SONOS PLAY:3 All-in-One Wireless Music Player (Black)

• Hear every song you have and discover more with access to over 100,000 free radio stations and shows worldwide
• Easily connects to your wireless router with included ethernet cable or wirelessly anywhere with addition of Sonos BRIDGE
• Start with one, expand everywhere - wireless expandability to play different songs in different rooms or play together in sync
• Plays digital music with HiFi sound with 3 driver speaker system, 3 digital amps, 1 tweeter, 2 mid range drivers and 1 bass radiator
• Control from anywhere with your smart phone or tablet - works with Android, iPhone, iPad, and Sonos controller

Here's the problem with Sonos. Most of these reviews are worthless for a new customer as they have no concept what the various components do, how they fit together and what they should get! In fact, I will say that Sonos could significantly improve the messaging of their products. Think about it -is a new customer going to have any idea what ZonePlayer or Bridge means. Even their website is quite confusing for someone new to all of this stuff. For example, they sell a ZonePlayer120 and ZonePlayer90, which have vastly different functionality. Sonos should just get rid of their marketing folks and hire some people from Apple to fix the messaging confusion. My advice for folks who want to learn more about Sonos is to find a friend with one or go to local stereo shop. Fortunately, the folks on the tech-side of Sonos know what the heck they are doing and why I give this 5 stars!

OK, I just bought a new Black Play:3 along with the Bridge. In a nutshell, here is probably all you need to know:

Why... The Play:3 is essentially for folks who want to listen to their digital music through a high-quality speaker system that is wirelessly connected to sources of music. Typically, the music is coming from your computer's library (e.g., iTunes) or some internet service such as Pandora or TuneIn (internet radio). How do you control all of this -by using one of their nifty free apps which run on iPhones, iPod Touch, Androids, iPads (with more to come).

The Play:3 is your speaker component where sound comes out of. The only connection to worry about is AC power. The beauty of this is that you can move your speaker anywhere in your house at will just as you would with a clock radio.

The Bridge is a little white box that connects to your WiFi router. It functions to stream music from the source to your Play:3 speaker, wherever that may be. Sure, you don't really need this $50 box as you could plug your Play:3 into your router, but then you defeat much of the purpose for getting a Sonos (wireless portability).

Sonos makes setup of everything about as easy as possible. If you have a firewall (e.g., at workplace), then things become a little more complicated (you're best off just calling tech support instead of wasting hours figuring it out, which I know many have done).

I decided to copy my entire iTunes library to a network (NAS) drive and just have Sonos access this. Essentially, I have a portable 500GB Western Digital USB drive connected to my Apple Airport Extreme base station. It is ridiculously easy to setup. The advantage of this is that my music is always available instead of needing my computer to be turned on. Also, much of disk space on my Macbook Pro is used for photos and videos. I should say that another reason I did this was because I am running Mac OS Lion, which is not yet supported by Sonos (but this will be addressed very soon).

The nice thing about Sonos is that I can easily expand my system later on. For example, I can buy another Play:3 so that I can setup the two in stereo. Or I can create multiple zones in my house (e.g., bedroom, living room) with each Play:3 playing different music at the same time.

The main limitation of the Play:3 is that there is no line-in jack. This means you cannot connect an outside audio source such as a CD player. And because of this limitation, you cannot configure it using an Apple Airport Express to stream from your iOS device using Apple's Airplay technology. The Play:5 system has a line-in if you really some of these features. Personally, I would love to see Sonos come out with a cheap little white box that just has some line-in audio jacks (including optical). This box could address some of the Play:3 limitations as well as offering an easy way to connect the Sonos system to an Apple TV.

Overall, I am extremely pleased with my purchase and will likely buy another Play:3 shortly to further enhance my system. It just works...and sounds great!

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I had 3 Sonos 5's (now called the play:5) and I wanted to add 4th. The play:3 came out so I decided to save the $100 or so and go for the play:3 after reading all the reviews of it. I had the unit exactly 30 minutes before deciding to return it. It's not even close to the 5's. Volume is control is jumpy, not linear like the 5's, power is about half of 5's and once the volume is over 50% the sound starts to get real tinny.

Bottom line is if you don't have anything to compare the play:3 against you may be perfectly happy with it, but if you have any 5's in the mix you will be disappointed. I'm a huge fan of sonos but the play:3 just doesn't cut it and is way too expensive for the sound quality.

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We were looking for something that would allow us to play music remotely with the ability to change music without having to get up every time we wanted to hear something different. Normally we have a Tivoli radio in the kitchen for FM and we also hook an ipod touch up to it for Pandora. Not the most convenient thing to do to have to find the ipod and cable and sometimes the FM stations were hard to get it clearly. We just got the Sonos Play 3 yesterday and I have got to say we are blown away by the convenience, ease of setup and sound quality.

Keep in mind you have to buy the Sonos Bridge if you want to use it wirelessly. I also bought the bridge and hooked it up to our router. I put in the setup cd and everything was running smoothly in less than 10 minutes. Easiest setup for a gadget in a long time. I then downloaded the Sonos Ipad app, then signed in to my Spotify and Pandora accounts and I was streaming effortlessly in 5 minutes. Controlling the songs from the Sonos software was really easy and I could change songs and even change the volume easily. Overall I am so impressed with the Sonos Play 3 we are going to get another for our nursery. I am a gadget geek and this is the most impressed I have been with a gadget in a very long time. Highly recommended.

Update: I have ordered another Play 3 in white for our nursery and expect delivery this week. Once it arrives and I have set it up and tested it I will update this review with thoughts on how a multiple zone speaker set up works.

Update 2 August 17: We have had the additional Play 3 speaker in the nursery for over two weeks and it works like a charm. I mainly use the Ipad app to control the speakers while at home and it is really easy to switch between the two speakers/zones and make seperate playlists, control volume seperately, etc. It could not be easier. Also, I now have added the Sirius/XM service and I can stream any of those channels with ease. I can be playing NFL Radio down in the living room while the nursery has classical music playing and it all goes off without a hitch. VERY happy.

Update 3 January 10, 2013: I have now had the Play 3 speaker for almost 1.5yrs. It still sounds just as good as the day I got it and I have not had a single problem. We run the software on our macbook air, iphones, ipads, android phone and android tablet. It has run flawlessly from all sources and the software has been solid as a rock. If you have the money this is the one to get. I recommend this to all my friends and family looking for a wireless audio solution. It is that awesome.

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Summary: We're a huge Apple family, so we were unsure if we needed Sonos. In the end, I've become a huge fan of Sonos, realizing that no one else including Apple can do what Sonos does. I had no idea what we were missing, or how much more music we'd play if we had a different way to interact with our music library or TV audio. In the end, we find ourselves dancing or singing to music way more often than we ever did before Sonos.

The Details:

When we wanted to add music to our house, multiple people in my neighborhood said that hands down, we needed to use Sonos. The reasons why, as I've discovered, are pretty simple:

1. it plays anything / everything. from my iTunes/MP3 library on my computer, to local radio, to pandora, to SiriusXM, to MOG, to accepting the audio from my TV or other sources, Sonos plays every source I have. Plus, since it picks up audio from our home network/internet, it seems to be pretty future proof.

2. the user interface is super simple, even for non techies. using an iPod/iPhone/iPad or a computer (PC or mac), literally, 3 touches and the right music is playing for hours and even days. We put the usability to the test this weekend when my parents (in their 80s visited), and they picked it up right away.

3. Setting it up is super simple. there is no programming it's the equivalent of the old clock radios I grew up with. I just plugged in the Bridge (i.e. to "bridge" from your network to the sonos device(s)) to the wall and my router, pressed a button on the top of the bridge and tapped on the controller (for me it was my iPad), and boom the system was on my network and ready to stream music. It even searched my network and found our iTunes libraries. To add a new speaker (Play:3), I just plugged in the new device to an electrical outlet, then press 2 buttons on the top of the Play:3 and a button on my iPad, and boom the new speaker shows up as an option to play music.

4. synchronization or NOT. We are a family of 4, so sometimes we want each Sonos device to play different music. And, when we have people over and we want all the rooms to play the same audio (even with each at different volumes), Sonos supports that too. Literally, the sonos software allows you to group in different "zones" (i.e. speakers) to play the same music or different sources with 2 clicks.

5. variety of solutions. When we updated our home recently, we installed a ZonePlayer 120 (plays all the music from any source, plus is an amplifier) for our kitchen, a ZonePlayer 90 (plays all the music from any source but allowed us to reuse our existing amplifier, plus takes in audio from another source like our TV to pump it out to the other sonos devices) for our TV room. Since they don't have speakers of their own, they are really just a way to create a music network. And this weekend, I added a Play:3 to my setup...

The Play:3

* Compact less than a foot wide, less than a half foot tall and wide. Easily disappears on a bookshelf among books, on my nightstand, or in the corner of my kids room.

* Audio quality Honestly, was amazed. Same or better than the Bose Wave, Cambridge Soundworks, and anything else I've had bedside. Amazing the bass and crystal clear highs.

* Easy of use I am using the Play:3 bedside now, and I can set my wake up alarm from any room in the house (I don't disturb my wife when she is sleeping). I can wake up my wife to music without ever being in the bedroom (I try not blare Back in Black unless I am really jealous).

* Flexible if my kids want music in a room without music, they can just grab my play:3 and move it to the room and they instantly have music.

Overall, I can't find fault with the product. A lower price would certainly allow me to have Play:3's in every room in the house, but I absolutely appreciate the value in each of the Sonos devices.

Let me start by saying that for years I've found the Sonos system to be fantastic. You can play the same music on every Sonos device in your house, but you don't have to--each device can play different music simultaneously. If someone in your household is not technical and is easily frustrated by setup and remotes, you'll love Sonos. It's simple to set up and simple to use. The free Sonos app for the iPad in particular is excellent (probably because there was so much more real estate for the developers to work with). The proprietary peer-to-peer mesh network Sonos uses to broadcast music to each device is very reliable--probably more so than your home wireless network used by AirPlay speakers. While Sonos dropped the ball for Mac users on the upgrade to OSX Lion, they did get their act together and worked hard to update their software. I participated in the OSX Lion beta testing and thought the developers were great. I also had a problem when I bought my first Sonos unit, because it didn't work with my aging router (which I ended up replacing). However, I've always found the Sonos support personnel to be very knowledgeable and very helpful, either by telephone or by email.

Now for the Play 3. We're remodeling our kitchen, and we planned to install two wired speakers in the ceiling. I decided to give the Sonos powered speakers a try first, since we already have two Sonos Zone Players (now called "Connect") in our house and love the Sonos system. Unfortunately, I found the Play 3 to be disappointing. With this unit oriented horizontally, it uses some sort of DSP processing to try to create a wider sound field, but the result is not good. I couldn't listen to it in the horizontal position for longer than about 15 minutes without having it really bother me. If you rotate the speaker to the vertical position, the DSP processing turns off and the sound is much crisper, cleaner, and centered. However, it then sounds like 1930's radio, with all the music coming from a single, point source. Two Play 3 units would take up more room than we want on the counter top, might look ugly hanging from the wall, and would be pretty expensive. At this point, I was sure I would have to install a pair of wired ceiling speakers to get any kind of wide, full sound in the kitchen.

Before giving up altogether, I decided to try the more expensive Sonos 5. As it turns out, the difference between these two Sonos wireless speakers is like night and day. The Sonos 5, which only sits in a horizontal position, produces a rich, full, clean sound that fills our kitchen and sounds great. By contrast, the Play 3 treble sounds weaker, the midrange is somewhat muddy, and the bass is smaller and seems distorted. If you have the space, for a third more money you can get at least three times better sound by going with the Play 5 instead of the Play 3.

Pros:

The Play 3 is relatively light and doesn't take up much space, especially in a vertical orientation.

This unit includes a screw hole in the back and could be mounted on a wall or a ceiling using a strong enough bracket.

You can pair two Play 3 units to produce true stereo sound (though I haven't tried this)

Cons:

The Play 3 has no bass driver and only one tweeter. The sound it generates is fairly limited, and it seems especially distorted when the unit is oriented horizontally.

Unlike the larger Play 5, this unit does not include a second Ethernet port, a headphone jack, or an analog line-in jack.

This powered speaker works with all the Sonos features and thus could make a nice addition to your home audio system. However, before you buy a Sonos Play 3, I recommend you compare it to the Sonos Play 5. To my ear, the difference in sound quality is well worth the extra cost.