New additions to my life – the Sonos Connect and Klipsch in-ear headphones

I’ve always loved music. I’m a visual person at heart, but music has always been important. I enjoyed my music classes in junior high school. I played string bass for 8 years before college. I keep an extensive local music library. Music fidelity is important to me as well.

Recently, my wife has taken to gently mocking me for the number of speakers I continue to add to the house. I think she supported me originally, but now it’s probably a little ridiculous. We’ve got a pair of Sonos Play:1 speakers in the Lounge. In the Family Room, I invested in large Klipsch floorstanding speakers, a large center channel speaker, and a powerful subwoofer. We used to be a Sonos Play:5 there, but I’ve temporarily moved it to the Master Bedroom. Last summer I got the old outdoor speakers hooked up, but I’m seriously considering yanking out the original wiring and cheapo Audiovox speakers, putting in wiring properly and installing a volume control box and nice Klipsch outdoor speakers. I probably won’t do the outdoor replacements until I hang up string lights.

In addition to music, I also really love light.

In December, I added two new components to this audiophile’s life:

My new Klipsch R6ii-II headphones

My new Klipsch R6ii-II headphones

I received a nice pair of Klipsch R6i-II in-ear headphones from my wishlist for Christmas. My previous Klipsch headphones were starting to show serious wear and tear, then finally disappeared. Don’t be suspicious. I didn’t lose them on purpose. The Universe took them away from me. 😉

With the recent Christmas parties and get-togethers all coming up at the time, I was troubled / annoyed that we couldn’t synchronize the music on the first floor. While we can do 95% of what we need independently between the Sonos speakers in the Lounge, and the Sony STR-DN1080 receiver in the Family Room, they wouldn’t be in sync. If you’re gonna have a party, you want the music to be the continuous as you walk from one room to another. 

Okay, maybe you don’t, but I did. 

To accomplish this last 5% task, we would have to invest $349 for a Sonos Connect. Plug that into the receiver, and that achieve the last mile. But for $349? Was it worth it? I went back and forth on this for days, but I had been thinking about it for months. Or at least the cats in my head had been batting it around for a while. My wife honestly couldn’t have cared less (because she’s a practical person), and nobody liked the price tag.

Sonos Connect

Sonos Connect

I had a conversation with my friend Paul about it, and his take was, “Well, YOU seem to care about it because you keep obsessing about it.” It was true. Maybe it wasn’t practical at all, but it obviously bothered me. So I went to Best Buy in Lawrenceville on the day of the 1st party, bought a Connect, set it up, and it works well.

Three parties later, and it’s a nice feature we have in the house. I’m still not happy with the price tag, but what can you do sometimes. If you truly want something, you have to try your best to make it happen. Of course, to make this worthwhile, we’ll need to have many more people over to make use of it.

So, please feel free to invite yourself over in 2019 and come jam with us!

[Now I need to figure out how and when we should budget for the new outdoor music setup, and a Sonos Beam for the master bedroom.]

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