Sound strategies

Sonos was first with synchronous multi-room speakers. But the company is now facing stiff competition from Pure, DTS and CSR. It was only a couple of decades ago that if you wanted to listen to music, you simply removed a record or CD from its sleeve, switched on your stereo and hit play. In the digital era, however, we expect so much more. We have playlists and we can carry our music with us everywhere. We can, for a small subscription fee, stream millions of tracks through Last. FM, Napster and a number of other similar services. But that´s not enough for some music fans, and satisfying their zealous equivalent - the audiophile - is near impossible. We are increasingly craving the ability to stream music room-to-room in our homes synchronously so that we´re finally untethered from our smartphones or media players. There are clear advantages to distributing sound around a home. Other people in the household are less likely to be disturbed by having one person´s music only in certain rooms. Your neighbours, meanwhile, will appreciate you not having to put the living room speakers on full blast to hear the music while you´re upstairs.