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Deeply seated in the arena of music, Sonos, a US-based company has come up with the technology that could saturate every room in your house with a choice of digital music.  Descriptively entitled the "Sonic Digital Music System" (says it all really), the Sonos way gives you control over what and how loud the music will be played in each room that has been designated as part of the Sonos system. 

Basically the set up consists of ZonePlayers, which are distributed in various rooms and communicate wirelessly, along with a Controller that also makes use of wireless technology.  It should be pointed out that the wireless technology is not WiFi per se but a system that keeps a tight control over the signal.  Unique identifiers with 128-bit encryption are used to ensure that there are no possible cross-over problems when similar systems are in close proximity.

See also: MP3 players

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The Sonos Digital Music System big selling point is it ability to selectively distribute tracks to specific locations.  You could, for example, have one track playing in the living room while a different track was piped into the bedroom (maybe to wake a late sleeper) and a third track directed into any other room that formed part of the Sonos network.  Of course you could have the same track being played in all rooms.  The word from Sonos is that it is easier to have different tracks playing than to send the same track to all rooms.  Volume control can be adjusted to suit the needs of each individual room.

While separate ZonePlayers need to be placed in each room, all the necessary commands would emanate from a single Controller.  Naturally you would need to supply both the digital music and a set of loudspeakers for each ZonePlayer.  The digital music source could be a computer (PC or Mac), an external NAS drive or even an iPOD or suitable MP3 player.  There is even an option for nostalgic buffs, such as me, who still hark back to the days of vinyl and hang on to precious LPs.

The ZonePlayer has a built-in 50 Watt per channel amplifier with component-quality audio specifications.  As well as being able to handle a wide array of music formats, including MP3, WMA, AAC (MPEG4), FLAC, AIFF, Ogg Vorbis and WAV, the ZonePlayer comes bundled with customisable Internet radio stations.  A minimum of two ZonePlayers will be required and there is a limit of 32 units - hardly an issue with most of us.  Sonos tells me that the largest network currently consists of 17 ZonePlayers.  Each player can communicate with the others in the group and pass requests from one to the other so that any obstructions can easily be by-passed.

The Controller, which is similar to some hand-held game consoles, has a full colour LCD screen and a touch-sensitive scroll wheel (