Sonos PLAY:1 May Be Your First (of Many) WiFi Streaming Speaker

Sonos, a high-end audio company from Santa Barbara, has been mainly selling its WiFi music streaming equipment to audiophiles who want the best possible sound quality and are able to pay for it. But now, with the Sonos PLAY:1 WiFi speaker, priced at a reachable $200, the company find a broader audience looking for something with a little more quality than Bluetooth speakers can deliver.

Sonos announced the PLAY:1 on its blog on Monday, slating the release date for October 29 (though some units accidentally appeared on Target shelves the weekend before this announcement).

Priced at $200, the PLAY:1 is a single speaker that wirelessly connects to your computer or Android devices and plays music in any room of your house. As with other Sonos products, you can stream music services like Rdio, Spotify, Pandora, Sirius XM, and dozens of others, along with 100,000+ internet music stations, along with your own personal library, to the speaker.

The PLAY:1 has a Play/Pause button (this is new - on previous Sonos products, it was a mute button) and a volume rocker to control your tunes. Double tapping the play button advances to the next song, and you can control tunes from your devices as well.

According to SlashGear, the PLAY:1 comes with a mid-woofer and a tweeter, wrapped in a 360 fine silver mesh, giving you crisp, HiFi music performance out of a single speaker, even in lower volume settings. The PLAY:1 speaker is not waterproof, but it is designed to be humidity resistant, so you can set it up in your bathroom without worry.

The speaker has to be plugged into the wall - it doesn't have a rechargeable battery or an option to throw in a few Ds - but, in exchange for the limited portability, you get more connectivity for (possible) future Sonos devices.

That's because if you have an existing set of Sonos speakers, adding the PLAY:1 to the sound array is as easy as plugging it in, and choosing "Add New Component" in the Sonos control app. Meaning that Sonos might be betting that once you're hooked on the $200 speaker, you'll come back for the more expensive high-end Sonos Play Bar or PLAY: 3 or PLAY: 5 speaker systems, which work on the same dedicated Sonos WiFi network.

If you only have the PLAY:1, you can't connect directly to your wireless system and start playing immediately - Sonos bypasses your home's WiFi to build its own dedicated network, so as to not over-tax your home network with data-intensive high-end audio signals. That's no big deal for first time buyers though, as Sonos is including (for a limited time) a free $50 "Bridge," that you hook into your network to start building your Sonos system.

Sonos has clever back-end tricks once you have your wireless speaker network set up that encourages repeat customers. For example, once you have two PLAY:1 speakers paired, your system will automatically know to treat them as left and right stereo speakers. If you have even more speakers from Sonos set up in the same room, Sonos will turn some into dedicated front, back, and subwoofers, making home theater setup as easy as plugging in adding a device to a WiFi network.

Here's what to expect from Sonos' newest, most affordable offering: