As a long-time Sonos lover, I’d be really happy to see a cheaper, fully featured whole home solution. Is Beep the one? Perhaps. It comes with a great pedigree and looks amazing. The brass and silver models they showed me were very well-made and easy to use. The guys are dedicated to their cause and they have some great experience. I think it’s enough, thankfully, to help them solve the age-old riddle of how to get music to play in every room of your manse.

“There’s no good way today to play the Pandoras and Spotifys of the world on your home speakers,” Conrad told The Times. “You’ve got it on your phone, you’ve got it on your laptop, but you don’t have it on your home speakers.”

Beep’s Conrad told me that he eventually wants to work with speaker makers and other consumer electronics companies as well to help them integrate cloud music into their devices. But for now, the small company is focusing on the iconic clickwheel adapter. “This is a great place for us to start,” said Daniel Conrad. And, one could add, it’s also a way for Beep to be at the forefront of standards-based whole-home audio.

Not only does Beep allow someone to stream music directly to a pair of speakers, if there are multiple units connected you can sync them up and play music throughout the house. I saw a live demo of this function: multiple Beep devices synced up and streaming music together. It worked great, but did make me wince a little to think of the technical details making this all happen since Beep connects using standard Wi-Fi rather than some proprietary protocol.

Unlike around 90 percent of wireless speakers, including Jambox, Beep uses Wi-Fi to control speakers. Bluetooth has limited range and, as Arnold explained, is "basically a one-device-to-one-speaker" system that gets interrupted if you get a phone call.