Sonos vs Niles ZR-6

I'm am by no means an expert and can only offer you my opinion on the Sonos equipment. I have Sonos in my home and love it. For my needs it is perfect, simple and works flawlessly, but I think your decision will really come down to what YOU want to do with the system.

For me, local MP3 files, Spotify, Pandora, SiriusXM, Last.fm and internet radio were my only sources I was looking to play in my home. I didn't need or want to control any other sources in a central location. I didn't want an intercom system and I didn't care about sending a source from one room (not centrally located) throughout my whole home. With all of that being said, it made Sonos the right choice. As you start adding those needs or wants into your system you will probably find that Sonos may not be the right choice.

You need to decide what sources you will want available in what rooms and how you want to use the system to really find out what system is best for you.

Also there are plenty of threads on the site already that talk about the various systems. You might want to do a search and read some of them to help get you up to speed on each systems pros and cons.

Good luck,
Dave

Though, if that happens, you can just install any Sonos unit in that room and you're good to go.

True, but Sonos doesn't have any IR or RS232 control built into it. I'm sure the Niles system or a similar system would. So you get into a situation where you are in the backyard for example, but the source is in the living room. You could control the volume from Sonos and select the zone/zones you wanted the source to play in but have no control over the source device. So you could listen to a CD from a CD player in the living room, you just couldn't start playing a CD, skip tracks, shuffle, replay or so forth via Sonos.

Don't get me wrong, I love my Sonos and it is the best fit for MY needs, but I do see it as very limited for complex whole home audio solutions with sources other than Sonos itself. It works great to stream internet or local music files around the home, but in my opinion it can't compete when it comes to integrating/controlling other external sources such as cable boxes, cd players and so on.

I don't think that is a bad thing either, I just don't believe the system was ever designed to be used in that manner.

Yeah, if you want old school stuff (as in physical media) etc, you either need to go a more expensive route or at least have a less neat solution with separate distributed IR etc (which would mean two controls to control that source, Sonos + IR stuff).

That being said, if I still were a CD kinda guy (am not, haven't listened to a CD since... I don't know, 2003 or something, they're just collecting dust these days), I'd probably invest my time in ripping all my CD's into a lossless format and put them on a NAS or something instead.

I agree 100% with this post!!!