Look at that stack of black hi-fi separates sitting in the corner of your room. I mean, just look at it, sitting there like a giant burnt club sandwich. It’s so late 90s. You, sir, need to drag your hi-fi kicking and screaming into the 21st century. Here is your shopping list:
1. Network Attached Storage.
NAS is a box with one or more hard drives nestling inside. It can be always on, and will serve files to any computer on your network. You can store terrabytes of lovely lossless music files here (preferably with RAID redundancy) without having to worry about it all being lost the moment you have a giant attack of fail while trying to dual-boot with Linux.
2. Sonos Controller 100.
This is a little slice of genius. The Sonos controller lets you access the music in your NAS box, and play it anywhere in the house. It uses a secure encrypted wireless protocol that allows you to control any room from any other room. You can have up to 32 of these, depending on how hungry the back of your sofa happens to be.
3. Sonos Zone Player 80.
You can connect this to any existing amplifier/speaker combos you have, and they will receive music from your NAS box and send it to your hi-fi.
4. Sonos Zone Player 100.
This is basically the same as the 80, but with an amplifier, allowing you to dispense other hifi equipment and connect directly to your speakers.
5. Sonos ZoneBridge (optional).
If you require music in the room where your NAS resides, then you do not require one of these as you can directly connect a zone player to your router (which is in turn connected to your NAS) in order to access your music. On the other hand, if your NAS sits underneath your stairs, this is a cheap (relatively) module which transmits the music data from your NAS to the rest of your Sonos network.
So there you have it, all your music at your fingertips, no more scrabbling around trying to find your Kenny G album only to find that the cat has been sick on it, and if your neighbours really annoy you, why not stick on ten different Slipknot songs in ten different rooms at the same time?
