Sonos S5 Home Audio Solutions Interview
We took a listen to the home audio speaker systems from Sonos at the Dabs.com gadget show in London. Here's a transcript of our interview with Sonos.
Listen to our FrequencyCast Special from Dabs.com Live 2010 Sonos Interview starts around 8 minutes into the show |
In March 2010, the FrequencyCast team were out and about at the Dabs.com Live Gadget show in London's Wembley Stadium. Here's a transcript of our interview with Keith Tomalin, recorded at the show
The Sonos S5 Sound System:
Carl:
So I'm here at the Live Dabs Show, and I'm here with Keith, who's surrounded by beautiful wide speakers - do I need some more?
Keith:
Absolutely, without any question. The Sonos product, it's a system for everybody, if you're into music or whether you just listen to it occasionally, because you'll find you listen to it more once you've got it.
Carl:
Now it's very loud, and I'm also hearing quite a good sound quality - what sort of quality are we looking at here? - is this supreme quality in your opinion?
Keith:
The quality of the product in the S5, as rated by "What Hi-Fi" magazine, is five stars, so all I would suggest to anybody that's listening to your podcast is, do a bit of research, look on the internet, read the reviews, read the customer feedback on the Sonus forum, it is a great product, it's not just a sales guy telling you that, you can go and do your own research.
Carl:
Now the beauty of this is to actually get music right the way round your house, it's not just another sound system, this is a round the house sound system, and I must admit, that is the thing for me nowadays, is making sure I can hear everything in every room, and carry on living my life. How does this work?
Keith:
Well, it's a zone system, and it's as simple or as hard as you want to make it. You buy it a bit at a time, nobody says you have to go and fill your house with it, most people start with one product. Now, there's only six products in the whole range, but most people these days would start with a Sonos S5, it's a portable unit, it looks like a docking station, but it isn't a docking station, because it's that plus more, so you don't dock an iPhone with it, you don't dock an iTouch with it, but it is a wireless music system, so you do need to have a broadband access, you need access to your router, and once you've got that, if you sign up for the music services that come with it, so that's Last FM, that one's a free one, or Napster, you get a 30 day trial with that, and then after that you've got to pay £5 a month, and you've got up to 9 million tracks, so you start with that, and then you say, you know what? - this is pretty good, because I can programme into this, "I like Aswad", or "I like Elton John", or whatever you can think of, even my father-in-law asked me for Doris Day the other day, and that's the truth, and you look at how many albums are on Napster, and you've got instant access to it, so once you've got that single zone, you will want more, and there are various zones that you can buy, either more S5s, or if you've got an existing music system, some other systems that will do what ours does, they say, "Buy ours - throw yours away" - we don't, we offer you other solutions that say, I've got a Denon amplifier in my front room with some Bowers & Wilkins speakers, sound pretty good, but they're part of the Sonos network, so by buying a ZP90, I add that to my Denon amplifier, and guess what? - that's part of my network, and I can control that from a controller.
Carl:
And that's very important, because I think a lot of people out there don't want to replace their existing systems, that's very good. I'm looking, and this is just a single speaker, it looks like a single cabinet, but in fact this is stereo, isn't it, I'm listening to?
Keith:
Yes, the S5 is a stereo speaker, it's got five speakers in it with five digital amplifiers in the back of that. The output, I can't remember exactly the RMS output, it's loud, it's very loud. The sound quality is very deep, very warm, very rich, you have full treble control, bass control, loudness control, which you can turn on or off via a controller. Now it's only fair to say that, although you're looking at the speaker, and you're hearing a great sound, you need to control that. Now we do a controller ourselves, and that's £279, which you have to factor in. If you've got an iPhone, or an iTouch, then you can download an application from the App Store - it gives you 99% of the functionality of the CR200 controller, but the beauty is, it's for free, we don't charge for that.
Carl:
Brilliant, OK, well thank you very much for your time, Keith.
Keith:
No no, that's great, fantastic, thank you.
The S5, featured in our review, plus other devices and controllers from Sonos, can be found online at Dabs.com, John Lewis and Advancedmp3players.co.uk
Listen to our FrequencyCast Special from Dabs.com Live 2010 |
More information:
- Dabs.com Live - Show Overview
- Sign up for more free shows from FrequencyCast
- Dabs.com - The place to buy the gadgets and gizmos featured at Dabs Live 2010 and in our special Dabs.com Live podcast review
- More FrequencyCast Transcripts
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