Sonos surround sound means music for all rooms, occasions

Adding wi-fi speakers to your house can be akin to rearranging the furniture or adding a whole wing to the house.

The Sonos Play 5 speaker.

Share houses are interesting beasts. They can work really well — or be a version of hell — depending on who you share the space with and how you interact within it.

For me, music has long been something pivotal to making and maintaining friendships, and since our house plunged into the world of WiFi-enabled Sonos speakers something has changed.

Sure, our house was good already — it boasts a rooftop space, a jacuzzi, plenty of exposed brick — but now it has speakers spread throughout the place: one in the kitchen, a couple in the living room and one in my bedroom. And our house is different now.

Weeknight dinners previously spent in relative silence and chatter are now enriched by Miles Davis’s 1959 classic Kind of Blue, and debates about US politics and domestic asylum-seeker policy are conducted to Elvis Presley’s The Sun Sessions. It doesn’t always work; whenever I put on the Kmart October 1989 in-store tapes I’m threatened with mutiny. Other times the rest of the house is not sharing the vibe and my 90s emo classics don’t really fit. But when the right album is on, magic happens.

The Sonos set-up has a seamlessness and a low-friction way of operating that are a vastly different experience from Bluetooth speakers. Bluetooth speakers, as useful as they can be particularly for travelling and moving around the house, feel like the past. You have to find it, switch it on, pair your phone or laptop, charge the speaker for every 10 hours or so of playback, all for an experience that doesn’t fill your house, or even really the room, depending on the speaker.

The Sonos is a whole new experience; it’s always on and always connected to your WiFi network. No pairing or physical interaction with the speaker is required and you just use the one Sonos app for all streaming ser­vices. (The company says it’s working on integration with native apps such as Spotify and Pandora, as well as an API platform.) I can walk through the front door, press play on Coheed and Cambria’s Welcome Home on my iPhone, and that’s it.

In a sign of the technology’s success, rival systems have started popping up from the likes of Philips, Bose and Samsung.

Sonos executive Michael Papish tells me adding WiFi speakers to your house is akin to rearranging the furniture or adding a whole wing to the house, and it’s hard to disagree. Papish says people have changed the way they listen to music; they used to have classic hi-fi systems built in the 1970s and 80s, a room full of large speakers, and you would sit on the couch and really “put the album on”.

“Plenty of homes have that set-up, but you spend most of your time obviously not in that setting,” he says. “You’re cooking, you’re wandering around the house, you’re looking after your kids. That’s they way people are listening to things now.”

Building a multi-room audio set-up isn’t cheap, but good hi-fi systems never are. And I’d say there’s real value here when comparing with alternatives, such as an old school hi-fi system (easily a few thousand dollars) or a Bluetooth speaker such as Bose’s Soundlink III ($399).

Sonos speakers start at $299 for the Play: 1 and up to $750 for the flagship Play: 5 speaker. I started with two and have slowly built up to the point where there’s music for every room. It hasn’t been entirely smooth; I needed to buy a $150 Sonos Boost WiFi extender so the speakers could have their own dedicated WiFi network, as the speakers would sometimes buffer and stutter. They don’t now, but one of my housemates is convinced it’s a scam on Sonos’s part. I just think we had too many other devices already connected.

I’d recommend a multi-room audio set-up to just about anyone, or at least anyone who listens to a lot of music or radio. My house feels fuller. Parties are better, our steak nights are better and I think we have a happier house. Good technology can do that.