Sonos-like functionality?

[thisispoki]

I was pre-Christmas shopping with my partner in John Lewis, when we happened to pass a Sonos stand. She asked whether we have the ability to wifi-sound our house like the Sonos does, and I realised ... I have no idea which of the many media servers available in Amahi provide this functionality!

My HDA is currently running Plex Media Server, AmahiTunes, amahi-dlna (currently disabled, as Plex seems to be a superset of this) and AmpJuke. I haven't noticed any jukebox-style facilities in any of these servers to provide synchronised multi-room audio capabilities.

We have various Android devices (2x Nexus 7, an Archos5, a couple of phones), an iPhone, some MacBook Pros and Windows7 laptops, an XBMC media nettop and a Pure Sensia wifi radio. These would need some client support, I presume, to ensure sychronised playback. It's disconcerting when listening to media than to have audible offset between different outputs, but there's no way that I'm going to spend £300 per room just for audio sync, especially when we own a bunch of media-enabled devices!

Do any of my already-installed media servers have the ability to emulate the functionalities of a Sonos server, or do I need yet another media server? If I need another one, I think I will need to rationalise the number of media servers I'm running, so what others can I then dispense with?

[sgtfoo]

Sonos itself is a simple analog to digital codec. Essentially is rides wifi for it's own codec connectivity. It has a fancy controller app too.

DLNA on the other hand is a streaming protocol for getting devices to talk media between eachother. ... (to be as simple as possible about it)

Think of Sonos as being the solution to wireless audio as though you wired up your house for room-to-room audio matrixing.

I don't know of any home server app that does this.

[thisispoki]

I've tried Logitech Media Server (Squeezebox) for now, and it's not bad at synchronising audio through squeeze clients, although gives a half-a-second difference. The server software has a shocking UI, though, so I'm not sure if I can suggest it as a solution.