Part II (don't worry - unlike Peter Jackson, I won't artificially stretch it out into a trilogy...)
THE GOOD - SOUND QUALITY:
I've only had these speakers for a couple days, but I've tried to use them as much as I can in that time period. I usually don't listen to music much while at home, but now I have. I've also watched a couple big-budget Hollywood movies to really exercise the Sub in particular, and...auhmmm...yeah. They make noise, for sure. HELL can they make noise!
The Sub is a complete and utter BRUTE actually. No idea what the wattage is on the amps in that thing, Sonos doesn't say, but like the horsepower rating on a Rolls Royce, it's enough all right. Cabinets and light armatures in my apartment start rattling and shaking if this thing is turned up even moderately high! Watching Thor on blu-ray was both a joy and quite frightening really, a joy because you could absolutely tell when the low-frequency sound channel kicked in as you could feel it in your chest even if the volume was kept down low enough that the room itself did not start to rumble along with the action. Frightening, because I'll probably get evicted if I enjoy myself TOO much with these speakers!
According to tests done by reviewers on the web - and I have no way to verify this - the Sub gives useful sound output down to 25Hz, and I've no genuine reason to doubt that. It certainly feels that way when listening, you notice the bass has a wholly different character than with an ordinary consumer-type set of speakers, or even with my old Sony HT-BE1 surround setup which had a sub, although only a really really paltry one compared to this one. The depth of the bass doesn't even require all that much in the way of volume either, you can absolutely tell the lower frequency register is there even if the volume is set so low you won't disturb your neighbors at night, that's how good this sub is.
As my apartment is quite small I have to be careful though to not turn the volume up too much while watching movies; the sound dynamic range is much wider in a Dolby Digital-encoded movie than when listening to regular music. This makes you want to turn the volume up a bit for dialogue, but then sitting close to the Playbar can be uncomfortable when lots of stuff start blowing up and things like that. Had I owned a bigger place this would not have been as much of an issue, but then again, this is hardly the speakers' fault either.
Music-wise, this setup is great. The Playbar on its own sounds pretty decent with fair bass reproduction, but adding the Sub to the mix brings in a wholly different level of tonal nuances and depth. As the Playbar doesn't have to service the lowest register anymore the on-board signal processing adjusts its EQ curves and noticeably tightens up, and it's all done automatically. Treble and mid-range improves - greatly, I would say - while bass simultaneously deepens and broadens due to the Sub starting to fill in at the lower end. This change is almost instantaneous, and it's easy to check the difference as you can toggle the Sub on or off at will in the configuration window of the Controller software.
A heavy dance music track like Daft Punk's "Derezzed" is a genuine kick in the pants with deep, firm bass track and distinct upper-range register. The Prodigy's "Climbatize" is airy and crisp at the treble end while rich and vibrant in the mid-range together with a jolly good dynamic-sounding base humming away. Strongly electronic Crystal Castles' "Untrust Us" for example feels very alive and energetic on these speakers, the song easily encompasses the whole room and makes your body fill with fizzy softdrink bubbles and makes you want to hop around crazily like a young jittery twenty-year-something.
80s pop works really great too when listened through Sonos speakers. ELO's "Calling America" is full of warmth and happy details, while Alphaville's "Summer in Berlin" takes me right back to fifth or maybe sixth (I forget!) grade and my yellow Sony Sports Walkman playing this song on tape into equally yellow sideways-earbuds as were popular at the time. Truly a masterpiece, with its prominent synths and muted percussion, like any good 80s synthpop tune should have, and it is reproduced flawlessly here, almost thirty years later.
British avant-garde synthpop band Art of Noise's "Legacy" does not show its age in my opinion, despite being somewhat the 80s equivalent of an Adobe Flash soundboard applet. After all, sampling was an exciting new thing at the time. Listening to that song now still evokes many of the same feelings as it did as when I first heard it as a young teen. Legendary krautrock/ambient/electronica band Tangerine Dream has done tons of awesome and mostly instrumental music over the years (decades really); their track "Melrose" is a varied and melodic tune that starts out simple with synth strings, drums and a lonesome piano before blooming out into a jazzy ambient saxophone piece with truly deep, rumbling bassy waves that feel great as they hit you. Turning again towards the heavier side of the spectrum, Front 242's classic 80s "Quite Unusual" is at least as heavy-hitting and jawsockingly represented on these speakers as its much younger contemporal electronic dance siblings, while Yello's "Live at the Roxy" is complex and layered, its delicate, disparate details well preserved and separated in space by the Sonos surround setup.
I don't mind some purely accoustic music every now in a while either, and it is a pure joy to listen to 3 Doors Down's "Here Without You", and Brad Arnold's hauntingly sorrowful voice (some would call it "emo" I guess, but I say, fsck 'em!). Sitting in the center of the surround setup envelops you in a soft bed of strings even as the song's melody becomes more intense towards the end. I almost never listen to hard rock or heavy metal, but when I do it's usually a well-known and loved ballad. Yeah, I'm a pussy, I know, you don't have to tell me. Metallica's timeless classic "Nothing Else Matters" finds no fault in these fine sound reproduction devices. Chris Hetfield's not-so-dulcet tones carry through clearly without getting distorted or muddled up in the powerful guitars and drums as the song works towards its crescendo, and the purely instrumental sections inbetween verses also come through in full color, showing that it takes even more than this amazing song to overwork these well-crafted Sonos drivers and amps.
Swedish music is also excellently presented on these speakers. "Midnight Sun" by The Sounds is a nice, forgettable little chiptune-retro-ish pop ditty that lets you appreciate Maja Ivarsson's distinct voice. The wide array of digitally controlled speaker drivers of the Playbar gives a broad stereo image that adds depth to the male backup singers as well. Meanwhile, mid-90s hit "Den Vilda" by ethnopop band One More Time is a startling experience with its masterful female vocalist duo backed by a clear piano, sweeping synths, swirling violins and throaty chellos.
Meanwhile, accurate reproduction of classical music is also not beyond Sonos; Robert Nilsson Ericson's classic "Utskärgård" in orchestral arrangement as played by Swedish Radio's Symphonic Orchestra (in a recording which dates back to the 1960s but hasn't lost any of its poignancy) makes you strongly visualize the sun, the salty waves, the strong breeze and sometimes fickle weather of sailing in the Swedish summer archipelagos. ...As we all have done, I'm sure! The more bombastic side of classical music as represented by "The Road to Sourceville" by Don Davis' "Matrix Reloaded" original soundtrack paints an intense, dynamic sound carpet of both strong highs and powerful lows that shows that these speakers can't just play it loud, they can also bring out the finest of details in accoustic instruments in a deeply enjoyable fashion. Klaus Badeldt's "Professor Alexander Hartdegen" from the movie "The Time Machine" features a gentle, floating oboe solo which despite its airy structure still strikes you with its emotive power, accompanied by delicate woodwind instruments, piano, strings and choir elements.
THE BAD:
While some people lament that Sonos' products don't have line-in or USB connectors or other inputs for hooking up music players and harddrives and whatnot, I don't really care about those things. No, what I could wish had been improved on with these speakers and the general Sonos infrastructure are almost all software related. (Well, apart from the price I suppose, because Sonos sure isn't cheap.)
See, I'm not the squirrely type when it comes to music; I don't have massive collections of ripped discs, piles of digitally purchased iTunes tracks, oodles of pirated MP3s or any of that stuff. I stream everything I listen to over the interwebs via Spotify, and at least when using that as a source you quickly notice the Sonos Controller software's shortcomings; while you can search the Spotify catalogue and select wether you wish to display results for artists, albums or songs, you CAN'T sort actual playlists according to these criteria, or even sort them at all it seems. If you have very large playlists (like I tend to; I just dump in tons of albums from various artists belonging to roughly the same style/genre that reach 1000 or more tracks) it becomes pure hell trying to find anything when albums from the same artist/band aren't even grouped together!
Furthermore, you can't play anything through the Sonos software without first creating a queue; however, Spotify playlists are inerently a queue already, and if I add or remove songs to my Spotify playlist that won't update the Sonos queue. I have to do that manually, which is fiddly and counter-intuitive and just plain irritating.
Also, when you turn on your TV, by default anything streaming stops (which isn't bad as otherwise you'd have to fiddle to change inputs) and sound playback is switched over to the optical input. However, the track you were playing doesn't pause. It is stopped completely, so if/when you then wish to resume music playback you must then start the song all over again, you can't just unpause it and continue.
Overall, the Sonos Controller just isn't a very well-designed piece of software, user interface-wise. It doesn't support media keys on PC/Windows keyboards for some bizarre reason unless you give the Controller's window focus (by clicking it), and then you might as well just click the buttons in the window anyway, it'd be faster - although the Sonos Controller software does support universal hotkeys on Apple Macs... It's discrimination, I say! *shakes fist* Also, the "Mini Controller" window does not show any buttons at all unless you mouse them over, which is dumb; do I really want to look at a tiny stamp-sized picture of the cover artwork or do I want to have quick and easy access to the user interface without having to wait for it to slide into place? NEVER EVER design user interfaces with form over function in mind! *shakes fist again, more threateningly this time* That's a cardinal sin! There's also no time indicator in the Mini Controller and no fast-forward or rewind functionality. The volume slider is also not shown at all unless the speaker icon is moused over, which is terrible, as you might get unpleasantly surprised by the sound volume if you'd changed it when playing something else and then forgot about it.
The iOS (and, I presume Android, but I have no way to verify) app is also not very well designed for use on a phone, requiring a lot of aiming fingers and tapping at buttons to get things done when dragging gestures to flip between screens and a more cohesive overall design of the app would have been more intuitive. It'll be clearer on an iPad no doubt due to the much larger screen, but not everyone can afford an iPad, and probably can't warrant getting one just for controlling their speaker setup if they have no other genuine need for it (like myself.) The iOS Controller app is also not iOS 7-optimized yet despite this version having been out for months already.
Weird omission: the Sonos Playbar does not support DTS-encoded surround audio, only Dolby Digital, which is totally bizarre since it is being actively marketed as a 5.1 sound system by Sonos, and DTS is arguably superior in sound quality. There exists a petition on Sonos' forums, but the company has so far expressed no interest in bringing support to their hardware even though the Playbar would easily be capable of performing the decoding. This is disappointing.
Lastly, I would have hoped the Controller software could have done more to normalize sound volume better - or even at all. Many Spotify tracks are fairly quiet, even supposedly loud pop music, and some tracks are much, much louder. It forces you to adjust the volume too often, lest your ears suffer, and even though blame is ultimately to be laid at Spotify's feet for having these discrepancies it'd been welcome if Sonos could have done something to work around the issue. Activating night mode is not an option, as this feature is only enabled when receiving audio through the optical input, not when streaming music from the internet or a computer... Strange, and inconsistent! Perhaps we're supposed to use headphones at night instead of our expensive speaker setups?
THE UGLY:
I've had some issues with sound stuttering after putting streaming playback on pause for an extended period of time. It only happens sometimes, right when re-starting playback of a paused song and then never again, and not at all when starting a song fresh from the beginning. Software bug rather than hardware issue? Undoubtedly, and not a very serious one I'd say, but it's there and it's mildly annoying when it happens so I hope they fix it, because damn, these speakers are expensive!
Another bug I've encountered is by rapidly clicking the dragbar that shows how far into a song you are using the Windows version of the Controller. If done quickly enough the Controller shows an error message and playback stops, forcing you to start the song all over again. Also easily fixable I bet, but how long will that take? And how long have this bug existed? I don't know, since I just bought this setup. Some companies are slow to fix these things; after all, they've already got your money so they seem to reason that any "excess" effort spent on software (meaning spitshining and whacking of non-critical bugs) is money lost.
SUMMARY:
Superior build quality, awesome hardware design, great sound quality, simple-as-hell setup and configuration, fairly straightforward user interface (unless you use an iPhone), however with some quirks and bugs making the software side the weak link. Also: NOT CHEAP.
