Whether you’re taken with the S5 largely depends on how you feel about Sonos in the first place. If you’ve been itching for an elegant way to play music and internet radio over your home network, and you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you’ll probably love the S5. It’s not very different from Sonos’s other products, really: Instead of plugging in your own stereo, the S5 simply supplies its own. Navigation, playback and music discovery are unchanged from previous Sonos products, so I’m going to focus on the hardware, mostly sound quality.

The receiver/speaker all-in-one is smaller than you’d expect, no bigger than a mid-sized iPod dock, and conservatively styled in white metal with a grey grille. I tested it alongside the winner of our iPod dock Battlemodo, the JBL OnStage 400p, for purely sound-specific purposes, since the actual products have a different feature set. Hardware-wise, the Sonos S5 lacks the JBL’s iPod dock (as it doesn’t really have a need for one) but does have Wi-Fi, ethernet and audio-in and -out.

It’s super easy to set up; the iPhone app discovers any Sonos hardware, which you name and then have access to from the main menu. You choose music, either from a location on the network (like a computer, or in my case an Apple Time Capsule) or from streaming services like Pandora, Napster and Last.FM. Streaming was very quick, with only a split-second lag before the song started, and streaming music (both from a saved location and from the internet) played back so smoothly you can’t tell that it’s streaming. The Sonos iPhone app is excellent, as always. Suffice to say that it’s extremely fast and easy to use, whether you’re searching through Last.FM for an artist or just streaming your own tunes from a computer.

Sound quality was actually very slightly disappointing, in that it didn’t totally blow me away. It sounds quite good, don’t get me wrong, and played far louder (without audible distortion even at its highest setting) than the JBL OnStage 400p, but on the whole I preferred the JBL. Though the Sonos is packing two tweeters, two mids and a subwoofer, bass wasn’t nearly as full and rich as on the JBL. EQ can be tweaked via the remote (iPhone/iPod Touch or Sonos controller), but its stock setting was a little jarring on the highs and slightly thin-sounding compared to the JBL. At low volumes, the difference wouldn’t be noticeable, but blasting Discovery’s “Orange Crush” showed a distinct difference between the two.

I don’t want to imply that the S5’s sound quality is lousy in any way: It’s definitely above-average for an all-in-one system, and I was impressed with the lack of distortion and clarity. But I kind of expected to be wowed, and I wasn’t. That doesn’t mean it’s not an interesting and worthwhile product, but it could be better.

The S5 worked flawlessly with other S5s, able to play different songs simultaneously—but if you want one to stop playing its song and join in with another S5 to play in tandem, it can do that too, and sync perfectly. It’s pretty cool and worked well, but I’m not sure why you’d need two all-in-one units to play the same song at the same time in different rooms.

I really like the Sonos S5 as a speaker for a room where you don’t want a full stereo—like the kitchen, say, or the back porch. It’s great to be free from wires yet still have access to all of your music, and services like Pandora. If you already own an iPhone or iPod Touch, it’s actually a solid deal, provided you’re sold on Sonos: The ZonePlayer 80 costs $US300, but for $US100 more you can get a portable (and pretty decent) speaker with the S5.

But the question I was left with: Is it worth the $US160 premium over the JBL OnStage 400p? I’m not sure, really. The S5 is a more elegant solution, certainly, but a lot of users just want a quick-and-dirty playback device, and the S5 is too refined for that. If you’re already a Sonos devotee, the S5 is an interesting and affordable addition to the lineup, but if you aren’t sold on the whole concept, I don’t think the S5 will change your mind. [Sonos]

If you want to pick up the S5 in Australia, the RRP is $799. Or, going at today’s awesome exchange rate, the equivalent of $US725. Sure, we’ve got GST and the US price probably doesn’t include sales tax, plus there are economies of scale to think about. But ultimately, this looks like yet another case of Aussies getting the short end of the stick when it comes to gadget pricing.

[Playback]

The ZonePlayer S5 will be $US400 on November 10, and gives you an all-in-one option to extend your Sonos music network into a new room. It looks a little like the Bose SoundLink on the outside, and inside has a 5-driver speaker system consisting of two tweeters, two 3-inch mids and a 3.5-inch sub).

You can control the S5 using the Sonos CR200 controller, or via free apps for the iPhone/iPod touch and Mac or PC.
[Sonos]

SONOS INTRODUCES THE SONOS ZONEPLAYER S5: THE ALL-IN-ONE WIRELESS MUSIC SYSTEM CONTROLLED WITH AN IPHONE

* Wirelessly play music in any or every room of the house for $US399 per room
* Enjoy room-filling, high-performance sound with all digital architecture
* Access your iTunes® library, plus thousands of radio stations and millions of songs from the Internet
* Control your music experience with free Sonos Controller for iPhone™ app or any other Sonos Controller

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. – October 13, 2009 – Sonos®, Inc., the leading developer of wireless multi-room music systems for the home, today introduced the Sonos ZonePlayer S5, an all-in-one wireless music system that can be controlled with an iPhone, iPod® touch or any Sonos Controller. The S5 delivers crystal-clear, room-filling sound that rivals much larger, more complicated audio equipment. Plus, the S5 provides instant access to unlimited music with control from the palm of your hand. Now music lovers can find and play any song from an iTunes library, plus, a world of music and radio on the Internet, in any room of the house. The S5 will be available for $US399 in late October. To see the S5 in action, please visit: www.sonos.com/S5demo.

“Our customers tell us they listen to twice as much music after bringing Sonos into their homes,” said John MacFarlane, CEO of Sonos. “The new S5 is our latest effort to simplify the Sonos experience so more people can enjoy more music than ever before.”

The S5 features a 5-driver speaker system that packs a big sound – filling an entire room with music. Sonos uniquely designed the S5 with an all-digital sound architecture for precise sound reproduction. The S5 includes two tweeters, two mid-range drivers and a built-in single subwoofer – each individually powered by a dedicated digital amplifier and optimised to deliver room-filling sound with smooth tonal balance and deep bass. All filter settings, bass and treble controls, active equalization, and time-alignment are done in the digital domain through state-of-the-art DSP circuitry, so there’s absolutely no loss of audio quality or energy.

With the Internet-connected S5, you can listen to way more music than you can with a dock that only plays the songs that fit on your iPod. The S5 gives you instant access to a world of music, including 25,000 Internet radio stations, shows and podcasts -all free of charge and pre-loaded on Sonos. Sonos works seamlessly with the most popular music services to provide computer-free access to millions of songs and stations from the likes of Last.fm, Napster, Rhapsody, Pandora, SIRIUS Internet Radio, and Deezer. The S5 also gives you instant access to any iTunes library stored on any computer or Network Attached storage, such as an Apple Time Capsule. The S5’s analogue audio input lets you connect to an external audio source (such as an iPod, CD player, TV, DVD, VCR, or radio) and play music or audio on all ZonePlayers in the system.

When it comes to controlling your S5, you simply reach into your pocket for your iPhone or iPod touch. With the free Sonos Controller for iPhone app (available on the iTunes App Store), you can search for songs and stations, choose the music and control the volume in as many rooms as you like. And because the iPhone is controlling the music, and not the source of it, when a text comes in or you need to make a phone call, the music doesn’t stop. That also means you can keep your iPhone in your pocket, not stuck in a dock. The S5 also includes free Sonos Controller software for your Mac or PC. Or you can let everyone in the house share the control with the dedicated Sonos Controller 200 (sold separately).

As with all Sonos ZonePlayers, the S5 is simple to set up, easy to expand and 100% compatible with all other Sonos products. Just plug in the S5 wherever you want music. One ZonePlayer or Sonos ZoneBridge™ (sold separately) must be connected to your router and all the rest will work wirelessly. When you’re ready to play more music in more rooms, simply add S5s or other ZonePlayers without adding wires. Now you can play the same song in every room with perfect synchronicity or mix it up by playing different songs in different rooms.

Sonos’s Twitter integration is pretty simple but also quite cool for devout Twitterers: Directly from the Sonos controller (either physical or any of the software clients), users can post their current artist and track name to Twitter. The update will be free and enters into beta today, though it won’t be fully finished until sometime later this fall. [Sonos]

The CR200 is available by itself for $US350 and as part of the Sonos 250 Bundle for $US1000. You save a little bit on the bundle since the ZonePlayer 120 and ZonePlayer 90 are $US500 and $US350, respectively. If you’re not familiar with Sonos, it’s basically a very fancy (and expandable) Airport Express-like unit to get music throughout your house. Our previous review of the last gen ZP80 was good, but the ZP90 and ZP120—this gen—are much better. They’re both capable of streaming music either over your network, or wirelessly through a $US100 ZoneBridge unit.

The main competitor to the Sonos controller isn’t actually the last-generation Sonos controller, it’s the free iPhone/iPod Touch app. With an iPod Touch coming in at $US230 ($US120 less than the CR200), using that to manage your music or internet radio and piping that through different rooms in your house seems like the natural (and cheaper) choice, seeing as the thing also doubles as an iPod Touch when not controlling your rig. Why would someone want to use the CR200? Because it’s good.

Somehow Sonos managed to get the multitouch as responsive and as usable as the iPhone. Scrolling, flicking and even typing are taken directly from Apple’s user interface designs, and thus, should be instantly familiar to just about everyone now. The screen is bright, and the blue theme throughout the controller is classy—unlike the blue iPhone app, which is just slightly tacky looking.

Click for gallery

But that’s not why it’s better. It’s better because it’s got a better user interface. You can arrange songs, adjust volume, configure zones, jump back into the Zones menu, adjust your queue, and do just about everything faster than you can on the iPhone app. Getting where you want to go takes fewer clicks. Sonos decided to put more effort into the CR200 (probably because it’s not free in the app store) in order to drive sales of the controller, and it shows. It’s not as if you can’t do the same things on the iPhone app, you just can’t do them as well or as fast.

The downside to the CR200 is that its battery doesn’t last all that long, so you need to remember to dock it whenever you’re done using it. You can leave it in your living room or your bedroom or wherever and it’ll sync wirelessly to any ZonePlayers or ZoneBridges you have around your house. The range is fantastic, and has no problems penetrating three stories-worth of floors and walls to control music.

Basically, the CR200 controller is exactly what you’d expect from Sonos. The whole full-house music streaming still has that distinct taste of being futuristic, even though the prices are down to somewhat reasonable levels now. Given a few more years for prices to drop and for these things to be integrated at the builder and installer level for new homes, it’ll become as ubiquitous as CAT5 wiring is now.

The Sonos CR200 is great at what it does and it’s super easy to use, but it’s still pretty damn pricey at $US350. Sonos knows what kinda customers they’re looking for: people with the extra money to outfit their house, Bill Gates style, with music in every room. No mere Airport Express would be enough for them, they want quality and they’re not afraid to spend a little bit more for it. And that’s the CR200. [Sonos]

Bright, very usable touchscreen

Better UI than the free iPhone/iPod Touch app

Good range, battery life

Costs $US350

Though the sales pitch on the somewhat pricey CR200 matches that of the free iPhone/iPod Touch app: Wireless multi-room control of ZonePlayers throughout the house, quickly access music, automatic updates bring new features. With capacitive touch glass screen, 2-5 days of battery life, rugged body and removable battery, the thing is justifiable as a standalone product, if there wasn’t a “free” alternative.

But there’s one claim that seems to be a dig at that the iPhone app alternative: “100% dedicated to multi-room music.” I don’t know whether they think the delay getting from a iPhone’s home screen to the Sonos options is annoying (k, it is a little bit) or whether they fear your significant other will go for a jog and take the iTouch with her/him, leaving you controller-less (it could happen), but they definitely view a single-function controller as a boon.

I am sensing two takeaways: The first is that, since Sonos sells a lot of product at the custom-installer level, those installers need some cool upgrades to go and sell to rich people. God love ‘em for it, that’s fine. The other is that Sonos will spend more time on its potentially profitable CR200 than on its more populist iPhone app, and a divide may emerge.

So, Sonos: Please continue to support the free iPhone app, which makes your product line accessible to people on a budget, and we will continue to write up things like this leaked CR200, which may not be for everyone, but makes sense in some cases. [Yanked Sonos Product Page via Engadget]

Oddly enough, this is Sonos’ fault in every possible way. We don’t have any specs, price or features, but given how close to perfect the free iPhone app for Sonos is, this wireless controller may have a hard time competing as an add-on product, especially if it’s priced above the $US229 baseline iPod Touch. In bundles, I suppose it’ll do fine.

Speaking of which! Automated Home says the CR200 will be part of a spruced up Sonos system bundle:

The BU150 now changes to the BU250 which includes the CR200. There also is a slight colour change with the zoneplayers hardware to match the new controller but there are no technical changes & will still be named the ZP120 & ZP90

If that means anything to you, you probably know that this is a good thing. If not, then it’s time to read up. [Automated Home via Engadget]

The Price: Each module costs $US100, and you need at least two to make things happen, so you’re looking at $US200 or even $US300 to start. (Haven’t seen any combo pricing deals yet.)

The Verdict: It’s a unique set of wireless toys that is a lot of fun to play with, and would have been a must-have back when I used to play guitar in a band. But these things can be cool even in the home of a total non-musician, which is why I’m bringing them up at all.

Think of it as Sonos Portable. You set one of them to transmit, and start playing a song from your computer, iPod, any audio source at all really, including, mind you, a CD or DVD player with S/PDIF output. Set another one to receive, then attach that to earphones, a boom box or your home theatre system, and you hear everything with no latency. Well, with about 10 milliseconds of almost totally unnoticeable latency. In “broadcast” mode, you an add additional Pipelines—E-Mu says “any number of receivers”—so that many rooms, or many people, can catch your tuneage at the same time.

Of course, if you do play music, you can plug your guitar into one, set it for “pairing” mode, stick another one at your amp set to receive. In this scenario the latency is just 6.6ms, and you are suddenly completely unfettered.

I tested it in my house using prerecorded audio, and it sounded great. I stuck my computer with the source music down in the basement, and clipped a receiver to my belt with headphones plugged in, and wandered throughout the house. The signal faltered only when I was at the absolute farthest point away from the source, which probably was right around the advertised 15 meters (49 feet) of range that these babies can get.

Battery life is good, perhaps the big reason this thing even brushes the $US100 point: You get 10 hours in receive mode, and 5 while transmitting.

The only issue I ran into, if you could call it that, was the “DIP switch” setup, which you can see in the rear shot above. I am not afraid of a few switches, but it seemed a complex way to set the channel, the receive or transmit mode, and the audio preferences. Not sure what would have been better, and once you set them, you can almost forget them, but it was, initially, a bit of a pain.

These babies aren’t cheap, but setting up a way to wirelessly listen to music at home (like, say, piping music outdoors, syncing music between multiple rooms, or even walking around with earphones, listening to music playing somewhere else) seems worthwhile for $US200, and the one-to-many broadcast mode makes it quite a unique product. My only gripe is that it would be cool if E-MU made an even better priced unit without the battery, so you could pick and choose.

Regardless of that, if you jam in a band, you definitely need a pair of these buggers—though the rest of your band might suddenly hate you for getting all Angus Young on them. Of course, Angus did all that crazy guitar shit with cord attached, but that’s plain super human. [Pipeline Product Page]

The key is that you have to have compatible networked “digital media renderers” at the receiving end. Right now, the list is verrrry short: Sonos is the poster child for the feature at this point, and when you right click a song and send it to the Sonos ZonePlayer in any room, it starts playing no problem. But Sonos is for music only and so is Roku’s SoundBridge, which has a variation of the feature enabled on its latest firmware. Video is the holy grail, but for now, the only thing you can send video to is the Xbox 360—and then only when it’s running Media Centre Extender.

This will change soon, when the DLNA rolls out its “Play To” certification as part of the 1.5 specification. The functionality will likely find its way into loads of media-rendering products: The PS3 is key, but ideally this will be in TVs, connected stereo systems, media adapters and digital picture frames too. Can you imagine how nice it would be if sending a photo to a frame was a right-click away, instead of some convoluted 12-step process requiring proprietary software and a steady easterly breeze?

In other words, though Play To is first coming to life as a Windows 7 attribute, it will hopefully not be just some Microsoft (TM) thing, but a platform that all computers and devices can get with, a whole-house “This just works” thing. Yes, I can see you naysayers wrinkling your noses already: It’s a dream that potentially has nightmare written all over it. But at least with Windows 7 and supported devices, Microsoft is burning some midnight oil to make it work.

And the PC is potentially good for getting around kick-in-the-stomach file-format rejections we see in connected products: Windows 7 will automatically render files that it knows the networked device itself can’t accept. For instance, a media player that doesn’t like AAC will be delivered a more palatable WMA audio track in realtime. Microsoft even says conversion will work with video files—as in, flipping an XviD of The Big Lebowski into WMV as you’re watching. It’s early in the beta, so there’s no telling how pleasant or painful that experience will be. Needless to say, it’s not testable just yet.

The other reason the PC is so cool for this is that you can browse files that live somewhere else on your home network. When you find one, you right-click and send it to some other device, clear at the other end of your house. The computer isn’t a media player at all anymore, but a big expensive universal remote that also does email.

The experience today isn’t life changing, but I was able to play networked music on the Sonos, control its volume, build a playlist and skip around, all with no problem, and with no Sonos software installed. Play To isn’t entirely compatible with official Sonos controllers yet (those show that the ZonePlayer is doing something, but won’t name the track or show any metadata). It’s possible that these issues will be solved by the time Windows 7 is released.

I mentioned that the Xbox 360 needs to run Windows Media Center Extender to use Play To. I think this is a design flaw. I hope that the developers will see fit to make Play To work with Xbox’s native media players, because they’re much better than the Extender in a lot of ways. In testing so far, we’ve been able to send WMV and certain AVI files over—even, as you can see in the image, while sending music to a different media player. Still, not all files work yet, not even all the ones supposedly supported. I chalk that up to the beta status, though, and I know Microsoft is doing some serious problem-solving in that area even now.

I don’t want to sound like some hippie, but there’s no telling what Play To could achieve if everyone—Mac and PC, PS3 and Xbox, and any digital media renderer, be it a Samsung Blu-ray player, a Philips photo frame or a Sony Bravia connected LCD—got on board. Here’s to hoping, and to this first step looking none too shabby. [Windows 7 on Gizmodo]