Is there anything like Sonos but with a hard drive?

[Piemin]

I wondered if anyone might be able to advise me. I've been looking for some time for a home music system that's got the following features:

It's own hard drive so I don't have to have my PC on at the same time as listening to music.

One central hub and then indivdual units that I can put in different rooms throughout the house with remote controls so that whereever I am I can control what I'm listening to.

In-built DAB radio.

I've looked at Philips Streamium but the fact I think it feels bulky and I'm not that keen on the looks and the fact it doesn't have an in-built DAB radio have all put me off it. I like the look of the Sonos but I wish it had a hard drive. Does anyone know of anything else out there that fits the bill?

Thanks.

[Otto-Mate]

Hi Piemin, I'd still highly recommend Sonos for you! You can use it with a NAS (network attached storage) like this one I recently got for my sister...
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/...EV0/markmccall ...that does away with the need to have a PC on all the time.

As for DAB, you can plug in any DAB tuner to one of the Sonos zoneplayers and then stream its output to all the others round the house.

You can read our full Sonos review here - http://www.wordpress-1219309-4387497...rm-Review.html

M.

[Piemin]

Thanks Otto-Mate - I feared my query was too basic for the forum so it was good to get the advice. I think I'll buy exactly what you recommend.

[wywywywy]

Sonos is so cool, such a shame it is useless for me because it doesn't support Unicode...

[MichaelD]

Probably a dumb question, but why do you want your music player to support unicode?

[toscal]

Don't worry I was thinking the same thing.
I always thought Unicode was a way for computers to express or manipulate any type of text from one machine to another.
Maybe its a typo and it should read Unix / Linux or similar.

[jpdw]

Don't worry I was thinking the same thing.
I always thought Unicode was a way for computers to express or manipulate any type of text from one machine to another.
Maybe its a typo and it should read Unix / Linux or similar.

I would guess wywywywy has a lot of content that has tags in a non-latin alphabet based alphabet (eg simplified chinese) etc.

[wywywywy]

Thats right.
I have a large library of CJK (Chinese Japanese Korean) songs.
And the filenames and tags are in Unicode.

[Guest]

Agree its a shame the WACS7000 Streamium doesn't have DAB but it is a very cool system.

Not sure it can really be compared to the Sonos as the WACS7000 does is a complete solution in terms of amp, speakers, etc