The Sonos system is the perfect solution for anyone wanting to distribute audio to different areas of a house. In essence, it's the only reasonably-priced solution. You can't really compare this to products like the roku soundbridge because they simply don't do what the Sonos system does. The Sonos lets you play music, either from your hard drive or the internet (streaming radio or subscription tracks like rhapsody, yahoo music, or Napster) in any area where you have a zone player, and you can control it all from a remote. This product does not require that your computer be on, or that you even have a computer. A library of music could be on a network attached storage device, for example, or you could get all your music streaming from the internet. The audio quality is as good as the source files being played. Obviously, if you have your music stored as lossy mp3 files they won't sound as good as playing music from a cd. But the Sonos also supports lossless formats as well. If you're an audiophile you may notice that the sound quality isn't as good as much pricier amps, but then you're probably not looking at this product and should be looking at the Zoneplayer 80 instead (which does not have a built in amp but which does have digital outputs to connect to your high-end audio equipment). The zoneplayer 100 is perfect for me, though. I have a 1200 square foot condo with two Zoneplayer 100's and one of them is connected to an external amp to create a sort of slave zoneplayer. With this I can have my whole house filled with music or I can listen to one thing in my room while my roommate listens to something else in the living room.
I'll quickly mention that the Sonos system is a breeze to set up and very intuitive to use. My one con that I noted is that the desktop software is not quite as intuitive as other music management programs, and you will find yourself using a different program for music management and playlist creation, such as itunes or windows madie player. The Sonos company itself has been terrific about putting out software updates so far, with each update adding great functionality and improving the overall experience.
Again, this is truly the best product for distributing digital audio throughout the home in a multi-zone system.
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