Sonos speaker smartens up

Sonos One Review: The Best-Sounding Speaker Smartens Up – Jan 22, 2018 – Santa Barbara, California (Techreleased) – Sonos has been held up as the top speaker brand for both everyday listeners and music aficionados, dominating the audio space at the expense of competitors who just couldn’t quite hit the sweet spot.

Sonos speaker smartens up

Sonos released the Sonos One late last year. I’ve been using it for over a month now and it’s truly a brilliant speaker, even against other multi-room sets I’ve tried out. The new Sonos comes headlined with Alexa integration, but there is no doubt other speakers are catching up.

At a more expensive £199, do the new smarts for Sonos do enough keep its place as the king of home speakers?

Design and features

The new Sonos One hasn’t changed much in looks since the Sonos Play:1. With Sonos you get a sleek all black or white design, a smart cylindrical design just over six inches tall.

The only cable is the power cable. This means you can’t link up to a 3.5mm cable. It also doesn’t work with Bluetooth. These limitations have been major gripes among some Sonos users and show no signs of changing on current models.

Set up

The initial set up of your Sonos speaker is designed to be painless for most smartphone natives. Once plugged in, download the Sonos app. You’ll need to create an account and pair your smartphone with your new Sonos over your Wi-Fi network.

From here you will probably want to enable Alexa, a big new part of the Sonos ecosystem. To do this you will have to download the Alexa app and enable your Sonos through it. I’ve never been much of a smart speaker lover, but I have found myself using Alexa on the Sonos for listening to the news, turning the volume up or down when my hands are tied down cooking or making breakfast.

Multi-room starter

Sonos is known for its multi-room and surround sound speaker offering and the Sonos One adds to that system. You can link up multiple Sonos speakers to the Sonos One from its app. These can then be named for your “living room” or “bedroom” and Alexa can pick up these signals – such as “play BBC Radio 2 in the bedroom”.

Sonos app

A major part of Sonos’ appeal is its simple app and multi-room set up. Adding new speakers and assigning them rooms is a doddle with Sonos, meaning you can build up a multi-room setting with speakers set to the living room or bedroom.

One brilliant element of Sonos is that you can access music from other services if users are connected. This means I can play Apple Music stored on my flatmate’s iPhone straight to the Sonos via my Android device.

Smart speaker and Alexa

Integrating Alexa into Sonos was a major step forward for the speaker company and, for me, it actually works rather well. I’ve never been a great lover of the smart speaker ecosystem, but by deploying it on a genuinely high-end speaker I feel you are getting the best of both worlds. A powerful speaker and the centre of your smart home.

Sonos has also said it is adding integration for Apple’s AirPlay and Google Assistant. These will be much needed additions, to make the Sonos One seem like more than just an Amazon peripheral. And if it keeps good promise you should be able to link your Sonos to other Google devices and the Google Home app.

Sound quality

All this before I even get to sound quality – which is really why you would buy a Sonos. The company has for several years made some of the best-sounding small and entry-level speaker systems you can buy and the Sonos One is no exception.

Price and verdict

At under £200, the Sonos is priced just below premium speakers, but it is currently the most expensive smart speaker you can buy in the UK, when you consider the new Amazon Echo is £89 and the Google Home £129. That said, it is leagues ahead in terms of sound quality, as both these speakers emphasise their virtual assistant qualities over being a speaker.