Sonos launches its Play:3 wireless music device

DIGITAL MUSIC OUTFIT Sonos has announced both a new logo for its brand and some new hardware to help get the logo into customers homes. It's called the Play:3 and it's Sonos' most compact and lowest-cost wireless speaker system yet.

The Play:3 is also a new type of naming convention for the company, which is also changing the S5 to the Play:5. These names, in turn, refer to the number of speakers built into each unit, as though you'd never have guessed how many there were in a Sonos S3.

The Play:3 costs £259, which is £100 less than the five-speaker-equipped Play:5. With the Play:5, though, you can combine two of the speakers together to get a stereo system, should you chose. And, of course you can buy speakers for every room if you want, and are rich.

As always, to make the Play:3 work it needs to be connected to both the internet and your home network. This connection must be wired, or there must be another piece of Sonos hardware that is wired to your network. Once you've got one bit of Sonos gear online, it creates a virtually latency free wireless network that other Sonos devices can join.

Once on your network, the Sonos can access music shared via the company's free software, or it can use Spotify and Napster to deliver music over the internet. There are also options for podcast and online radio, and these are some of the best and most useful functions.

Sonos has countless other kit to help make things easy. There's an Ipod dock, which streams music from your fruit themed player to the Sonos hardware wirelessly. And other Zone Players, which can feed music to either an existing hi-fi or a set of speakers, from an internal amplifier. µ