I have been looking at various ways on how to do distributed audio around the house. Two brands come up tops regarding this – the one that you mentioned namely Sonos and of course Logitec Squeezbox.

But although these systems are very good, they are also a bit expensive. If you look at the minimum bits and pieces that you need, it is going to cost a bit.

But there is a 3rd solution. Get a whole lot of AirPort Expresses and some speakers connected to them and place them around the house. iTunes can pipe music to all devices or selected devices. From what I’ve heard from friends, it works very well. Of course with the iTunes Remote app for the iPhone / iPad, it makes it easy to control iTunes as well as pipe music to the various destinations. If you need to pipe audio from your PC/Mac directly to the AirPort Expresses, you can use Airfoil – this is when you’d want to pipe LostFM or any streaming audio.

Pros

If you’re already embedded with the Apple ecosystem, it is a natual fit.

Cons

You cannot send seporate audio streams to different devices. i.e. Room 1 gets song A and Room 2 gets Song B at the same time.

The Sonos and Sqeezebox can do the above well. But I guess if you look at getting the receiving device and seporate powered speakers, it might work out getting a Sonos / Squeezebox since the receiver and speakers integrate as well.

One day, I hope to have some form of distributed audio in the house . 🙂