Tag: Sonos

Sonos Still Sucks

Sonos is back with a hardware refresh of its products, and the reviews of it are driving me up the wall, because both Sonos’s website and the reviews fail to admit the single biggest drawback to the product — the wireless controller has a hard limit of 65,000 tracks it can access. In practice, the controller tends to be max out around 40,000 tracks.

That wouldn’t be such an issue if this was a $150 product, but the controller alone retails for $399. Such a small hard limit at that price point is ridiculous (and you don’t have to spend all day downloading MP3s to get that many tracks…just rip a sizable classical music collection sometime).

That almost everybody who reviews the Sonos either a) is oblivious to the limit or b) doesn’t think it relevant to note really says a lot about the state of computer hrelated reviews.

Sonos “Upgrade”

I was so close to buying a Sonos system until I read about the 40,000 track limit on its hand controller. The weird thing is that I’ve read dozens of reviews of the Sonos system in computer and audio magazines and not a single one mentioned this limit. Maybe most people don’t have 40,000 tracks, but I’m guessing the subset of music lovers willing to spend $1,000 or more on the Sonos are likely to (I’ve got about 35,000 tracks at the moment).

Now, I’m seeing stories about Sonos’ 2.0 firmware upgrade, but again no mention of the track limit. To Sonos’ credit, they have done something about the track limit, but unfortunately the upgrade is underwhelming on that point.

According to Sonos’ web site, “the maximum library and queue size has expanded to 50,000 tracks.”

Well, it is an increase, but 50,000 tracks is still relatively small for such an expensive system.

Sorry, no sale.

Sonos – Expensive and Pointless

I was seriously looking at the Sonos system to play my MP3s throughout my house. First, though, I need to get my MP3s and other data onto a larger NAS system, and I was doing research to make sure that the NAS system I was going with would work with the Sonos.

It was at that point I ran across the deal killer for the Sonos. Those handheld controllers look sweet, but the Sonos system can only index a maximum of 40,000 tracks — less depending on how thorough the metadata on each track is (and I am very thorough with my metadata). That’s a pitifully low maximum number of tracks for a higher-end music system.

For that price I can buy a few Squeezeboxes, add a PDA with 802.11b for a remote, and search through 100,000+ tracks.