. This is part of the reason why Sonos decided it needed to make its own integrated speakers that don’t rely on an external stereo receiver and speakers. A complex system like that tends to work better when one company designs every key piece of it with painstaking attention to detail.

Mr. MacFarlane believes Apple ultimately decided not to design a home-stereo system that competes more directly with Sonos because it wanted to stay focused on bigger opportunities, like the mobile phone and television markets. “Audio is a much smaller market than what gets Apple out of bed in the morning,” he said.

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Blog courtesy of NYTimes
(http://gadgetwise.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/how-sonos-outshines-apple-in-home-audio/?_r=1)

How Sonos Built the Perfect Wireless Speaker (Bloomberg)

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How Sonos Built the Perfect Wireless SpeakerPhotograph by David Brandon Geeting

The Sonos Studio is easy to miss, tucked between vintage furniture stores and art galleries on a sun-bleached stretch of La Brea Boulevard in Los Angeles. Sonos is a company that makes exactly nine products—five wireless speakers for playing music at home and four accessories—but here at the studio, its only permanent retail space, it’s not possible to purchase any of them. Instead, one might encounter a listening party, a music-inspired art installation, a class on sound production, or a concert. Off to one side is a wall-mounted skateboard “lending library,” and across from that is a living room decorated in late-era hipster, with cow skulls, taxidermied squirrels, and a chandelier shaped like an octopus. The room is laid out to show how a consumer might install a Sonos audio system at home. On repeat visits there’s but a single customer, who seems most interested in the free Wi-Fi. An employee estimates that 10 people come in on the average weekday.

John MacFarlane, Sonos’s co-founder and chief executive, shrugs when asked about the wisdom of a showroom where none of his products are for sale. “Maybe it’s a bad idea,” he says, smiling.

MacFarlane is a tall man prone to relaxed postures. He’s comfortable doing the seemingly weird thing and waiting for the rest of the world to catch up. It’s what has allowed Sonos, a business he helped start in 2002, to outsell some of the biggest technology companies on the planet in the single category—home audio—in which it chooses to compete. Sonos, however, is growing less niche by the year, as more consumers find they want what it does.

Sonos’s speakers may be the perfect conduits for streaming music services. It sells three core models, Play:1, Play:3, and Play:5, which are best understood as loud, louder, and loudest. There’s also Playbar, a long, thin speaker that goes under a TV, and a subwoofer. They range in price from $199 to $699. Sonos also sells a $499 device that will hook up old-fashioned speakers to Sonos’s system, as well as hardware for improving wireless signals.

CEO MacFarlane with Sonos designers and product managers
Photograph by Julian Berman for Bloomberg BusinessweekCEO MacFarlane with Sonos designers and product managers

The sleek, minimalist products all talk to one another, and most users control the system with a smartphone app. With the app, users can play music from virtually any source—Spotify, Internet radio stations, a local computer—and make it come out of all the speakers at the same time, or play different songs on different speakers. Those who cling to the ancient ways of the audiophile can make a stereo pair out of two units by changing a setting, but most customers get their music out of just one Sonos speaker per room. And the biggest devotees have them all over the house.

Until recently, home audio systems capable of such varied setups were bespoke indulgences for early adopters and the carefree rich. But Sonos’s products are becoming almost commonplace. The company turned profitable in 2012 and says it will surpass $1 billion in annual sales in early 2015. Before the invention of the iPod and iPhone—even before most people had Wi-Fi at home—Sonos predicted the era of ubiquitous, streaming music. It spent the next 12 years meticulously refining its speakers’ design, such that they’re now more like smart furniture than consumer electronics. It took that long for the idea of playing music from the cloud to take off. Once it did, so did Sonos.

When MacFarlane and three co-founders—Craig Shelburne, Tom Cullen, and Trung Mai—started Sonos in 2002, they had no background in audio technology or hardware. They’d been selling messaging applications to giant telecoms at Software.com, a Santa Barbara, Calif., company MacFarlane had founded in 1993. In 2000 the startup merged with Phone.com in a $6.8 billion deal near the peak of the dot-com bubble. The foursome left about a year later, rented an office in downtown Santa Barbara, and tried to figure out what to do next.

They understood Internet infrastructure and believed that two developments were going to fundamentally change the typical home. One was Wi-Fi, which was on the cusp of becoming widely affordable. The second was Napster, which had just exposed a generation to the idea of a virtually limitless music library.

“Literally we took a clean sheet of paper and said, ‘Well, what if we made a stereo system for the modern age?’ ” MacFarlane says, leaning back in his chair in the small, Spanish-style courtyard in front of headquarters. “I think we still have that paper around. I swear, it looks like a bunch of Sonos units you’d buy today. It just takes a while to build this stuff.”

They listed the three features they wanted for the hi-fi of the future: You shouldn’t have to get up from the sofa to control the music; you should be able to pick any song you want to play; and you shouldn’t have to mess with wires. That was it. That was the whole plan. It still is.

Many Silicon Valley startups subscribe to Facebook’s (FB) mantra that one should “Move fast and break things.” At Sonos, flush with capital from the Software.com sale and operating in sleepy Santa Barbara, rushing was anathema. To come up with a name for the company, the founders hired David Placek, the branding guru who coined the names for the PowerBook, the Zune, and the BlackBerry. They rejected so many of his suggestions that he almost quit. Eventually Placek hit on Sonos. A palindrome and an ambigram (a word that’s still legible when rotated), it has no meaning in any language, and it’s easy to pronounce. “It’s an empty vessel you can put a lot of work into,” MacFarlane says.

Most decisions got this treatment. The design team fought with engineers over the placement of a mute button, while the acoustics team battled with wireless experts over where the antenna should go. “We just sat down and argued about everything, from the very beginning,” says MacFarlane. It took more than two years to create a working product: a $1,199 bundle consisting of two speakers, two amplifiers, and a controller.

MacFarlane brought a prototype to the 2004 International Consumer Electronics Show, the annual gadget-unveiling orgy in Las Vegas. A product manager from Yamaha went up to the Sonos booth. He’d heard that something like a thousand different audio sources could plug into the system. Where did they fit all the plugs? MacFarlane tried to explain that the system was fed by data from the Internet, not traditional analog audio connectors. The guy walked away shaking his head. Few people were quite as clueless, but the exchange encouraged MacFarlane and his partners that they had a product no one else had, and that gave them a shot at taking on the giants of home audio.

Later in 2004, Sonos showed off its remote control at a Wall Street Journalconference. The device featured a scroll wheel, not too different from the interface of an early iPod. At the conference, Steve Jobs came up to MacFarlane in a rage, poked his finger at his chest, and said he’d sue Sonos out of existence. The incident made the front page of the Journal. No suit was ever filed. Sonos was on the map.

The bundle hit the market in 2005. Sonos sold systems to about 7,000 households that year, MacFarlane says, mostly via high-end audio stores, whose main line of business was wiring complex speaker systems through rich people’s homes. The Sonos system was radically simple. Each speaker had only three buttons, and, of course, there weren’t any wires to trip over. Like Apple (AAPL), Sonos built every important element in its system as well as the code that knits it together, so the whole thing seemed to just work. Users became obsessives. Of those initial households, MacFarlane says, virtually every one still uses a Sonos—in many cases, parts of the original bundle. The company knows this because all its products connect to the Internet, allowing them to be tracked remotely.

Rapturous product reviews came quickly. “Pure heaven,” David Pogue of the New York Times wrote in 2006; “the Lexus of the category,” said the Wall Street Journal’s Walter Mossberg. The price, though, remained too high for most—Sonos’s next controller featured a touchscreen and cost $350. Help came from a familiar place. A few months after the new remote came out, Apple unveiled the iPhone, and soon began accepting apps from third parties. Sonos shifted resources away from its own touchscreen development and hired software engineers to create an app for iOS. Customers and reviewers were astonished that it seemed to work better than the proprietary remote. With the price of entry to the Sonos ecosystem now lower, overall sales rose, MacFarlane says.

From the outside, Sonos appeared to move with all the urgency of a mollusk, releasing just four products from 2009 to the October 2013 introduction of its version of an entry-level speaker, the $199 Play:1. Big infusions of capital—$110 million in total, including from Kohlberg Kravis Roberts (KKR)—allowed the company to take its time and burnish its reputation as a perfectionist. Patrick Spence joined the company two years ago from then-Research In Motion as the head of product development. He was shocked to witness the delayed release of the Playbar, which hooks up to TVs and video players to deliver surround sound. The device was supposed to come out before the 2012 holiday shopping season, but the design team wasn’t happy with the cloth that covered the front grill. It didn’t look elegant enough and sometimes pilled after packaging. Sonos held the Playbar until February—an unthinkable decision at most companies. “A question I kept hearing was: Is this beautiful enough to deserve a place in someone’s home for 10 years?” Spence recalls. The Playbar is currently the best-selling product in its class, according to NPD Group.

As Sonos was polishing its products, MP3 sales were leveling off and streaming music services were starting to catch on. Pandora (P) went public in June 2011, followed a month later by Spotify’s introduction in the U.S. Today, Sonos estimates that some 150 million people worldwide are what it calls “modern music lovers”—anyone who listens to music via the Internet and wants better-quality sound. It doesn’t matter that virtually no streaming music company has figured out a way to make money, just so long as consumers get hooked on the format. The more people begin to treat music like a utility, the more they’ll desire an object that projects it—the way you need a TV if you’re paying for cable. “Basically,” MacFarlane says, “it’s as simple as, if you already pay to stream music, you already get what Sonos does. We don’t have to work to educate you.”

Sonos makes a careful study of how its products fit into the home. Two years ago, the company hired Mark Trammell, a designer who’d worked at Digg, Twitter(TWTR), and on President Obama’s 2012 reelection effort. Both the campaign and Sonos involve what Trammell calls “a transfer of passion.” With speakers, this often plays out along gender lines. Typically, a guy brings a Sonos home because he’s into gadgets. How does his wife, girlfriend, or daughter become a Sonos fan? Trammell likes to interview customers in their homes, sometimes in the moment when a Sonos speaker first arrives and a family is taking it out of the box and deciding where it should go.

“They’re looking for a Sonos-size hole to fill,” he says. The small Play:1 is good for bathrooms and kitchens; the Play:5 tends to go in living rooms and dens. The accessories allow for attaching other kinds of sound equipment, such as weatherproof outdoor speakers, to the network. The average Sonos household has 2.1 units.

A key moment tends to be when family members discover how to add to and remix playlists together. Mark Whitten, Sonos’s chief product officer, compares the experience to that of the Xbox. “The reason gaming consoles became ascendant wasn’t because of the games,” he says. “It’s because two kids were sitting on a couch, playing together.” Whitten was hired six months ago from Microsoft (MSFT), where he introduced and oversaw much of the Xbox, including Xbox Live. He says he was attracted to Sonos, a company one-140th the size of his former employer, because it was going after something very simple, and “doing something that’s very simple is very, very hard.”

Take the basic Sonos proposition: playing the same music out of two speakers in two adjacent rooms. One box is downloading the song from an Internet music service and sending that information to the second box. There’s an acoustic challenge—the sound must be in perfect sync or the effect is ruined. And there’s a software challenge: If the user wants to start playing a different song on the second speaker, that speaker must immediately switch from being in harmony with its partner to pulling in its own data. Whitten describes a good user experience as a series of “ands”—you do this, and then that, and then another thing, all the while never noticing a lag or sensing the technology behind the experience. The tech, if done right, disappears. “How many things do I have to explain to you before you can go play music? If it’s more than one thing, that’s too many.”

In pursuit of such simplicity, Sonos’s R&D department has grown to 325 employees, split between Santa Barbara and Cambridge, Mass. Worldwide, Sonos now has about 1,100 workers, triple the number in 2012. The company’s acoustics lab is in a Santa Barbara neighborhood called the Funk Zone. Inside, there are a drum set, amps, and local beers on tap. On Thursday or Friday nights some of the engineers get together for jam sessions. Foo Fighters, Weezer, and the Rolling Stones blast overhead on Play:5 speakers. The place is beyond cluttered—the aesthetic opposite of the austere, reverent image that Sonos projects.

Down a long hallway referred to as the bowling alley sits a stack of discarded grills, the metal outer shell of the speakers. The preferred process of punching holes into each grill is—no surprise—an ongoing debate. On the Play:1, the company tried acid, lasers, even an old-fashioned punch machine. Each approach changed the look, feel, sound quality, and wireless range. Eventually Sonos developed its own drill machine to do the job.

In Los Angeles, the company is happy to provide its Sonos Studio, for free, to almost any artist of a certain stature or cool factor who wishes to use it. Moby and Alanis Morissette have performed there, and the band The xx created an interactive installation with 50 robotically controlled speakers. The studio is a clubhouse, but it’s also a honey trap—a space to lure artists, and even, eventually, customers.

The company did briefly yield to the obvious last year, allowing some sales of its products at the La Brea showroom during the 2013 holiday season. Greg Perlot, who oversees marketing and branding, says the company hasn’t decided whether to repeat the experiment this Christmas. “We just don’t yet have that experience sorted out,” he says.

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Blog courtesy of Bloomberg
(http://www.bloomberg.com/bw/articles/2014-10-30/how-sonos-and-john-macfarlane-built-the-perfect-wireless-speaker-for-streaming-music)

One Song Setup (SONOS)

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How many things can you really accomplish before a single song finishes? Watch this couple set up multiple Sonos speakers throughout the home while Kimbra performs her track “Carolina” in the living room.

After an initial beat captures Kimbra’s imagination, the music lovers go from unboxing to setting up Sonos in four rooms. By the end of the song, they’re streaming Kimbra’s music from Spotify throughout the house.

Having a quick and intuitive setup experience also means that everyone you recommend Sonos to will be able to listen in a snap.

Once you add your first speaker by plugging it in for power and connecting to the home WiFi in the Sonos Controller app, you can add others at the touch of a button. Just select Add a Player in the app. From there, start streaming your music in high fidelity within seconds from your favorite sources.

Want to hear more from Kimbra? Dive into the short behind the scenes video to hear about her process and affection for music.

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Blog courtesy of Sonos
(http://blog.sonos.com/sonos-stories/one-song-setup/)