Henrik Carlsson's Blog

Many years ago now, I set ”The Year of Music” as a Yearly Theme. Though one of the ideas behind a theme is that it shouldn’t really be something that you can fail at I would say that The Year of Music was a huge failure. No new music made, very little music listening. Now, however, the latter part of that is changing.

After many years of indecisiveness I took the plunge and bought into the Sonos ecosystem and I am so glad I did. The idea of being able to fill the house with music, or to have different music playing in different rooms, have been something I’ve wanted for so long. However, even though I’ve considered Sonos – and the Sonos/Ikea products – I’ve always resisted, thinking that there’s got to be a better, less expensive solution that doesn’t lock me into a single company’s line of products. So I’ve kept thinking about it, going more or less deep into various Raspberry Pi-based rabbit holes, never sticking to one idea. In recent years I’ve even considered buying a turntable and getting into vinyl records. I’ve got a MacMini server at home, several speakers – both Bluetooth and wired – and I have some basic programming skills. Surely, I should be able to create the perfect solution. Surely…

Obviously that didn’t happen. Now, in hindsight, I think that is part of why the listening part of Year of Music failed. Friction, even light friction, greatly reduces the chance of something happening. When music listening requires me to connect my phone physically to a speaker, or make an AirPlay connection, and having playback be instantly disrupted whenever a call comes to my phone, making it almost impossible to have a communal experience with my family about selecting the music, and so on, there is great friction making it very unlikely to happen.

So a month or two ago I started seriously looking at Sonos gear. Yes, it cost a lot of money¹ but honestly speaking I am in that part of life where I have more money than time so I should at least consider it. Fortunately I spoke to Linn about it. I have a tendency to overthink everything. She is much more spontaneous so she encouraged me to go ahead and buy a speaker or two, or why not even three. Thank you, Linn! :)

Finally, I talked to my old friend Johan who’s been using Sonos for a long time and he’s recommendation was the last push I needed so I bought two (yes, two) Era 100 and one Roam 2. I’m using the Era 100s as a stereo pair in the kitchen/living room and the Roam as a portable speaker, wherever I might need it.

It has worked great, both as an interconnected system with the same music playing in the kitchen as on the backyard patio – or when I’m writing this among the flowers next to the green house of the front side of the house – as well as a system for the kitchen and a separate speaker for separate music somewhere else, for instance when my daughter brings it out to the trampoline in the back garden. The fact that each speaker is ”smart” enough to act as a music player, that no phone or other device is required during playback is such an important feature and makes it miles better then any Bluetooth or AirPlay speaker.

In the end, the friction of listening to music is minimal and the result is that I indeed listen a whole lot more. Sometimes it’s to music that I really like, sometimes to music that someone else in my household really likes, but there is always music in the air.