Unboxing

Sonos has sent us three products to review, the Bundle (BU 130) 130, the remote Cradle (CC100) and the ZoneBridge (BR100), which is a wireless adapter that attaches to your router to instantly activate the SonosNet. We will look at the latter two items in a separate review.

The Sonos Bundle 130 comes in a brown cardboard box with the sides colored in gray along with gray borders.

Upon opening the box, one is immediately greeted by the quick setup guide. Beneath this guide, the Sonos Controller and Zoneplayer 80 are found in a protective Styrofoam. To the left of this Styrofoam packing is a white cardboard box which holds the power cords and audio cables.

The layer also holds the installation CD along with the instruction manuals for the ZonePlayer 100, Zoneplayer 80 and the Sonos Controller.

Once you remove the Styrofoam packaging containing the above listed components, you will now come across the ZonePlayer 100.

The components of the Sonos Bundle 130 are mostly white, grayish silver with light baby blue on the back of some of the components.

The Sonos ZonePlayer 100 is the device you want, if you need to build a Sonos without having a stereo or home entertainment unit available. The ZP 100 is primarily silver and white. The front panel features a mute and volume up and down buttons. The top is white with 330 small ventilation holes on top. The unit measures 10.2 x 8.2 x 4.4 inches and weighs in at a whooping 10 pounds.

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The rear of the ZP 100 has a light blue back plate and features four Ethernet ports, inputs for left and right external stereo speakers, analog audio output, including one for a subwoofer and analog audio inputs. You will also find the AC input and a voltage select switch. This box can connect to your network either wireless or through a wired Ethernet connection. To get a wireless connection, you will need either a ZonePlayer or a ZoneBridge to be connected to your home network using a standard Ethernet connection.

The ZP 100 features a built-in, powerful amplifier with 50W per channel, which can operate either small or large speakers. The subwoofer has a built in crossover, meaning the ZonePlayer automatically adjusts the output to send the low frequencies to the subwoofer and the high frequencies to the speaker. Since it uses radiant cooling the ZP 100 operates silently allowing you to hear only the music.

The ZonePlayer 100 and all the Sonos devices use a secure AES encrypted, peer-to-peer wireless mesh network called SonosNet that streams music wirelessly to other ZonePlayers, avoiding sources of wireless interference while ensuring synchronous music playback.

The ZP100 has 4 Ethernet ports that can be used to connect other devices to the home network through SonosNet. So in essence, it can serve as a wireless bridge off your entertainment center. This is especially great if your music is near your console gaming system such as a Wii, Xbox 360 or PS3.

The ZonePlayer 100 has the ability to multi-stream different songs to different zones and multi-zone synchronous playback, allowing the same song to be played simultaneously in up to 32 zones.

The Sonos Controller has a silver face with white buttons and silver lettering.

There is a 3.5 240 x 320-pixel backlit LCD display in the middle/left hand side of the controller. To the right of the screen, there is a scroll wheel, reminiscent to the iPod one. Surrounding this scroll wheel, there are six buttons.

The three above it, are the Zones, Back and Music buttons and the three below are the backward, play/pause and forward buttons.

Below the screen are three buttons that map to the bottom of the display. So depending on which function the Sonos controller is using, these bottom buttons change their function. For instance, when playing music from your library, they are related to searching and your queue.

On the left hand side, one finds the volume and mute buttons.

The Sonos Controller has a built in rechargeable battery that dies not seem to be replaceable by the end user. The BU130 comes with a charger cable. If you want to get the charging dock, then you need to buy it as an additional accessory. For the price of the Bundle, it seems rather strange that Sonos does not include the dock in the package. Charging the controller takes a little over an hour.

If you already have an entertainment center, a stereo or any amplified audio device with either digital or analog inputs, then the Sonos ZonePlayer 80 can be used. The ZP80 is about 1/3 the size of its bigger brother, the ZP100 measuring at 5.4 x 5.5 x 2.9 inches and weighing in ar 1.5 pounds. The majority of the unit is white with some silver accents around the front buttons and a silver and white square logo on the top of the unit. Once again, the front features a set of volume buttons and a mute button.

The sides are white and the back plate features the power input, two Ethernet ports, an optical and coaxial digital audio output, analog audio outputs and analog audio inputs. With the analog audio inputs, music from an external audio source (such as a CD player, radio or MP3 player) can be connected to a ZP80 and played by all ZonePlayers in the system.

Many of the features from the ZonePlayer 100 are also found in the ZonePlayer 80. These include the built in wireless capability, the use of SonosNet, multi-stream and multi-zone synchronous playback. The main difference between the units is the lack of extra Ethernet ports and lack of speaker inputs on the ZonePlayer 80.