By Shelly Brisbin
January 8, 2024 10:58 AM PT
Sonos and other speakers: Revitalizing my music system
On Christmas night, my husband and I hosted a gathering of family. There was turkey. There was pie. There was music – my carefully curated holiday playlist streamed through the living room, kitchen, patio and even the guest bathroom.
It was the first time in years I’d been able to make that happen the way I wanted. And it all came together thanks to a $450 box that’s about the size of a Mac Mini.
The history part
Soon after we bought our house, we installed speakers and audio gear. I wanted to pipe music from the living room receiver to the patio, so we started with a pair of outdoor speakers. Soon, three sets of ceiling-mounted Sonance speakers sprouted around the house, along with some floor-standing Infinity cabinets in the living room. We controlled it all from a Niles SS-6 speaker controller stored under a bar in the hallway (since upgraded to a custom cabinet with a slide-out drawer for electronics). I would spend the moments before people arrived for a party twiddling wall-mounted volume knobs so that the sound was delivered at a pleasing level in different rooms of the house.
At first, audio sources were limited to a stereo receiver and a six-CD changer. (We don’t need to talk about the old tape deck in the stereo cabinet.) Somewhere in the mid-aughts, I got ahold of a Wi-Fi-enabled gadget with RCA outputs, and a matching A/V iPod dock. It all connected to an iMac and to the Pioneer receiver that controlled the house system. But eventually the little dock died, and I sought out a more robust solution.
Enter Sonos
From the first, bringing Sonos gear into the mix was about adding features to my existing setup, not creating a new one. If a few extra speakers came home to add music in new places, that would just be a bonus.
To do this, I bought a Sonos Connect – not one of the company’s most high-profile offerings, but the one that allowed a physical connection to my stereo components, and a wireless one to my iMac. I chose the Connect instead of the Sonos Amp, which does the same thing, but includes an amplifier of its own. (Shoutout to the fine folks at A&B TV in Austin, who sold us most of this audio gear, and suggested the two-box solution.)
We also bought a Niles amplifier that powered the setup. This meant we no longer needed an A/V receiver, and it also meant that if one component (amp or Sonos box) died, the other would still be on the job. As it turned out, I made the right decision there.
…then Sonos broke up with us
It happened just two months before the COVID pandemic began. Sonos announced it would drop support for some older devices. You could still use them, but you couldn’t add them to a new network or wrangle them with the company’s updated management software. The Sonos Connect was among the orphaned devices.
With no immediate plans for music-infused gatherings at home, I chose not to replace the Connect, even though Sonos offered discounts on new equipment. I focused instead on the three Sonos speakers I’d added over the years. It meant, unfortunately, that I could play music from the Sonos speakers or from the stereo—but couldn’t get all my speakers working together.
Finally, I bit the bullet in December of last year. I picked up a Sonos Port ($449, but I managed to get it on sale), which replaced the Connect, and turned out to be the one device I needed to bring my system into the modern world.
Any Port in a storm
Because the Port supports AirPlay, I can now send it any audio I like, and choose which of the ceiling and floor speakers plays it. The setup looks like this: In the hall cabinet, the Sonos Port is set up as an input to the Niles amplifier. That amp is connected to the various speakers in the house via the old speaker controller.
I also have three Sonos speakers on same network as the Port. And I can play my music library, Apple Music, or one of a few streamed radio stations I like, to everything. For my Christmas party, I used speakers in the TV room, living room, guest bathroom and patio, as well as a Sonos Play:3 in a bedroom where folks left their coats. I ran the playlist from the Sonos app and an iPad that I set on a shelf so people could see what was playing. It was all a big success, and the playlist outlasted the last guests, who hummed Vince Guaraldi tunes as they took their leave.
It wasn’t until the next day that I discovered my favorite new audio trick with this new setup. While retrieving all the junk I’d hidden in my office during the party. I launched Overcast on my phone and set AirPlay to output to the Port. Next, I used my controller box switch box to select only the speakers in my office.
Voilà! I can now AirPlay from my phone to my ceiling speakers. The Sonos hardware is just acting as an AirPlay middle man. When I moved into the bedroom later, I turned down the Port’s volume slider in the Sonos app, end added my old bedroom Play:3 while a podcast continued to play. I have AirPlay access to all the non-AirPlay speakers in my house.
So much of this would be simpler if I’d gone all in on new Sonos speakers after the 2020 product changes. But I like my built-in speakers, and I’ll keep finding ways to get the most out of them as long as the speakers, the amplifier and the volume knobs hold out.
[Shelly Brisbin is a radio producer and author of the book iOS Access for All. She's the host of Lions, Towers & Shields, a podcast about classic movies, on The Incomparable network.]
