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Sonos is a leading American audio technology company that is best known for pioneering wireless multi-room audio systems, which make it easy for listeners to stream music and other content throughout their homes. The company continues to innovate, creating wireless speakers, home theatre systems, headphones, architectural components, and integrated home audio solutions that revolutionize how people listen and connect to sound.

Academy Award-winning film sound engineer Chris Jenkins spends his days crafting sonic landscapes for movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Fifth Element. The studio headphones may come off by the time he gets home, but the listening is just getting started.

Despite its name, the motion picture would be nothing without the other half of its creative equation: Sound. Behind every booming explosion, whispered line of dialogue, and iconic score is a team of sound engineers helping to orchestrate the cinematic experience. Few do so as masterfully as Chris Jenkins.

As a film sound re-recording engineer, Jenkins uses his discerning ear to propel stories off of screens and immerse audiences in the worlds of such films as 

. In his nearly 40 years of experience, he’s amassed over 180 mixing credits and won three Academy Awards.

When he’s not helping to craft multi-sensory storytelling experiences for movie theaters, Jenkins is busy doing his part to make sure movies and music sound amazing at home as well. As a member of the Sonos Soundboard—an advisory panel of entertainment industry sound creators enlisted by Sonos–Jenkins works closely with the company’s engineers and product team, offering his professional feedback on the sound of speakers like the new Sonos Beam as they’re being developed. Through a series of hands-on listening sessions, creative advisors like Jenkins have a simple aim: To help Sonos ensure that the original emotion and sonic clarity of films, music, and other content are retained as this work makes its way from the studio mixing board to the living room.

Because he spends all day working with sound, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if he wanted to come home to complete silence, but Jenkins’s passion spans both his professional and personal lives. We visited him at his home on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Jeanne, and two dogs, Daisy and Moose, to talk about sound and learn how he listens off the clock.

How do you transition from listening at work to listening at home? What role does sound play here as opposed to in the studio?

We always have music on here. If I work late in the studio, sometimes a quiet drive home is necessary just to help me reset, but that quiet time makes the listening experience here at home even better.

We live in this beautiful canyon. I love the sounds of nature and how still it can be sometimes, but great music is just a requirement for home. Otherwise, it feels naked in a way. I grew up in a house with music, so it’s always been a rich part of my life, including in my work on movies.

Living out here must be great for decompressing from work and finding inspiration.

I listen to the way things sound out here, and sound comes from everywhere. Nature is everywhere sonically. We have an incredible gift with our ears and our minds to be able to process that. So I keep listening to music and thinking about ways to improve that experience, whether it’s a singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar or Luciano Pavarotti with an 80-piece orchestra. There should be no difference in the quality of listening.

"We have an incredible gift with our ears and minds. I keep listening to music and thinking about ways to improve that experience."

A Play: 5 fills the Jenkins' living room with deep rich sound.

You probably wear headphones a lot at work. How does that compare to listening out loud?

I find them incredibly intrusive. I was a second engineer for many years for a lot of great mixers, so I had to wear headphones every day, and I hated them. They’re not comfortable. It’s not a natural way for me to listen to music. Headphones today are intended to shut the rest of the world away. They isolate people, so they have their experience with their phone or tablet and don’t have to engage with other people. When I listen to music or watch movies, I want it to be a shared experience.

My goal is to get people to take off the headphones. There’s nothing greater than watching a room full of people who respond positively to listening to the same thing. There’s so much joy in the room from that shared experience. Even with total strangers.

But headphones are a reality. A lot of artists I’ve worked with have just handed me a pair of earbuds and said, “Make it sound good on these.” People you think would be huge sound fanatics know that we live in the real world. We have to make something sound great for earbuds and 7.1 systems alike.

When you’re mixing, most of the time you’re focused on the listening experience in the cinema. How do you make sure people get that kind of listening experience at home?

We want people to have that same experience. More and more, shows that we work on and soundtracks that we create have much more sophisticated immersive audio. As the technology keeps advancing, people are closer to having that kind of experience without needing a bunch of huge speakers at home. The technology we have now makes it easier to reproduce those soundtracks and make immersive audio so much more accessible.

The Jenkins enjoy some music in the kitchen.

It was actually my wife! We have this incredible home that we’ve worked really hard on. Every little piece of wood and all the furniture is an important part of our style and who we are as people. We didn’t want to cut holes in walls or run cables and wires and have all this clunky gear around. That’s a part of my world at the studio, but we don’t want to make it part of our home. We bumped up against that time and time again with different gear and different ways of playing back music and movies at home.

My wife has a super keen eye for detail and design. When I first brought Playbase home to test, she didn’t say anything about it at first. I put it on and after about an hour, she came in and said, “What is that underneath the TV?” It sounded great, but for us, the design aesthetic was equally important.

Not everybody is used to having sound gear in their home, and the technology can’t interfere with your ability to enjoy it. And now with voice control, it’s easier for kids to use.

You seem to have a speaker in every room, even the bathrooms.

It’s amazing to have a single mono speaker that can produce such great sounding music in a place you don’t really expect. The living room is the most experiential. We take it for granted now that things are supposed to sound great because our TVs don’t produce good sound. I love being able to stream music from my office and listen off the Playbase in the living room. When we have guests over, we can have every speaker on and put the house in party mode and have that experience in as many places as possible.

"When I listen to music or watch movies, I want it to be a shared experience. My goal is to get people to take off the headphones."

Oh, everything. At any time I could be listening to country, bluegrass, classical, Hans Zimmer, or Junkie XL. You should see what my playlists look like. My wife loves Willie Nelson, so we’ll listen to Willie Nelson on our Sonos One in the kitchen while cooking. There’s always something on in any given room. Lately, it’s a lot of The Beatles, Jackson Brown, and Bruno Mars.

We did a movie with Father John Misty this year. It was part of the album that came out. We listen to everything. Music plays a huge part in our life.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Chris Jenkins: How an Acclaimed Hollywood Sound Creator Listens at Home

Guest Writer

For generations of music lovers, vinyl remains the ultimate audiophile format. From the nostalgia-inducing crackle of the needle hitting the groove, to its warm analogue sound and the tactile pleasure of a beautiful 12” gatefold sleeve, the ritual of putting a record on a turntable and letting it carry you away retains a charm and romance all its own.

Nearly a century since its introduction, the beloved vinyl record still remains in fine health. In 2022, record sales in the US saw their 

Clearly, our love for vinyl isn’t going away anytime soon, even as the immediacy and choice of streaming has revolutionized how we listen to music.

But why should we have to choose one format over the other? With Sonos, not only can you access hundreds of music streaming services, but you can also seamlessly integrate a turntable into your home sound system.

If you’re looking to make the most of your record collection, then this quick guide will help you connect a turntable to your Sonos system in minutes so you can start enjoying the rich, unmistakable sound of your favourite vinyl all around your home.

There are a number of ways to do this. First, you’ll need one of the following Sonos products:

Of course, you’ll also need a turntable, like the 

. We recommend that one because it has a phono pre-amp built in. If your turntable doesn’t have a phono pre-amp (most of them don’t), you’ll need to get one for the Sonos vinyl experience to work best. You can learn more about this on our 

Step 1:

Connect your turntable to your Sonos system

Our most advanced all-in-one speakers come with a direct line-in port for easily connecting your external audio devices to your Sonos system using the 

Plug the Line-In Adapter into the USB-C input on the back of your speaker, and use a standard stereo RCA to 3.5mm cable to connect to your turntable. You can also connect to Era 300 and Era 100 via Bluetooth® (more on that later).

A black Sonos Era 100 and a black Sonos Era 300 with their corresponding line-in adapters

Plug your turntable directly into our biggest speaker using the line-in port on the back.

Plug the single end of an RCA Y-audio cable into the line-in port of Five/Play:5 and attach the split cable to the corresponding colours of the L/R audio outputs on the back of your turntable.

If you have a turntable and third-party speakers but no amplifier, you can connect them to the Sonos system directly using Sonos Amp.

Just take the stereo RCA audio cable that comes with your Amp: plug one pair of white and red connectors into the left and right audio outputs of your turntable or pre-amp, and the other pair into the left and right audio inputs on the back of your Sonos Amp.

Sonos Port is perfect if you already have an amplifier and a set of third-party speakers. Port lets you use your amplified audio equipment to bring the sound of your vinyl collection into your multi-room Sonos system.

Just take the audio cable that comes with your Port. Plug one end into your turntable and the other end into the corresponding colours of the L/R inputs at the back of your Port.

Open the Sonos app on your phone or tablet. Go to the 

, and then choose the Line-in source. You can even 

 so your Sonos system knows it’s time to switch into vinyl mode as soon as the needle drops.

Step 2:

Switch the audio source on your Sonos app to Line-in

If you have multiple Sonos devices set up in different rooms, you can group them together using the 

 tab in the Sonos app, and spread the sound of your favourite vinyl throughout your home.

Step 3:

Add extra speakers and rooms

A Sonos user sitting in a chair in their living room controlling a white Sonos Era 300 from their phone

, include not only a built-in phono pre-amp but also Bluetooth® connection, which means you can send audio to Bluetooth-capable Sonos speakers without the need for a wired connection.

Once you’ve set up your Sonos speakers over WiFi, then you’ll need to pair them via Bluetooth® to your turntable. Press and hold the Bluetooth® button located on the back of the speaker. When you hear a chime and the status light flashes blue, this indicates that your speaker is ready to be paired. From there, you can connect to your speaker from your device's Bluetooth® settings.

Bonus:

Connect a turntable via Bluetooth®

Need help setting up Sonos to play vinyl? Our community site is loaded with answers to your most pressing questions.

.
Read other discussions about specific issues 

A Sonos user listening to his records with a turntable through a pair of black Sonos Era 100 speakers

How to Listen to Vinyl With Sonos

Photography by: Danny Clinch

Philip Glass opens his own door. He ushers me into the front room of his East Village brownstone — busy, unkempt and fully lived-in — to drop my coat off and wait a minute. I am, it seems, early, and Glass is still busy with his previous task. As I peel layers that protected me from a frosty New York afternoon, Glass shuffles into the next room over — the music room, it turns out — and gets back to quietly, intently banging out single notes on a piano. Let me tell you, there is no feeling like the feeling you get when you realize that you have accidentally interrupted Philip Glass — among the most influential American composers of the last century, one of the masters of contemporary classical music “with repetitive structures” (he shies away from the term “minimalist”), recipient of countless arts awards and lifetime-achievement medals — from working on music.

Philip Glass' shelf of sheet music and a Play:3.

Glass has lived in this house since 1984, and that crowded room — grand piano, synthesizer, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves filling up much of its capacity, sheet music, art and Eastern artifacts on every surface — is where he does his composing. It is, in fact, the room where he wrote most of Symphony No. 11, which premiered at Carnegie Hall on January 31st, which also happened to be Glass’s 80th birthday, the overlapping hallmarks far from a coincidence.

“The whole thing was a set-up,” Glass says through a smirk that rarely disappears during our conversation, a couple of weeks after the event. “The people who work for me commissioned it to be done on my birthday which was going to take place at Carnegie Hall.” (He assumes a voice of faux-incredulity: “No pressure. ’Oh, I see, this is my party and I have to do the work?’”) Glass says he temporarily fretted the stressful circumstances — rewriting the symphony’s last 11 pages after the first rehearsal because “I realized that the ending was not definitive enough” — but estimates that the debut, performed by the Bruckner Orchestra Linz, under the direction of its chief conductor (and longtime Glass collaborator), Dennis Russell Davies, went over pretty well. “The reception seemed fairly authentic. People really did like it. They weren’t just applauding because I was 80, like you might see with [older] people out running in the park, and people go ‘Yay’ only because they can still do it.”

“My days of listening were connected to my father’s record store, where I began working when I was 12. My first job in the music world was advising people what records they should buy, so I had to know all the records in the store.”

A moment later, referencing his own feelings in the symphony’s aftermath, Glass casually declares that “Writing it and hearing it is not exactly the same.” In a nutshell, this dichotomy is at the center of our discussion: how, for a composer, especially one as long-established as Glass, the acts of conceiving and listening are both intertwined and separate, and how such actions relate to one another when writing a massive piece such as the Eleventh.

For Glass, some notions of these concepts arrived early. Though he began attending Baltimore’s prestigious Peabody music school at the age of eight, he’s certain that “My days of listening were connected to my father’s record store, where I began working when I was 12. My first job in the music world was advising people what records they should buy, so I had to know all the records in the store. They would come in and say, ‘Well, I want to buy Beethoven’s Third Symphony’ and I would say, ‘Do you like it fast or do you like it slow? If you like it slow, you can get Bruno Walter’s. If you like it fast, we can get you Toscanini. If you want an American version, we got Leonard Bernstein’s.’ I had to listen professionally, you might say.”

Glass’s listening also needed to be mindful of the budding audiophile market. “We were aware of which were the good sounding records and which were not, but the people who were nuts about sound they didn’t care about the content. We’d say, ‘We just got a new marching-band record, you won’t believe how the brass sounds.’ We were selling music.”

As Glass moved through his schooling and creative evolution — at the University of Chicago and at New York’s Julliard School of Music; then in Paris, studying with the famous composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and 

notating the Indian music of Ravi Shankar

; then back to New York, where in 1967 he founded the Philip Glass Ensemble for the performance of his own budding compositions — he says, “I hardly listened at all.”

Glass’ fluency reading music and imagining it off the page accelerated his understanding of compositions and its forms. “I would pretend to be following lectures and actually I was reading a Beethoven quartet,” he says of racing the pedagogues and winning “because I could read faster.” Yet he also recognized the flaws in conceptualizing composed sound without actually listening back to it. “Are we hearing it accurately? Are we writing down what we want to hear?” Glass asks. In his mind, the greatest challenge of imagined accuracy is “hearing the music in real-time. It’s very hard to do. So you end up playing it on the piano,” which, if the piece is symphonic, is not the music’s true representation either. The relationship between linear time and writing is a life-long conundrum. “I think these are challenges for composers at any point in their life. You don’t get particularly better — you may learn certain tricks, but that’s it.”

Technology has certainly changed his landscape. It is interesting to hear Glass — who recently had a Sonos system set up throughout his house — discuss digital tools as “assets” in his process. Including, in the writing of the new symphony.

“I was working with Dennis,” he recounts of the lead-up to the Carnegie Hall premiere. “We were going over some transitions, and he had the rehearsals on a digital recorder. I had it put on Dropbox, pulled up the rehearsal on my phone, so we listened to it together, and would say, ‘well maybe we can cut a couple of measures here.’ Now in my music room, I tend to listen to playback of things, the rehearsal tapes. That became very useful.”

Aging has done its share to affect how Glass’ hears — “Perceptual faculties become degraded biologically,” he says, matter of factly. “Look I’m 80, what else is going to happen?” – but also, more importantly, what he chooses to hear.

“Mostly, I listen occupationally. Of course it’s fun to listen, but I don’t listen for fun. When I listen to Anoushka Shankar’s new album, for instance, I am more listening to see if she’s got a good band, if they’re playing together, would Ravi be happy when he heard it. Or, if I hear an orchestra, I want to hear the conductor, I want to hear how they sound.” The smirk rises to the fore once more. “I have all kinds of sinister agendas for listening tucked away.”

Glass says that, beyond music, he has other reasons to love his Sonos set-up. “I find that in my bedroom, I listen to the news — the stations are listed and they don’t drift. But listening for pleasure…” His voice trails away. “My ideal place is some place where they don’t play music. I found for example, that Chinese restaurants in New York don’t have music, have you noticed that?”

Chris Jenkins: How an Acclaimed Hollywood Sound Creator Listens at Home

How to Listen to Vinyl With Sonos

Philip Glass on Listening (and Composing) at 80

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Chris Jenkins: How an Acclaimed Hollywood Sound Creator Listens at Home

How to Listen to Vinyl With Sonos

.css-1q93gq8{color:#FFFFFF;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;}Philip Glass on Listening (and Composing) at 80

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Philip Glass on Listening (and Composing) at 80