Sonos has a new strategy: to become the dominant manufacturer of speaker docks for the iPhone and iPod Touch as consumer migrate to connected portable entertainment devices.
The company unveiled the $400 ZonePlayer S5 on Tuesday — an internet-connected speaker that can play the music on your home computers and a good range of free and premium streaming services in the cloud. This slimmed-down system requires only an iPhone or iPod Touch to function as the remote, and an internet connection to deliver the tunes.
Sonos co-founder Tom Cullen told Wired.com that the company is responding to a gap being created in the lucrative iPod speaker dock market as people upgrade their portable music players to the iPhone and iPod Touch. Owners of neither device — particularly the iPhone — want to leave it docked in order to listen to music, because they use the devices for so many other things. In addition, iPhones’ cell connections can interfere with the sound quality of legacy iPod docks unless they’re set to Airplane Mode.
The Sonos ZonePlayer S5 is quote compact, as indicated by this iPhone juxtaposition (photo courtesy of Sonos).
The Sonos ZonePlayer S5 is quote compact, as indicated by this iPhone juxtaposition (both images courtesy of Sonos).
We’ll demo the device next week to find out what it sounds like, but what we know so far about the S5’s sound quality is that the device splits the audio into five frequency ranges, each of which is routed to an individual Class D amplifier that powers one of the five speakers in the unit.
Cullen told us this uncommon approach allowed Sonos to test each driver with precision. If its team of beta-testing audiophiles detected a particular frequency distorting, Sonos was able to tweak the code inside the speakers to raise and lower certain frequencies to ensure that the speakers sound good within the chassis. Since these speakers are a single unit, they won’t provide much stereo separation, but neither did the iPod docks that consumers bought before their iPods came with built-in web browsers, cellphones, videogames and other apps.
Sonos’ iPhone/iPod Touch application is available for free, but there is one notable limitation to its system. In order for the ZonePlayer S5 (or any other Sonos device) to work, you need at least one ZonePlayer connected to your router via a hard Ethernet connection. After that, the devices form a Mesh network, so that you can set up ZonePlayers in multiple rooms without the various speakers going out of sync. So if you’re only planning on buying the ZonePlayer S5, it’ll need an Ethernet connection to your router, which is not as liberating as plunking down an iPod dock anywhere you want.
Once connected, the ZonePlayer can stream music from the iTunes library of any computer or networked hard drive (such as the Apple Time Capsule) on your network; subscription-based music from Napster, Sirius XM, and Rhapsody; and free interactive internet radio from Last.fm, Pandora, and Deezer.
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