questions about Sonos Five

  • 30 November 2020
  • 3 replies
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Hi,

My parents are looking for a speaker which they can take to a farmhouse they own, and it needs to be able to stream music from a phone + connect a CD player or a cassette deck player.

A few questions regarding the Sonos Five:

  1. with the line in on the Sonos Five, you can plug in any 3rd party tape deck or CD player into it, correct? And it should play whatever is on that cassette or CD player?

  2. The farmhouse doesn't have wifi. We have unlimited data with 100GB cap per cellular line, so we were gonna hotspot anything we needed WiFi wise. How would they go about streaming something from an iPhone to the Sonos Five without an extra router? Would 1 of the iPhones have to be turned into a hotspot, then use the other iPhone to connect to that hotspot, and then connect the Sonos that way? Or can you connect from iPhone to Sonos 5 via bluetooth?


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3 replies

Hi,

My parents are looking for a speaker which they can take to a farmhouse they own, and it needs to be able to stream music from a phone + connect a CD player or a cassette deck player.

A few questions regarding the Sonos Five:

  1. with the line in on the Sonos Five, you can plug in any 3rd party tape deck or CD player into it, correct? And it should play whatever is on that cassette or CD player?

 

 

Correct.

 

  1. The farmhouse doesn't have wifi. We have unlimited data with 100GB cap per cellular line, so we were gonna hotspot anything we needed WiFi wise. How would they go about streaming something from an iPhone to the Sonos Five without an extra router? Would 1 of the iPhones have to be turned into a hotspot, then use the other iPhone to connect to that hotspot, and then connect the Sonos that way? Or can you connect from iPhone to Sonos 5 via bluetooth?

You’re close.  You would need to have a travel router setup that gets internet connection from your hotspot phone.  The router would then create a network that the Sonos 5 and a 2nd phone or tablet can connect to. Sonos 5 does not have bluetooth

 

You may want consider getting a Sonos Move instead of a Five, as it’s really better designed for situations like this.  It can work over WiFi when at home and then work over a different WiFi or bluetooth when not at home.  It will also self tune itself to whatever room it’s placed it.  The one thing it can’t do is play the CDs and cassette player through line in, but you get around that with adding a bluetooth transmitter to you your CD/cassette player, if the players don’t have bluetooth built in.

 

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  1. The farmhouse doesn't have wifi. We have unlimited data with 100GB cap per cellular line, so we were gonna hotspot anything we needed WiFi wise. How would they go about streaming something from an iPhone to the Sonos Five without an extra router? Would 1 of the iPhones have to be turned into a hotspot, then use the other iPhone to connect to that hotspot, and then connect the Sonos that way? Or can you connect from iPhone to Sonos 5 via bluetooth?

You’re close.  You would need to have a travel router setup that gets internet connection from your hotspot phone.  The router would then create a network that the Sonos 5 and a 2nd phone or tablet can connect to. Sonos 5 does not have bluetooth

 

You may want consider getting a Sonos Move instead of a Five, as it’s really better designed for situations like this.  It can work over WiFi when at home and then work over a different WiFi or bluetooth when not at home.  It will also self tune itself to whatever room it’s placed it.  The one thing it can’t do is play the CDs and cassette player through line in, but you get around that with adding a bluetooth transmitter to you your CD/cassette player, if the players don’t have bluetooth built in.

Ahh yeah that’s going to be too many steps for my parents to pull off lol.

So basically no way to stream music to the Five without having an existing WiFi network….grrr.

Would the other option be getting a lightning to 3.5mm cable where you can plug the iPhone into the Sonos Five’s line-in directly? No streaming but can just listen directly by connecting the phone wired to the Five….

And if we went the Move route instead, I’d plug in the CD/cassette player into the bluetooth receiver (https://www.logitech.com/en-us/product/bluetooth-audio-adapter)….but then what? How do we connect the now bluetooth-enabled cassette/CD player to the Sonos Move?

With direct cabling to the Five, you’d need to (oddly, IMHO) turn on AutoPlay for the device while it was connected to an internet signal, it is not turned on normally, until you explicitly turn it on. Once that was done, you could use a cable connected to the line in. 
 

For the Move, your device is the wrong type. You’d want to connect the cassette/CD player to a Bluetooth sending device. The Move is already a Bluetooth receiving device.