Control 4 and Sonos Integration

How do you integrate over 200 gigabytes of CD's into a music system? That was the challenge at this fantastic house in Notting Hill. 

The client already had a Control4 system installed to control his TVs, amps and source equipment, but due to the unusually large size of the music library we advised him to also install a Sonos music system to help keep tabs on all those songs.  

Here's a sample screen-shot of the Extra Vegetables Sonos driver working on a Control4 graphical user interface.  The driver itself is based around the original Control4 Ipod driver and is pretty simple to use.  I would always advise using a C4 HC1000 processor with these drivers, as they have the horsepower to deal with large media databases.

In the Lounge the client also wanted to listen to music - unfortunately there were no speaker cables pre-wired.  Luckily, we found a Cat5 data cable on the back wall we could use so installed a Sonos ZP120 amp by the sofa with a small pair of speakers.  This worked great - until we realised the ZP120 wouldn't fit under the sofa out of the kid's way, so we swapped it out for a ZP90 pre-amp and a small stand-alone amplifier.





In the Library there's a great little Rotel hi-fi system in here driving some Kef bookshelf speakers, so the client can listen to his Cd's or playback his digital music via another ZP90, all controlled from a Control4 HC200 room processor.











After selling and installing so many systems dealing with MP3's etc, playing original Cd's through the Rotel felt positively old school.  How far we've come in such a short amount of time!

And here's where everything is controlled from: A small Middle Atlantic rack housing the following equipment:

Control4 HC1000

Control4 HC300
Control4 HC200

Control4 Speakerpoint

Sky HD

Pioneer AV Receiver

Pioneer Blu-ray
Sonos ZP90
APC UPS
Q-Nap Network hard drive
Cisco 24-port gigabit ethernet switch