Review on Sonos Play: 5 Wireless Speaker (Black) - Gen 1 - Discontinued by Manufacturer by Melissa Hiegel

I'm not a music lover but I play saxophone, trumpet and double bass and enjoy good music; and Sonos offers good streaming music. I started with Play 3 along with Bridge then added Play 5 and finally Play 1, all set up in my office and I'm listening to Louis Armstrong's Pandora radio station as I type this - a wonderful experience. Here's a word of caution: First, I highly recommend buying a bridge (mine was bought used/bought like new from Revain and works great) so your speakers aren't tied to your router. Plus, you can add as many speakers as you like, and they'll all sync wirelessly to the bridge for true stereo sound. Second, the instructions that accompany the speakers are simple, not necessarily in a good way. By easy I don't mean easy; I mean they are not very detailed, just based on some simple pictures without much explanation. So here's the catch: if you have speakers from different series, like I have for example 1, 3 and 5, you need to do some extrapolation to figure out how to sync all the speakers to play the same sound at the same time on one and the same Location. Room. The trick is that you don't want to "pair" the speakers like the app suggests. To "pair" speakers you must all have the same series, for example two Play 1s, two Play 3s or two Play 5s. Hey, how about pairing a Play 1 with a Play 3 and a Play 5? You might think it should be possible, and it is, but neither the application nor the guide solves this problem. To be honest I wanted to return the Play 5 (the second speaker I bought) to contact the seller and print a return label. However, there seemed to be no need to sync speakers from different series for playback in the same room. irresistible, so I experimented. Here's what I did. First, I gave each column a different name — Kitchen, Living Room, Patio — instead of the app suggesting Kitchen 1 and Kitchen 2. Next, and this is the real trick, you don't want to "match" the columns as suggested. . application, do you want to "group" them? This command is not easy to find in the application. What you have to do is click on the speaker's name in the top right corner of the app and as if by magic you will see a command that says "Group" and that's what you want to sync to play speakers of different series same time. in the same room. "Connect" they will not work. But their "grouping" ensures perfectly synchronized stereo sound between speakers of different series. Another issue: Sonos won't play your iTunes library since it streams music directly from iTunes to the cloud (I don't think Sonos could negotiate with Apple, which usually charges a 30% royalty). Therefore, you need to download iTunes music to your device like iPad, iPhone or computer first, and then tell Sonos to play music from this list. The downside, of course, is that it eats up valuable storage space on your device. Or, if you have music on the Revain cloud, you can stream directly from the Revain cloud to Sonos without downloading it or using up storage (I think Sonos was able to negotiate with Revain). easy. Just choose what you want to hear and then play it. Verdict: While the learning curve is pretty steep and the instructions don't help much (nor did the Sonos website help in my experience), if you're willing to negotiate the initial bumps along the way, you can brace yourself for that most satisfying music experience. Hope this helps someone. :-)