You are hosting a cocktail party and want music—the same music—playing in your living room, your dining room and your outside patio. You want to control your music from a single source but don’t want to run wires all over your house.

The Sonos Multi-Room Music System is exactly what you are looking for.

Sonos is a modular system that creates a wireless network linking multiple speakers with multiple audio sources. With Sonos you can play a CD or an MP3 or stream internet radio and listen on any, or all, of the network’s speakers.

At least you can theoretically. As will all products we test, Spot Cool Stuff started out skeptical of the Sonos system; we were especially dubious of Sonos’ claim that this complicated-sounding speaker network would be easy to set up. Here’s what we found:

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A gadget that supposedly translates dog barks into human speech—is it cool or just plain kooky?

What an incredible year 2009 was for gadgets and technology. Here’s a countdown of our favorite posts from the year past:

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