The ultimate WAF
With some reluctance, I have to admit that Volker is almost certainly right to say that the Sonos music system that he’s been testing recently has an excellent WAF (wife acceptance factor):
I pay a lot of attention to the way she adopts technology. There are a number of things that clicked immediately. One of them was digital photography. It was very liberating to practice without incurring additional cost. Hard disk recorder for TV, an automatic transmission in the car, heated seats, all of those were used immediately. Other things just fell to the wayside. Like the video recorder, the MP3 streamer, an iPod (!). But now the Sonos: She “got” it the first minute. Without looking twice she accepted the controller, and unlike me, never looked at the Mac or PC client.Certainly Ute’s reaction to the technological examples he gives matches Ruth’s almost 100% – Ruth really still prefers a film camera. Not that I disagree with his reasoning, but at 1149 Euro for a starter kit, it is a trifle expensive. I’m pretty sure that Sonos or a system with similar functionality is where we will end up, but for now we’ll wait and see how the price develops and whether the competition in this area comes up with anything even better (we use a considerably cheaper Roku SoundBridge M1000 for now to stream music to the stereo, but the functionality is nowhere as complete as that of the Sonos kit).
April 12th, 2006 at 08:04:58
I should write another piece: How to overspend. The most expensive way to live is to underspend. You keep buying stuff that does not cut it, and then, in the end you will buy what you should have gotten in the first place.
At first, I agreed that Sonos was too expensive. Currently I think they may actually be too cheap. Just take a look at what Bose charges for their Lifestyle stuff.
April 12th, 2006 at 11:04:18
Yes, I am sure you are right, I have come the same conclusion in other areas too.
However before spending over 1000 Euro, I’m afraid I need a proof of concept. Of course, I didn’t know that the Sonos gear was in the pipeline (or even available?) when I bought my SoundBridge, but even so, to spend so much without having tried the idea of streaming music to the stereo would have required a massive leap of faith. You are in the lucky position of being able to try the Sonos for free, which certainly makes the final decision much easier! At least now, I know that the “missing” functionality which the SoundBridge doesn’t cover is important.
April 12th, 2006 at 14:04:34
I invite you to come visit and take a look.
April 12th, 2006 at 14:04:31
But I am not taking any responsibilities for follow-up costs. Trust me, you won’t stop after you bought the starter kit.
April 12th, 2006 at 19:04:07
Ok – we’ll take you up on that!
April 19th, 2006 at 22:04:12
[...] If you read the comments to my previous post, you’ll have seen that Volker invited us round to look at the Sonos set-up which he’s testing at the moment. A demo really is the best way to appreciate the kit, the hand controller is a little larger than an iPod and makes it easy to link the units in several rooms to play the same music, or if you prefer and the rooms are not all open plan, you can listen to completely different playlists in each room. Like an iPod, the nice thing is that you can display the album covers on hand unit’s display, which makes the selection process more like browsing your physical albums. [...]