Been away for a while but am now back and very excited
Went to the Bristol Hi-Fi show last week and had an excellent opportunity to play with a SB Duet for about 20 mins and then had about half an hour on the Sonos stand.
Overall, my oppinion of the SB Duet was that it was not very well demonstrated and not very well marketed. The guy in the Progressive Consumer room seemed to be more fussed about showing off the Transporter, which I was slightly surprised with considering the potential of the SB Duet and the fact that lots of folk are obviously interested in it. In terms of performance, the GUI for the slimserver software looked very nice on the laptop they were using, and they had it networked using a Tranquil T7-HSA Home Server. The remote control itself looked cool (but it did feel a bit cheap and flimsey) and was easy to use (obviously with one hand rather than the two handed Sonos controller), the menu system again looked good, but the response time when queing up tracks and generally sifting through albums etc and then playing them did seem quite slow, which I thought was a bit lame considering I was standing right next to the wireless receiver. There were also lots of Sonos users in there looking with interest.
I then went to the Sonos stand and had a good play, which is really the first proper opportunity I've had. In summary, I felt the Sonos was better; more responsive and easier to use. The negative about Sonos is the design, and I prefer the SB Duet aesthetically, but in terms of usability the Sonos was better - and I prefer the bigger LCD screen. Needless to say I bought one and am now setting it up. I think the SB Duet may well have a lot of potential and possibly more scope for development, but if you want something now that does exactly what you need it to, then Sonos is the boy.
I have now managed to get Media Monkey working - so the FLAC files playback OK, so now just have to tag all the albums. Marvellous. I am never going through the pain of ripping my CD collection again!