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Sonos streams music, wirelessly - now in the UK. And "simultaneously" into all rooms? - how?

The Sonos Digital Music System - described by Wall Street Journal as the "Lexus of the category" in media streaming for the home - is now available in Europe and the UK

It just garnered yet another rave review from Ross Rubin in his Engadget column, Switched On. And the one thing they don't explain, any of these ravers, is: how does it do it simultaneously?

Here's the problem. If you use any sort of packet-based wireless, then the music is broken up into packets, transmitted, and then re-assembled into a stream at the other end. If any packet gets lost, you can sort it one of two ways. Either you can ask for the packet again (that's how Ethernet works) or you can transmit the packet several times (that's how digital packet radios work) and either way, you end up having a small delay between the moment the music is digitised, and the moment it is heard coming out the speaker.

If you play music over the Internet, the delay can be anything from almost nothing to several seconds. And each receiver will have its own delay. So, if you have one speaker in the kitchen and another in the sitting room, they can be horribly out of synch.

So, how does the Sonos system do it? "It uses a mesh network," says Rubin. "It's a WiFi network," says the WSJ's Walter Mossberg, adding that "you can group several ZonePlayers to receive the same music simultaneously." How?

Nobody can explain. Ah well.