Is dockless iPod/iPhone speaker system worth premium price?

If you've got an iPod or an iPhone, chances are you've at least thought about getting a speaker system for it.

Such devices are a great way to share music with family and friends or to fill a room - rather than just your ears - with it.

One problem with most iPod speaker systems is that your device must be plugged into it. That's OK for an iPod, which is primarily a music-playing device, but not for an iPhone, which does a lot more. While listening to music on your iPhone, you might want to check your e-mail or surf the Web, which is hard to do while it's plugged into a speaker system.

That's why I was intrigued by Sonos' new ZonePlayer S5 speaker system. In shape and design, it looks much like other high-end iPod or iPhone speaker systems. Unlike its rivals, though, it lacks an iPod dock because you control it wirelessly with an iPhone or iPod touch using a Sonos-designed app.

I like the idea of the S5. And I often enjoyed listening to music on it. But it was often frustrating to use and ultimately, I think, is not worth its premium price.

The S5 is the latest device from Sonos, a startup company that makes high-end networked music systems that play songs from your personal digital music collection or streamed from the Internet. Sonos' previous systems cost in the neighborhood of $1,000 or more. At about $400, the S5 offered the promise of similar capabilities at a more affordable price.

Indeed, the S5 can do some neat things. You can use it to listen to any song stored on your computer or those on thousands of Internet radio stations or a wide array of Internet music and audio services, including Pandora, Audible.com and Napster.

The sound quality is good because the S5 has five speakers that produce a full range of tones. I placed the S5 in my kitchen and it easily filled the room with sound comparable to that from speaker systems from companies such as Bose, iHome and Altec Lansing that are in the same price range.

Although those other speaker systems aren't networked, they can do much the same thing as the S5 when connected to an iPhone loaded with audio apps. Want to listen to your entire music library? There's an app for that. Want to listen to Pandora or Napster or Sirius or an Internet radio station? Just download the right app.

What distinguishes the S5 is its wireless connection to your iPhone and the fact that you can access a wide range of musical choices from within one application, rather than through multiple ones. Also, unlike other speaker systems, you can create a network of S5s and other Sonos devices in your house and control them all with one iPhone, either playing the same music on all of them or different songs on different devices.

But unless you already own a Sonos system, those perks aren't worth the trouble or the cost, which typically turns out to be more than $400, potentially a lot more.

If you don't already have a Sonos system and you want to locate the S5 anywhere other than right next to your router, you're going to need another Sonos device - priced at $100 on up - to beam music to it from your network and the Internet. The Sonos system runs on a proprietary wireless network that's incompatible with Wi-Fi, so you can't just use a wireless router you already own.

And that's not all. To ensure that your music library is always available - and you're not guzzling power by keeping your PC on - the Sonos folks advise that you move your music library from your computer's hard drive to a stand-alone drive connected directly to your network. That will cost you about $170, at least.

On top of that, you might well want to get another wireless controller for those times when your iPhone is out of juice. That will cost you another $350.

But cost isn't the S5's only issue.

If you use a Mac, you may find, as I did, that configuring it so the S5 can tap into the music on it can be a challenge. I spent more than an hour on the phone with Sonos' customer support to try to figure out why the S5 wouldn't talk to my Mac. We finally got the system working, but it involved a lot of tweaks to my firewall and system settings.

While Sonos' proprietary network is incompatible with Wi-Fi, it runs on the same frequency as Wi-Fi, which can cause interference issues. To get the two networks to play nice with one another, you'll need to reconfigure your Wi-Fi network. That can be painful.

What's more irksome is that you'll need to throttle down your Wi-Fi if you've got a newer high-speed router. That means putting a speed limit on all your other data traffic just so you can listen to music on the S5.

So while I like the idea of the S5, I think I'll stick to the old-fashioned iPod speaker systems for the time being.

Troy Wolverton: twolverton@mercurynews.com.

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