Review: Hands on with the Sonos BU130 Digital Wireless Music System Bundle

OK so we have had our hands on our review unit (the new Sonos BU130 Digital Music System Bundle to be exact) of the Sonos for awhile now, and we had promised a hands on review, so here it goes. We expected to get a great system to try out, we'll admit it. We had been reading and writing about it for awhile now, but we have to honestly say that we were blown away by what we found.

The Sonos BU130 Digital Music System Bundle evaluation kit contained the main base station, a satellite station and the super cool full color remote. The hook up was as simple as you can get. Plug the base station into the wall, the stereo, and our network. That has to be the simplest install we have ever done. There was basically nothing left for us to do in order to play back music.

We grabbed the remote and dove into the possibilities. The menu system is similar in style to that of the iPod in that you have a scroll wheel with a main input button in the middle. So off we start to tell it where our music collection is located. We see the standard, 'system settings' so we click on that. Next we see, "Music Library Management' which seems like an obvious next step for us. The next screen shows us this option, "Music Library Setup". Clicking on that option resulted in our first jaw drop of the day. The one entry on the list of shared folders was our NAS servers music folder.

We aren't sure how the software just found that one entry with all of the shares going on here, but it found it and we were impressed to say the least. One we selected that it let us know that it would take few minutes to catalog all of our music. True to its word in a few minutes we were greeted with a listing of our entire music collection! Nothing could have been simpler. This is something that even the most novice of users would be able to do without having to consult instructions. Of course that assume that they have already ripped their music to a network available location, but still very simple.

OK so now we had it set to play our music, but what else, what would the experience be like? We navigated the remote to our music library and selected a song and we instantly heard it playing over our speakers. The only thing we noticed that was slightly off was the lack of album art displayed on the remotes screen. We went online to find out why we didn't see any album art and it seems the Sonos won't just import the 'cover.jpg' file and display it. It seems you may need some 3rd party software for this to work if they weren't ripped properly in the first place.

We love the fact that the option is there so people that did have album art can see the cover right there while the album is playing. It would also be nice during a party to pass around the remote and have everyone be able to see the albums that they are selecting, nice touch.

So we queued up a bunch of songs and sat back as we enjoyed the rich sounds produced by the Sonos and our stereo. We had a lot of fun browsing through our collection and changing to whatever song stuck our fancy. But the real fun was just about to start.

We also hooked up the secondary unit in another room and hooked up a few speakers to it as well. Of course with the simplest of commands we were able to add the secondary unit to our system. Then we had our second jaw drop of the day, we selected a song for it to play and we were extremely pleased to hear different music in two different rooms. There was no drop out and the quality was excellent.

This is a feature that few media streamers offer, adding a auxiliary units to the mix. They offer the ability to add up to 32 total units into the mix. Now of course that would get insanely expensive, but the fact that the option is there really impressed us.

Another really nice feature of the Sonos BU130 Digital Music System Bundle is that it hooks up with Rhapsody and Pandora. If you haven't used these services you are really missing out on an amazing experience. They create custom playlists based on the types of songs you not only like in general, but that strike your fancy at that exact moment.

We set up Pandora for our tests and it was pure pleasure. We had used the web based version for awhile now so the concept wasn't new to us, but for those that haven't tried it out here is the deal. It basically uses some complex algorithms to determine the type of music the song contains. Anything from vocal styling to instrument type, rhythm and tempo. You select the first song to play and from then on it will choose songs it thinks you might like. As each song plays you can indicate if you like this song or not. By constantly giving the system feedback you can refine you selection down to a very specific type of music. So you can not just create a bluegrass station, but you can create one that has raspy female vocals and lots of banjo for instance. It will even explain why it picked a certain song for you.

You can do all that for just one 'station' of music. You can enter other music and go down other music style paths. So you could have the bluegrass station and a hard rock station as well as a jazz station. It is very addicting. You also discover a ton of new music you might never have heard before. And this integrates perfectly with the Sonos. We expected there to be some clunkiness with the integration since it isn't the easiest thing to retrofit your software to accommodate something completely new, but the engineers at Sonos nailed it. The remote responded like they had Pandora in mind from the beginning.

The only negative we found with this has nothing to do with Pandora, but with the Sonos remote. In order to register with Pandora we had to enter in our email address. Well with the wheel navigation it was very time consuming to hunt and peck all the letters necessary for our email. But, if you think about it, the only complaint we could come up with so far has been entering an email address( a one time thing ) for Pandora.

Unfortunately we had to send the unit back to Sonos since it was only a demo unit. We were very sad when we boxed it all up and said good bye. It was the best media streaming experience we have had so far. It really made us hope that more companies can look at what Sonos has done and try to replicate it. They went for simplicity, quality and style. And they have hit a home run in all three categories.

Here's hoping they have some new products coming out this year for us to test and for $1000 bucks the Sonos BU130 Digital Music System Bundle is going to be hard to beat.

More at Sonos and Sonos BU130 Digital Music System Bundle

July 10, 2007

Review: Hands on with the Sonos BU130 Digital Wireless Music System Bundle