Sonos Wireless Dock WD100 review

We’re big fans of Sonos at Expert Reviews, as the kit is the easiest, highest-quality way to get proper multi-room music throughout your home. One of the benefits of the system is that it doesn’t need any server software, simply pulling music from network shares.

With this in mind, the launch of the WD100 wireless iPod dock seems a little strange to us. Its basic job is to let you play music from your iPod to any of your Sonos ZonePlayers. Given that you’ve probably got all of your music accessible through your Sonos system anyway, this bit of kit could well be redundant to a lot of people.

Assuming this is a feature that you’ve been crying out for, it’s hard not to be impressed with the WD100. Once you’ve attached it to your Sonos system in the usual way using a Controller, you’re given the option of which ZonePlayer you want to designate as the Autoplay zone.

This basically means that you can plug your iPod into the dock, hit play on a track and the system automatically streams the music to selected ZonePlayer. It works seamlessly and the Sonos wireless network ensures that the sound you get over the system is the same quality as the music stored on your iPod. A volume control built into the side of the WD100 adjust the volume on the Autoplay zone.

As you’d hope and expect, you can use a Controller to pipe music to multiple ZonePlayers, so your iPod can be used to stream music to your entire home. The track information is read from the iPod and displayed on all Controllers in your system, although album artwork can’t be read.

A really clever aspect of the system is that you can use a Controller to access the dock and browser music stored on the iPod. It works brilliantly, although we found on our iPod Touch 4th Generation that once we’d used a controller to browse tracks, we had to redock the iPod in order to browse music using its touchscreen. Pretty much every modern iPod is supported, with the dock also charging iPods, too.

There’s no doubting that the WD100 is a very clever wireless iPod dock that fits brilliantly into an existing Sonos system. But, we can’t help that think it’s a touch pointless for most people. If you’ve got Sonos and don’t have a NAS, our advice is to put the £100 that the WD100 costs towards that instead. If you’ve got an iPod Touch or iPhone, either device is better suited as an extra Sonos Controller, rather than the source of your music.