Sonos is going big on spatial audio with the $450 Era 300 speaker

For the past few years, Sonos has focused most of its efforts on two categories: portable speakers, like the Move and Roam; and home theater products like the affordable Ray and fancier Atmos-compatible Arc soundbars. The company’s main pair of music-focused speakers, the One and Five, still sound great, but they’re getting a little long.

That changes today with two new options: the epoch 100 and epoch 300. The $250 Era 100 is a totally redesigned replacement for the One with a number of improvements over its predecessor, while the $450 Era 300 is Sonos’s first speaker capable of playing spatial audio. As with most Sonos speakers, you can use a pair of these in stereo or as surround back speakers in a home theater setup. If you have the Sonos Arc or gen-2 Beam and Sub, adding a pair of Era 300s as rear surrounds gives you a wild 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos experience. (If you’re willing to spend about $2,600 for that setup, anyway.)

The Era 300 looks like any speaker Sonos has released before it, though it still carries the company’s familiar clean design language. Its somewhat unusual flipped hourglass shape is largely functional: it allows the upward-facing tweeter to fire at a slight but specific angle, which the company says will deliver more room-filling reflections for spatial audio. . There are three more tweeters: one in the center and forward-firing, as well as two that point left and right. Finally, a pair of woofers on each side of the speaker provide plenty of bass.

The Era 100, on the other hand, is more obviously a modification of the Sonos One, itself acoustically identical to the Sonos Play:1 that launched in 2013. Put another way, an upgrade was long overdue. The Era 100 features a pair of tweeters for the left and right stereo channels in a single speaker, as well as a woofer that’s 25 percent larger than the One’s. It may not have the spatial audio capabilities of the Era 300 , but it’s still a significant upgrade from its predecessor.

Despite vastly different price points and capabilities, these two speakers have a lot in common. Both feature USB-C ports that allow you to connect a turntable or other audio equipment with an optional line-in adapter. More importantly, both also include Bluetooth, the first time Sonos has put the feature on a non-portable speaker. They also have a redesigned set of touch controls on top: instead of touching either side of the play/pause button to adjust the volume, there’s now a little ridge you can slide your finger along, as well as dedicated buttons to skip forward and back. back. Sonos also included a physical switch to disconnect the microphones. This actually cuts the connection to the microphone for added security, rather than simply muting it via software.

Both the Era 100 and Era 300 can also use those microphones for Trueplay tuning, optimizing audio for where you place your speakers in your living space. Previously, Trueplay required an iOS device; its microphone was used for listening to optimize the sound. If you used Android, you were unfortunately out of luck. But even though Sonos has been putting microphones on its speakers for years, you couldn’t use them for Trueplay. This new feature means that a lot more people will likely take advantage of the feature; That’s good news, because Trueplay does make a big difference.

I had a chance to listen to both speakers in a variety of configurations at a Sonos press event last month and, unsurprisingly, both sounded great, but that was in a carefully staged environment over which Sonos had full control. Obviously, we’ll have to review these speakers to see how they perform in the real world, but I was impressed with the short demo I got. The Era 100 doesn’t sound totally different to the One, but the larger woofer definitely gives it more bass presence. The two tweeters don’t provide true stereo separation, being so close to each other, but they definitely provide more clarity in the high ranges than you hear on the One.

The Era 300, however, sounds a bit different. Sonos showed us its chops for playing standard audio for the first time, and it packs a lot more volume, bass, and presence than the Era 100. Not surprising, considering it costs $200 more and has twice as many drivers. We then heard how the single speaker fared when playing spatial audio tracks. They didn’t sound radically different, but they didn’t seem to be coming from a single point in a room; instead, the audio was more balanced and immersive. Of the few songs we heard, Finneas’s “A Concert Six Months From Now” was the most impressive. His multi-coated focal lenses felt like they were coming at me from multiple angles, but it didn’t feel like a gimmick, it was just a more immersive and intimate presentation.

While it’s easy enough to see how the Era 100 fits into the Sonos lineup, the Era 300’s higher price point and its focus on spatial audio make the speaker a great bet in an untested market. For starters, the only spatial audio service it supports is Amazon Music Unlimited, which means the millions of people who use Apple Music are out of luck. Apple has pushed spatial audio more than anyone in recent years, highlighting it in both its music streaming service and AirPod line of headphones. And with a new full-size HomePod, Apple now has speakers and headphones that can play Atmos mixes. Therefore, it may not be compatible with competing Sonos hardware.

Regardless of the competition, Sonos clearly sees spatial audio as the future of music playback. The company said there’s a lot of interest in the format from artists and producers, saying Era 300 will be the best way to hear the details of spatial audio mixes without the need for a roomful of audio equipment. Of course, there’s not much we can expect from a single speaker, no matter how advanced its driver array. And while Amazon is the only service that Era 300 supports for spatial music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and others will probably start offering spatial audio sooner rather than later – though, again, that doesn’t mean it’ll necessarily work on Sonos hardware.

Of course, the Era 300 is also an extremely capable speaker even when playing stereo mixes. As with the excellent but expensive Sonos Five speaker, the Era 300 will likely be a more specialized product in the company’s lineup. But if the wave of spatial audio is about to peak, it makes sense for Sonos to be ready for it rather than catch up.

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