Tom Conrad

We’ve been working with the team at Sonos for about 6 months to get the Pandora Everywhere experience on their family of devices. During that time I’ve of course had the chance to listen to a Sonos here in the office a fair bit as we iterated together on builds. What I wasn’t able to do was to experience it in my own home. That all changed 48 hours ago when I setup my own multi-room Sonos system.

Best. Thing. Ever.

I’m a huge fan of Slim Devices and have been a very, very happy Slim customer for many years (going all the way back to their very first device the SliMP3). They’re a great company with a great team building really neat devices. But at the end of the day they really play at different places in the market than Sonos. The Squeezebox is more affordable device than the Sonos and the Transporter is at the very high end really targeted at the kind of people that pay ten grand for a CD player.

So, getting back to Sonos… this is a really delightful product. Incredibly easy to setup. I managed to configure a multi-room solution with Rhapsody, Pandora, and our own library of music in about 15 minutes and that included a round of firmware upgrades to take advantage of their latest feature (Pandora!).

The implementation of multi-room is the killer app for Sonos. It’s just flawless. I’m convinced that my home music use is going to skyrocket thanks to this. It’s also by far the best way to use Rhapsody (finally the $13/month makes sense to me). The Pandora implementation is also fantastic. I can’t wait to get back home and play with it some more.

The big news in music web-dom today is the CBS acquisition of Last.fm. I’ve frequently talked about my affection for last, and I really am happy to see them “exit” at a valuation that should be good for the entire team. Last is truly remarkable at getting great features out into their communities hands. It’s a great site with tons of really interesting content and conversations. I wish them continued success as they move into their latest chapter.