Having some work done in my basement & looking for input on SONOS as a combination home theater/multi-room music system.

Not married to the brand, but it is the one that's been most talked about by my contractors as a couple have it in their homes.

My ideal set-up is:

* Home theater in the basement with wall mounted sound bar, subwoofer & two mini's (Play?) for a surround sound type experience

* One or two mini's in the family room on the first floor

* A mini on my deck for the back yard

* A mini in the bedroom

Would like to have the ability for all rooms to play different music simultaneously from a single controller/app/whatever

Anyone have some first hand insight into how seamlessly SONOS operates?
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If you want seamless, Sonos is the way to go in my experience. They have it right. You can play different music in every room or the same thing in the whole house without any lag. Super easy to control with the app and you can let other people play their music through it if you want. I spent a lot of time and money trying to find a good alternative and never found one.

Right now, I have six Play1s across scattered around the house, with one on the porch. If we're going to have a party that spills over into other outside areas, I'll take the one from our bathroom and put it out there too. For having whole house ambient music and for parties, I think they're pretty much perfect. I already had surround sound for my home theater so haven't gotten one of their sound bars yet, but a buddy has it, loves it, and it sounds great. I'm thinking about adding one to my home office/den, but then I'd probably watch too much tv and not get enough work done.
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Outstanding, James - this is just the kind of feedback I was looking for.

If I only I was going to be in your area and could talk to you in person. :-)
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Or come by for a demonstration :-)
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We love our Sonos system. For tv, we have the playbar and sub, but no surrounds. We did the surrounds at first and I sold them as it didn't add much to the experience to justify the cost. Others certainly disagree with me on that.

As was mentioned, having different zones is great and it works seamlessly. You can have any number with the same music or different music. All different, all the same, two the same and others different, etc.

One thing to consider that won't save much money, if any, is to use the sonos connect with whatever home theater you prefer. You can get a top of the line home theater and have it work using the sonos app.

Edit, I think we sold our neighbor on the system this weekend when we had our play 5 outside. The quality of music is really great. Maybe not audiophile, but far better than most stuff you find on the stores. This was even the older version of the play 5. The new one is supposed to be even better.
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