Granted, Sonos does its one thing fantastically well.
Similarly, I worry about expensive, proprietary tech devices that only do one thing. Plus, there’s one more thing I’m nervous about – obsolescence.įood Network star Alton Brown is always complaining about “unitasker” gadgets in the kitchen. Getting started with AirPlay will cost me approximately $0. But for me, getting started with Sonos would cost a minimum of $600 after outfitting three rooms with a $199 Sonos Play:1 (at a bare minimum). He loves it (and takes every opportunity to tell me about it.) Sonos is the “it just works” solution, and I’ve heard almost no complaints about it. I’ve heard some pretty glowing reviews of Sonos-Steve has had Sonos for years and absolutely swears by it. I’ll tell you upfront why I chose AirPlay: price. AirPlay is an Apple-developed protocol that lets you stream audio to supported devices, such as the Apple TV, official Apple AirPlay speakers, and third-party devices that support AirPlay. Sonos is a proprietary, self-contained system that uses a combination of your WiFi network and its built-in networking capabilities to stream music from Pandora, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your audio library from your phone. Sonos whole-house audio and AirPlay whole-home audio are two very different solutions to the same problem.
We’ll revisit this once AirPlay 2 hits the streets. The rest of this article focuses on the current AirPlay protocol, which, as you’ll see, works but needed an update. And maybe we’ll even see some affordable AirPlay 2 speakers that make multi-room audio with HomePod (with Siri and HomeKit) a reality. But hopefully, this means that the protocol will get a whole lot better on iOS. More details on AirPlay 2 are forthcoming. The HomePod will go on sale in December 2017 for $350.
Update: During WWDC 2017, Apple announced two game-changers in the world of multi-room audio: AirPlay 2 and the HomePod (Apple’s smart speaker answer to Amazon Echo and Google Home).
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