With the second death of my Bose SoundTouch 20 Portable, I decided to try out Sonos.
How's the sound quality difference? I can't tell because I got the ZonePlayer, instead of actual Sonos speakers.
Sonos ZP100 is the company's first ever product. Introduced back in 2005, I'm surprised these things are still working. Lots for sale on Facebook Marketplace and cheap compared to RRP.
ZP100 and ZP80 are the OG Sonos products. ZP100 comes with a built-in 50W amplifier and a 4-port switch. Paired with my Voll A44 bookshelf speakers, the combo works pretty well. The ZP100 is S1 only and there is no way to upgrade to S2. In a way, that might be a blessing in disguise. S2 is a disaster when it first came out. Maybe S2 got better now, but maybe S1 still more stable, even if it might have less features.
That said, it's a pain connecting to my shared music folder. Took me a while to get it working with my QNAP NAS. Had to enable SMBv1 (on the QNAP) to even get Sonos to see my NAS. Even then, it can only see the Multimedia top folder, and not Multimedia\Audio\Music\Tagged folder that I intended. So what happened is that the ZP100 is indexing ALL my Multimedia content, instead of just the Tagged music albums, and this is taking a looong time.
Solution, create a top-level Tagged shared folder my other Synology NAS and connect that to the Sonos instead. Problem is, Sonos kept saying incorrect username or password, when I know that's not the case. Enabled SMBv1 support and NTLMv1 auth, which I've proven to be required (based on the Synology logs), but still no go.
Gave up using a native integration to the NAS. Used Plex as the bridge instead. Works well enough for me.
Interesting fact. Using Symfonium, I was able to cast / stream FLACs to the Sonos using Chromecast, but the audio sounds average. Tested the same FLAC file using Plex and the resulting audio quality is much much better.
