You’ve got your MP3s and they sound great on your MP3 player when you’re out and on your PC when you’re at your desk. How about hearing them in the front room? And in the kitchen? And in the bathroom, and everywhere else in the house? Multi-room music used to cost thousands to install. Then came Sonos and a multi-room system cost hundreds instead, but you can work on a much smaller budget if you don’t need all the features of a Sonos setup. There are plenty of other ways to get your music into every room where you want to listen to it, depending on how much you want to spend. We’ll walk you through how the different options work and what you need to do to set them up.

Connecting Sonos ZonePlayers

Wireless systems like the Sonos ZonePlayer are the simplest to set up (no drilling through walls and trailing cables under the rug) and the Sonos has some of the best multi-room features you can get. You can have up to 32 ZonePlayers, play different music on each one and move what you’re listening to from room to room. You can set multiple alarms for each ZonePlayer so you can wake up to your favourite playlist and sleep in at the weekend, move your playlist from the bedroom to the kitchen to the living room as you move around the house, play the same music in every room for a party then use the sleep timer to turn the music off when you want everyone to go home at the end of the evening - and run everything from the handheld controller.

The cheapest Sonos bundle (BU139 at £699) gives you one ZP100, which has an amplifier so you can connect your own speakers to it directly, one ZP80 to plug into your hi-fi and a controller (if you want Sonos speakers the bundle costs £809). It doesn’t include the cradle charger for the controller; this is much more convenient than the plug-in charger and well worth the extra £30. The controller has a motion sensor so it turns on as soon as you pick it up. Extra ZonePlayers cost £249 for the ZP80 and £349 for the ZP100 and if you want the Sonos speakers you can get them with the bundle for an extra £109. You only need one controller for up to 30 ZonePlayers and you get a software controller with the same features that runs on your PC or Mac. But if carrying the controller around the house doesn’t work – it’s no fun realising you left it in the bedroom when a song you can’t stand pops up on random play in the kitchen – you can have multiple controllers too. In an emergency there’s a mute button and volume controls on the front of each ZonePlayer too.

Although the ZonePlayers use 802.11 wireless to talk to each other (it’s an encrypted wireless mesh rather than standard Wi-Fi to give a seamless connection) one of them has to be connected to a wired Ethernet connection and preferably directly to your router or wireless access point. If there isn’t a spare port on your router it doesn’t matter; there’s a 2-port switch on the back of the Z80 and a 4-port switch on the back of the ZP100 so you can daisy-chain another cable to free up a port (but they are only 100Mbps switches, not gigabit). This does mean you’ll probably have a ZonePlayer in the same room as your computer which can seem a waste. If the fact that the handheld controller is more convenient to use than iTunes or Windows Media Player and the speakers on the ZonePlayer will probably be better than the ones on your computer don’t convince you then you can connect the first ZonePlayer with a wireless bridge, but you might not see such good performance. If you use an Airport Extreme for your Wi-Fi network you can plug the ZonePlayer into an Airport Express but you’ll need to use the Airport Extreme Admin Utility to assign an IP address to the Zone Player. Another alternative is to use a Power over Ethernet or HomePlug AV adapter to connect the first ZonePlayer, but again the connection may not be as robust.