Sonos reinvents its speakers for the future, with some limitations

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This was published 4 months ago

Sonos reinvents its speakers for the future, with some limitations

By Tim Biggs

Sonos’ new line of Era Wi-Fi speakers is a reminder of why the company is still a leader in multiroom audio despite a decade of increasing competition from tech giants in the space. But it also demonstrates how keeping up has become a lot more complicated.

The $400 Era 100 is a compact bookshelf unit clearly designed to replace the popular Sonos One, and it’s better in every way. A new internal design provides proper stereo, compared to the mono mix of the One, with the same detailed and complex sound now featuring decent separation and notably deeper bass.

The Sonos Era 100 looks like the Sonos One, but it’s been rebuilt from the ground up.

The Sonos Era 100 looks like the Sonos One, but it’s been rebuilt from the ground up.

Meanwhile, the $750 Era 300 comes in a larger and unconventionally shaped cabinet, designed to shoot music forward, upwards and to either side to better support spatial audio mixes. It sounds phenomenal when playing a native Dolby Atmos track or a thoughtfully done remaster, with instruments and vocals able to occupy specific spaces around the speaker.

Both devices also have some nice upgrades over prior Sonos gear. Bluetooth capabilities are included as a fallback for when a Wi-Fi connection isn’t practical or possible, and a sold-separately adapter lets you connect external players like a turntable via a 3.5mm cable. Both are designed for use with voice assistants, but there’s a mute button at the top with an LED to show when the speaker is listening, as well as a hardware switch at the back that completely disables the mic.

Yet while these are both excellent premium Wi-Fi speakers, Sonos’ ongoing attempts to create a privacy-preserving and service-agnostic music ecosystem mean having to dodge roadblocks that make these speakers frustratingly idiosyncratic in certain circumstances.

The Sonos Era 300 is a big speaker with an unusual pinched design.

The Sonos Era 300 is a big speaker with an unusual pinched design.

Most glaringly, compatibility with Google Assistant has been removed, meaning Era speakers won’t be able to access your audio accounts or control your smart home devices if that’s the voice service you’re set up to use. Google’s smart home ecosystem can still see the Era devices, so you could link them up with Assistant-enabled devices (like a Nest Mini, or an older Sonos), but functionality with Google’s Home app or smart displays is limited, and some services like Google Play Books won’t work on the new speakers at all.

A Sonos spokesperson said Google had changed the technical requirements for Google Assistant, and that adding support would be a heavy engineering lift.

“We remain hopeful that Google Assistant will be part of this ecosystem one day,” they said.

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The Eras work well enough with Amazon’s Alexa ecosystem, but if you’re not interested in smart home compatibility you could try Sonos’ own voice assistant, which promises to preserve your privacy and is for some reason voiced by actor Giancarlo Esposito. It lets you choose an artist, album song, radio station or genre, change volume or even movie music to another room, although I did miss other smart speaker basics like setting timers or checking the weather.

The bigger issue with Sonos Voice Control is that it currently supports Apple Music and Amazon Music but not Spotify, which is likely to be a deal-breaker for many. The Sonos spokesperson did not shed any light on this omission.

Either new speaker can connect to external players via a 3.5mm cable, or act as a stereo pair if you buy two.

Either new speaker can connect to external players via a 3.5mm cable, or act as a stereo pair if you buy two.

So, if you don’t care about voice control, or mostly rely on Amazon or Apple for music, The Era 100 is a brilliant smart speaker and a good upgrade over the old Sonos One. But what about the Era 300?

The addition of spatial audio support is exciting, but it also brings some caveats and quirks of its own. With a good Dolby Atmos track, I think it outshines Apple’s HomePod and even some more expensive soundbar-based setups, but depending on your musical tastes a good Dolby Atmos track isn’t always easy to find.

Streaming services are littered with frankly poor spatial audio mixes, which widen and heighten the soundstage for no reason or mix instruments incoherently. While hearing a favourite song in an Atmos mix can be a fantastic experience — Pearl Jam’s entire Ten album sounds incredible — it can also be massively disappointing. For example Blink-182’s What’s My Age Again? sounds like you’re in a middle-floor apartment and each instrument is located in a different far-flung area of the complex.

Listening to spatial audio also means you’re tied to the Sonos app, as casting from Amazon Music or AirPlaying from Apple only gets you stereo. The Sonos app is generally fine, but for this particular use it feels unsuited; there are no badges or other indicators of which tracks feature Atmos and which do not, meaning you generally have to find what you want in the streaming service’s own app, and then try to find it again in Sonos’.

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Worst of all, the Era 300 sounds dull when playing a regular old stereo mix, possibly because of its unique speaker layout. Certainly not bad, just flat, especially compared to dedicated stereo machines like the Sonos 5 or the discontinued Google Home Max.

None of the issues I’ve had with these new speakers are insurmountable, and in fact I’d be surprised if Sonos hadn’t addressed them all through software updates within a year. They remain, characteristically, stable and great-sounding Wi-Fi speakers that work on their own or as part of a whole-house setup.

But at a time when Google, Amazon and Apple are all trying to lock users into product ecosystems by tying their hardware and software closely together, Sonos’ pitch of an agnostic platform that works with everything is an important one, which it hasn’t quite realised just yet.

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