Posts Tagged music
The Sonos experience
I’ve been lusting after a Sonos system for around a year-and-a-half now, ever since reading a review of the kit in PC Pro magazine.
For the uninitiated, Sonos (or the Sonos Digital Music System, to give it its full title) is a set of components that let you stream digital audio around your home. There are basically two bits of hardware: ZonePlayers, that actually play the music through an attached amplifier or pair of speakers; and Controllers, paperback-sized bricks with a scroll wheel and colour LCD screen that are used to choose what the ZonePlayers should be playing. The Controllers are supposedly optional, in that each ZonePlayer comes with software you can install on a PC or Mac that will replicate the functionality of the Controller, thus allowing you to control the ZonePlayers via your computer. In reality, one of the main attractions of the system is in using the hardware Controller to browse through and play your music collection. I doubt many people end-up buying a system without a Controller.
Up to 32 ZonePlayers can be ‘connected’ to each other via wired or wireless ethernet, and then controlled via a single Controller. Each ZonePlayer (referred to as a ‘zone’) can play a different track, or individual zones can be linked such that they play the same track. So you could have two ZonePlayers, one in the lounge and the other in the bedroom for example, both playing the same song, in perfect sync with each other.
Musical fireworks
We (that is, myself, Paula, mum, dad and Chris) are off to a concert this Saturday evening: a “fireworks concert spectacular” at Cholmondeley Castle near Malpas. Nick was invited but politely declined on the grounds of musical taste (or lack thereof).
I mainly wanted to go because much of the music this year will be from Tchaikovsky’s ballets The Nutcracker and Swan Lake, which are both favourites of mine. I couldn’t give a rat’s ass about ballet (“strewth, mate, there’s a bloke down there with no strides on!”), but I love the music!
It’s one of those “take a picnic” affairs, which is a bit of a shame as many people seem more interested in eating and talking as opposed to listening to the orchestra (if you’re gonna do that, stay at home and have a barbeque, for crying out loud). Maybe if we sit close enough to the stage it’ll drown-out the noise of the riff-raff!