Best Sonos ZP-80 Mod?

Acastano,

As to the ZP100 - mine are in the gym, the patio, the courtyard, the den (in a cabinet) and in the dining room. The only place where improved amplification would be readily audible to me is the den, but ancillary electronics would not always be easily accessible in the cabinet. My 2 year old's stuff piles up!.

Dining Room listening is at very low levels. The gym tends to very high levels but fidelity ain't so importatant (to me, anyway) on the elliptical. and outside is outside. I use the Sonos when entertaining or reading and it is wonderful. I don't have a player in my listening room because my library is soon to reside on a QSonix server feeding lossless WMA to a Benchmark DAC1 and onto to my system. The Sonos gets 320kb compressed. Different horses for different courses.

Marty

BTW - According to Sonos, the digital out is fixed in level, so I'm not sure how the volume can be controlled. Am I misinformed?

Shazam -Good luck with your search. My gut feel is that tossing large sums at a Sonos for mods, etc, seems like a questionable call. It is what it is and IMHO that ain't bad.... it's just not particularly high end.

Marty

Tboooe - I have confirmation that the Cullen mod does NOT effect the software. I runs the same.

-G

Thank you Janikian!

All: I too purchased my Sonos purely because of its convenience. I have zone players in every bedroom (4), the family room, the backyard, the balcony, and my listening room. For every room other than my listening room I agree with Marty that convenience outweighs quality. But for my listening room, I am willing to go through a little more hassle to have great sound, which in this case simply means having to keep my preamp remote close to me, which I dont find to be a problem at all. I do keep a stash of my favorite cds around so I can pop it into my Esoteric cdp when I want the listen critically. But I guess I just want it all...I want the rest of cd collection (5K cds) to sound good through the Sonos too!

Marty,

The digital output is variable. The volume control affedts all the outputs. You can check this in the Sonos website forums. One tread claims that this does not degrades sound quality unless you reduce the volume more than, I think, 48dB.

It's great that you are happy with all your ZP100s. My only point is that you can significantly increase the quality without loosing convenience by using a ZP80 feeding an amplifier. In my experience, the quality jump going form ZP100 to ZP80+amplifier is significantly larger than going form ZP80+amplifier to ZP80+DAC+Pre+Amp. BTW, I also have different horses for different courses :-)