Mate of mine who is very clever with IT (professional of 25+ yrs) has just built a new house and has gone with Sonos. I don't know anything about MusicCast, but on my mates 'advice' if I was looking I would def look closely at Sonos...

gs12 said..
we've had sonos for about 2 years. it's fine, can't comment about sound quality as I'm no audio buff, certainly more than good enough for my ears

Keep in mind that with Sonos, you may need other subscriptions, such as Spotify Premium. Of course if you have mp3 collection you can place it on a drive connected to your home network and Sonos will play that too. To be honest I just pay the spotify premium monthly as it has pretty much everything song or album I could ever wanted to listen.

The other option, if you already have a good sound system and want to make it wireless, is to get google chromecast audio for about $55

Thanks gs12, seems the ChromeCast does multi room, and I already have plenty of audio hardware, so a couple of these should give me the best of both worlds. So cheap it's worth trying, I'll give it a shot.

Oh.... on the Chromecast. My son has one and it is such a cheap device for what it does...... but it does not seem to play well with locally sourced audio sources.... so it is great at playing music from internet sources... streams, cloud stored music etc, but it does not seem so good at playing music from a local media server. I have a NAS drive with DLNA server with all my music ripped to it, and it does not seem to be great at playing music from that. I guess it depends on where you play music from as to whether it is a good choice.

^
yeah that is a good point to keep in mind with Sonos that you can only connect some music services. That is little annoying as sometimes I like to play music from youtube (see below) and that does not work.

But all the big music services listed in the article above are OK so you are probably going to be ok unless you really want something weird.... which you probably already have anyway
(luckily I already have garage punk rock I used to listen at uni as mp3 and can think of only 2 fairly obscure bands I can't find on spotify)


support.sonos.com/s/article/3459?language=en

So did you take your push lawn mower with ya?

Wineman said..
So did you take your push lawn mower with ya?

Absolutely!!

Yamaha Musicast has similar technology to the Sonos with no delays. Actually there is delay added to the source and then all slave devices are synced to the delayed source so there is no echo (all have the same delay).

The Yamaha system is probably more suitable for those who still play old school audio sources. For instance, you can have a record player connected to your amp and then link (over the wifi anywhere in wifi range) a small powered speaker to that so that you can listen to a record around your house. I have done this with about 5 slave devices. This can be done for any analogue or digital source (I still play CDs). The master source buffers the audio signal by about half a second (I guess it determines the delay based on network performance), and the slave devices then play in sync. This works great for almost everything.... but you can also use it for TV as an audio source. This is great for listening to sports or something in other rooms of the house. Unfortunately the delay does cause lip sync issues and I guess there is no way around that.

My thoughts are that the Sonos system is a more polished system with more standalone speaker options for a modern user with most of their music played from streaming services and someone who wants minimalist unseen speakers/devices. The Yamaha system is more for people who like a big home theatre system or a high end sound system with nice amps and speakers and traditional music sources but wants to get similar synchronised multi room music to Sonos. Yamaha does the streaming services, but I think not as user friendly as Sonos.

Sonos and Yamaha small plug and play speakers sound good for what they are.... but are really not comparable to a good system with high quality floor standing speakers and a high end sub-woofer. My setup would blow a Sonos or Yamaha small speaker away for sound quality at both low and high volumes..... but most people are satisfied with the sound of the smaller speakers.

Hi
we have the old musiccast system (2400 system) I guess 6 years plus now and were happy with it but have heard Yamaha have gone to china for there system now so not sure if i would go that way again.
sonos was just coming out when we got into owes.
I have always prefered wired and have tried both and found wireless isnt always 100% reliable.

i went sonos. Had 100gig of music but not really accessible - used to play the same 3 albums that was on my phone. Now with sonos - have all that music on a NAS box and can play it all. Really nice to go back and play old or forgotten albums that are now so close to hand