No, after all you don’t purchase a speaker to have a look at it. But ought to your gaze fall upon your speaker when you’re having fun with its sound, ideally the sight of it shouldn’t make you wince. So it’s simply as properly that Era 300, the newest Sonos wireless speaker and the corporate’s first foray into spatial audio (apart from its Dolby Atmos–enabled soundbars, after all), is such a powerful and achieved performer—its bodily look is straightforward to miss. Unless you one way or the other discover it in your sight view unexpectedly, anyhow, during which case it by no means ceases to be startling.

It’s truthful to say Sonos’ ubiquity has, till now, been established as a lot on its completely painless possession expertise as on the sound its merchandise truly make. “Reasonably competitive” sound high quality is a lot ok for a lot of listeners if it’s accompanied by class-leading ergonomics, an impeccable management app, and the only, most simple multi-room audio ecosystem round. 

With Era 300, although—and with the smaller, extra inexpensive Era 100 stereo speaker that launched on the identical time—Sonos has retained all its established virtues and added audio efficiency that’s a match for any price-comparable, size-adjacent different. And within the case of the Era 300, spatial audio efficiency besides.    

Homepod Humbling

Spatial audio (which principally means “more than two channels,” and is sort of all the time based mostly on Dolby’s Atmos format) has been gaining important traction outdoors its unique house within the cinema, thanks in no small half to evangelical help from the likes of Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, and Tidal music streaming companies. 

Sonos doesn’t help Tidal’s catalog of Dolby Atmos content material (boo!), but it surely does not less than help Amazon’s and Apple’s spatial audio choices. And although Apple, due to its Homepod sensible speaker, is a full-service supplier of spatial audio music, it’s secure to say that in the case of the {hardware}, the Sonos Era 300 wipes the ground with the Apple Homepod. Yes, it’s dearer—but it surely’s price it, after which some.  

The Era 300 makes use of six speaker drivers to create an impression of immersive, enveloping sound. There are 4 tweeters: one going through ahead, one left, one proper, and one loaded right into a horn and firing upward to mirror sound from the ceiling and create a sensation of sonic top. Then a few mid/bass drivers are angled out to the left and the appropriate to generate some width (and provide separation when the speaker is taking part in stereo content material). Each driver will get a person block of Class D amplification—this being Sonos, although, the quantity of energy that’s accessible is privileged info.

Paragraph Four now ends: “And the Era 300 represents, among other things, the end of an era for Sonos. The company used to have the clearest, most logical naming convention for its speakers—but now we’re in the Era era, where a pecking order is much less straightforward to discern.”

On the highest of the cupboard—so unhappily angular and wonkily proportioned that my youngest daughter bodily recoiled on the sight of it—there are a number of bodily controls. Touch-surfaces cowl play/pause, skip ahead/backward, and voice-assistant interplay (the Era 300 is appropriate with Amazon Alexa and Sonos Voice Control), and there’s an indented (and really properly carried out) quantity slider. Aside from a model brand and a defeatable tell-tale LED, the entrance of the cupboard is featureless. The backside has a few little rubber toes and fixings for the cost-option stand. And on the rear, there’s a socket for mains energy, a swap to kill the mics, a USB-C formed auxiliary enter (unforgivably, the bespoke line-in adapter to be used with this enter is a price possibility, too) and a button for Bluetooth pairing.

Sonos Sees the Blue Light

Oh sure, Bluetooth. After who is aware of what number of years of dismissing Bluetooth as an inferior know-how match just for its moveable audio system, Sonos has undergone a Damascene conversion. So along with utilizing its exemplary management app, into which any variety of streaming companies might be built-in, it’s attainable to stream to the Era 300 utilizing Bluetooth 5.0 with bog-standard SBC and AAC codec compatibility. Apple AirPlay 2 can be accessible, as is streaming through Wi-Fi—Wi-Fi 6 is supported.

As properly as grouping all of your most popular streaming companies collectively, the app gives some EQ adjustment and the newest model of Sonos’ admirable Trueplay room calibration software program. Newly accessible for Android (though in considerably truncated type) in addition to iOS, Trueplay doesn’t take lengthy and proves brilliantly efficient at tuning Era 300 to your particular setting. 

The app additionally gives multi-room and multi-channel prospects (you probably have a few Era 300, they’ll act as rear audio system in a house cinema system together with, say, the Sonos Arc Dolby Atmos soundbar). The app stays the paradigm, the gold customary … and it makes Sonos possession appear a profoundly smart possibility no matter some other issues.