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I wish to buy a new audio system to use in conjunction with my MacBook Air, my iPhone 6 Plus, my wife's iPhone 6S and her iPad 2.

I am leaning heavily at the moment towards buying a pair of Sonos Play 1 speakers but I would welcome any suggestions by others on this forum with more experience than me.

Sonos is great. I have loads of their stuff, but precisely, what do you want to do? It does have limitations. It works best with your MP3 library on a central always-on network drive though you can play files sitting locally on the iPhone. As per . Also the many TuneIn radio stations and subscription streaming services. It doesn't act as a Bluetooth speaker, for example.

You can listen to TuneIn internet radio (not the iTunes ones) from the devices to the Sonos speakers. You can play MP3s from the iPad and iPhone. To play from the Air, you need the MP3 files in a directory as a library. This can be the same place as iTunes stores them as you tell the Sonos controller software (run it on each device) the path to said files. In my case, it points at my NAS but could also be on the Air, maybe ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Media. Then you could use the controller on the iPhone to play them, as long as the Air is on. You couldn't play CDs, as you know, just rip them to file. I believe M4P files don't play but then I don't have any of them.

Note that you must have at least one of the speakers hard wired to your router if you don't have a Sonos Bridge (recommended, as more stable but not necessary and obviously costs more).

Either a bridge hardwired to the router or one of the units hardwired to the router. It depends where you want the speakers and where the router is.

Actually, I did some searching and found the link below. It suggests that you can do it on wifi. I genuinely did not know that. All the manuals I have seen say Ethernet. That is my one thing learned for today. I'd still suggest a wire.

Play:1 do have an Ethernet port. All Sonos stuff does as far as I know. I have no idea what an Airport Express is. You don't use AirPlay, you use the Sonos app - that is what talks to the hardware.

I can't advise on setting up without Ethernet because that is all I know. I have never needed to know otherwise, except for that link I found that indicates they updated the firmware to handle that. Have a look at the which will tell you all you need to know to understand it. If that doesn't explain it, I probably can't

How many rooms do you want to play music in?

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Sonos are designed to be always plugged in. They get grumpy if you turn them off but they do play after a while once they connect again.

AirPlay on Sonos is a PITA that can be solved by money. We bought a second hand Connect which we have an AirPort Express plugged into.

We haven't got our Sonos system plugged into a Mac so I can't help you there, but using the Sonos app on our iPhones we have music all over the house (occasional glitches due to poor wifi) and Audible too, which stammers a lot when switching from the downstairs wifi to the upstairs when on AirPlay.

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Oh, and another thing. If you want to use AirPlay (for Audible etc., any service that Sonos doesn't support) it may be better to buy a Play:5, rather than a Connect and a Play 1, to reduce clutter for very little difference in money.

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