Sonos Era 100 SL: two-minute review

The Sonos Era 100 SL is a wireless speaker that features nearly all the strengths of 2023’s original Sonos Era 100, but at a cheaper price. While it isn't a surprise that there have been some trade-offs to get that cost down, I doubt they'll be a dealbreaker for most people.

Sonically speaking, there aren’t many sacrifices at all. In the mid-range, the Era 100 SL is capable of impressive detail. When I played I Want You by Moloko, I was impressed by how well its funky guitar noises, strings and acidy synth line cut through the mix, without interfering with the wonderfully polished vocals.

However, I found the high end a little more cluttered on occasion: listening to The Gloaming by Radiohead, I did feel that the rhythmic pulsing static was a bit too forward, treading on the toes of the granular synth. It sounds great for the price, but you do get a finer presentation if you pay more.

Bass was always the original Era 100’s achilles heel. It often tipped into being brash, slightly swamping the rest of the mix. When I played Six Days (Machinedrum remix) by DJ Shadow on the SL, the low-end appeared slightly more dynamic when compared to the original Era 100, leading me to wonder if a software tweak to rein in bass was responsible, or whether it's part of the re-engineering inside that Sonos CEO Tom Conrad told us the company had done, to hit the lower price.

Either way, it still isn't great with sub, though: it falls away just when it hits the drop, that swelling bassline feeling nowhere near as substantial as it sounds on the best wireless speakers that are pricier.

Generally, though, the SL offers a spacious presentation, especially when fed high-quality recordings. Playing Wasting My Young Years by London Grammar from Tidal’s hi-res tier, I was struck by the airiness of the mix, which allowed the silvery vocals to stand apart from the piano and drums.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t quite extend to the speaker’s stereo field — as with its predecessor, I found it hard to differentiate a clear stereo separation unless I was very close. As such, you’re unlikely to get a clear sense of left and right from halfway across the room — but then, at this price, you could actually buy two happily.

So the Era 100 SL is as easy on the ear as its predecessor, albeit with some of the same drawbacks. But how does it look?

Given it’s largely decked out in the same getup as the Era 100, there really are few surprises here. It’s the same dimensions and has the same wraparound grille and matte-plastic top surface. The touch-capacitive control scheme is also largely identical — with the voice control button being the only real omission, because Sonos removed that feature. Otherwise, Sonos has stuck with what works for the SL, and I’d say that was the right instinct.

In fact, probably the only area where the SL makes a real departure from its namesake is in its feature set. Connectivity remains solid, offering Wi-Fi 6, AirPlay 2 and a whole host of built-in streaming services — although the only wired input you’ll get is if you splash extra cash on its USB-C to 3.5mm analog converter. EQ options are identical to those on the Era 100, offering just the option to boost or duck bass or treble.

But there are two significant differences. First off, as I alluded to above, voice control has been stripped out of the SL. This feels like a reasonable sacrifice to lower that price — and I’d rather that than weaker sound quality.

Slightly more an issue for me is the omission of Trueplay room correction for Android users (which is a consequence of dropping the microphones, since the Android solution relies on them). Those with an iPhone can still tailor the SL’s sound to their space using their device to track calibration sound as they walk around the room. Given how well this feature polishes its sound, it is a shame that you'll miss out if you're on an Android device.

Despite this though, the Sonos Era 100 SL is well worth it. You get the quality sound plus classic design of Sonos’s pricier speaker, for the reduced price of $189 / £169 / AU$289. That’s a pretty great bargain and ameliorates our biggest hesitation with its pricier predecessor. Yes, it's a shame that Android users miss out on a great feature but it's still the best home speaker you'll get for this price.

Sonos Era 100 SL review: specs

Sonos Era 100 SL review: price & availability

• Launched on March 31, 2026
• Costs $189 / £169 / AU$289
• Available in black or white

Having launched on March 31, 2026, the Sonos Era 100 SL is available now, at a cheaper price than its predecessor, the Era 100.

The SL comes in at $189 / £169 / AU$289, compared to the Era 100’s now-reduced price of $219 / £199 / AU$319. While not a huge gulf, it still amounts to a decent saving, especially given the near-identical specs.

And, as is usually the case with Sonos gear, for that price you have the option to pick up the speaker in white or black.

Sonos Era 100 SL review: features

• Good connectivity options and streaming service support
• Room correction only compatible with iPhone
• No voice control of any kind

So how does the Sonos Era 100 SL’s featureset differ from its spendier stablemate? Well, on paper, it’s very similar to the Era 100, with only a couple of key differences.

Let’s start with its drivers. The SL offers the same setup as as the Era 100, with a mid-woofer to handle both mid-range frequencies and bass, while two angled tweeters take care of the treble and help form its stereo field. These are all driven by the speaker’s three class D amplifiers, meaning you get decent volume and low-end heft.

Setting up Sonos products has always been a breeze, and the Era 100 SL is no exception. Simply plug it in, download the Sonos app, and select the system you want to add it to. Tap on your speaker when it appears, and it will play an audio pin to connect it to your system. After installing an update via the app, I was good to go.

The last (optional) step is to set up the SL’s Trueplay room-calibration tuning, which is designed to get you the best possible sound from the speaker, and that works much the same as it did on the Era 100.

Essentially, you point your iPhone’s mic toward the speaker, then walk around the room while whirling it around in slow circles with one arm, like a lopsided propeller.

Following calibration, the sound definitely seemed free of obvious acoustic issues — there wasn’t any boom back from the bass, nor any unfortunate reverberations off the surfaces or walls — so Sonos’ room correction seems as effective as ever.

Unfortunately, there’s a pretty major caveat here: unlike on the Era 100, the SL’s Trueplay tuning is only compatible with iOS. And that is a real shame, given it does help unlock the SL's best sound. However, it still offers great performance for Android users, even if the lack of Trueplay does add an asterisk there.

Trueplay for Android users isn’t the only feature removed to help reduce the SL’s price. The voice control offered by the full Era 100 has been omitted, too, saving you the price of the mic module and controls. Personally, it takes me far longer to horsewhip my thoughts into a spoken command than it does to simply pull out my phone, so I’m not all that bothered about the lack of voice assistant. But if you are, you’ll probably prefer the Era 100.

While I’ve mentioned how much I rate the Era 100 SL’s room-correction tech, I can’t really say the same for its EQ options. The Sonos app only offers the ability to boost or duck the treble or bass by up to 10 levels. While I do think Sonos’s speakers sound a lot better than some wireless speakers out of the box, plenty of rivals now offer nine-band or even parametric EQ — which makes the SL’s bass and treble sliders feel like old hat.

As far as connectivity options are concerned, the Era 100 SL offers a decent range. Using Wi-Fi 6, you can stream tunes directly from your devices using AirPlay 2, or from the speaker using built-in apps including Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Soundcloud, Spotify, Tidal and a whole heap more. Meanwhile, Bluetooth 5.3 will allow you to hook up all your non-Apple devices, although there’s no support for higher-res formats such as aptX HD.

Sadly, the Era 100 SL is less well equipped when it comes to physical connections. Its USB-C port is only for plugging in adapters, so banish any thoughts of hooking up wired digital audio. So while it does allow you the option for plugging in either a 3.5mm jack for analog audio or an Ethernet cable, each of these requires you to buy a separate adapter. It’s a world away from the wealth of ports that a speaker such as the Bluesound Pulse Flex offers.

• Features score: 4 / 5

Sonos Era 100 SL review: sound quality

• Impressive detail
• Rich mids, and bass feels slightly less muddy
• Relatively weak stereo field

My big worry when preparing to test the Sonos Era 100 SL was that in trying to hit the cheaper price point, there would have been a negative impact on the quality of its sound. Fortunately, I’m pleased to reveal this isn't the case — the Era 100 SL happily holds its own against its predecessor and, in some areas, I actually wonder if software tweaks have reined in some of the Era 100’s worst impulses.

First, let’s start with the mid-range. When listening to Venera by George Fitzgerald, I was impressed with how much presence and detail the SL could squeeze out of the track’s vocal, pad washes and synth lines, making them sound like a richly textured whole. Admittedly, some of the percussion felt a little less punchy than I’m used to, but that was more than made up for by how well it balanced the saturated, arpeggiated synth and organic organic woodwind sounds that close out the track.

The original Era 100 came unstuck mainly in the bass — like an overexcitable puppy, it was both enthusiastic and yet lacking in discipline. Here, it sounds like the SL’s software has been tweaked slightly to rein this in.

Comparing Listen by Pola & Bryson and Goddard on both speakers, sustained bass notes sound less reverberant and flabby on the SL, while snarling distorted bass synths seem more tightly expressed. However, not that if you’re expecting super-low bass from either device, you’ll be left wanting: there’s very little in the way of sub from either.

I tested the SL’s treble by playing Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac — an exam it easily passed, even if it didn’t quite ace it. There wasn’t any unpleasant distortion or oversaturation to it, while the snare and toms had a delicious punch that kept everything moving forward. However, my one reservation was that the rhythmic punch and the polished vocals slightly outshone the twangy rhythm guitar — for me, they’re part of what makes the track so iconic, so it was a shame they didn't get to share as much of the limelight.

Given the Era 100 SL doesn’t exactly sit at the premium end of the market, it also does a good job of separating different instruments in the mix. Playing a hi-res stream of Clair de Lune by Kamasi Washington straight from Tidal, I was impressed by the clarity of timbre of each instrument, especially during the solos. The trumpet beautifully conveys the instrument’s rich harmonics, while the sliding strings of the double bass as the player launches into their solo are brilliantly expressed.

Like its predecessor, the SL is only capable of so-so stereo. Unlike some more premium speakers, it still largely feels like the sound is issuing from a single point. And when I played Manchild by Eels, I could appreciate the stereo separation between elements — with the guitars clearly panned to the right and the vocals to the left — but only when I was sat within a few feet of the device. At least listening angles are pretty consistent, with only a very slight drop off in the treble as you travel toward the speaker’s back.

All in all, my biggest worries going into this were ill-founded. Despite the cheaper price of the Sonos Era 100 SL, it doesn’t demonstrate any significant sonic sacrifices compared to its full-fat sibling. And there may have even been a few software tweaks behind the scenes to slightly rein in the wilder tendencies of the older speaker. Either way, it’s a very decent-sounding speaker for the price.

• Sound quality score: 4.5 / 5

Sonos Era 100 SL review: design

• Almost identical to the Era 100
• Solid, tactile build
• Effective touch-capacitive controls

When it comes to looks, the Sonos Era 100 SL remains almost identical to its older sibling. They share the same cylindrical ellipse shape, are wrapped in the same metallic grille, and arrive in the same black or white colorway. If you’ve ever gawked at the older Era 100, you’ll know exactly what you’re getting here.

All in all, the Era 100 SL is decently stylish, feels solidly built, and the matte plastic of its top surface is pleasingly tactile. While I’ve poured scorn on quite a few wireless speakers lately for defaulting to this same basic format, I’ll give Sonos a pass here. First off, it was largely the brand that coined this look in the first place — and, more importantly, the Era 100 SL is principally a cheaper speaker wearing its spendier brother’s clothing, meaning it was never going to break the mould of existing speakers.

In light of this, so not surprisingly, the Sonos Era 100 SL is the same size as its full-fat sibling, measuring 7.19 x 4.72 x 5.14 inches / 182.5 x 120 x 130.5mm. However, it's ever so slightly lighter — presumably thanks to its shedding of voice control mics — weighing in at 4.3lbs / 1.95kg compared to its predecessor’s 4.45lbs / 2.02kg. That makes it a pretty average size in the grand scheme of things, neither Lilliputian like the 0.96lbs / 0.44kg Sonos Roam 2, nor Brobdingnagian like the hulking, 3 lbs / 14.5kg Cambridge Audio Evo One.

With one notable exception, the erstwhile voice control button, the buttons on the Era 100 SL are the same. And that’s very much a plus: there’s no need to fix the Era 100’s control scheme since it definitely isn't broke. Its touch-capacitive controls are easy to activate, allowing you to play, pause and skip tracks, while swiping its touch bar lets you tweak its volume. Sure, it could offer light-up symbols for use in darker rooms or customizable shortcut keys, but it covers the core functions well.

Fundamentally, the Era 100 SL is the spitting image of the Era 100 before it. So if you were a fan of the older model, you can be sure you’ll like its younger sibling.

• Design score: 4 / 5

Sonos Era 100 SL review: value

In our review, one of our criticisms of the original Sonos Era 100 was its increased cost. Its initial list price of $249 / £249 / AU$399 presented a chunky markup on the Sonos One at $219 / £199 / AU$319 , but even more so when compared to the Sonos One SL's $199 / £179 / AU$289. Even though the Era 100 has now come down in price to $219 / £199 / AU$319, that’s still only roughly comparable to the Sonos One.

Conversely, the Era 100 SL has a list price of $189 / £169 / AU$289, making it the same price or even cheaper than the Sonos One SL but with many of the same features and the exact same sound quality as the Era 100. That’s not to be sneered at.

In fact, if you’re an iPhone user, the only real thing you’re losing here is voice control, something I’m personally happy to sacrifice for a bit of a bargain. And even if you’re an Android user, this price is still well worth it as you're unlikely to get much better performance by investing your spend elsewhere. Access to Trueplay is a definite bonus but that shouldn't detract from the fact the SL still offers great sound for its price.

• Value score: 4.5 / 5

Should I buy the Sonos Era 100 SL?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Sonos Era 100 SL review: also consider

How I tested the Sonos Era 100 SL

• Tested it over four weeks
• Compared it to the Era 100 using a wide range of tracks
• Have decades of experience using audio hardware

I tested the Sonos Era 100 SL over the course of about a month. I made sure to utilize many of its key features, including room-tuning and EQ, and tried connecting to it through a range of options from direct streaming on the device through to connecting discrete devices using AirPlay 2.

To assess its sound quality, I played a wide variety of music, from classic rock to liquid drum & bass. I also compared the sound, side by side, with the Era 100 to see whether I could perceive any significant differences between their sound signatures. In addition, I compared each version’s stereo field and angle drop-off to see whether either revealed any issues with their soundstage.

As well as spending at least the past six years reviewing wireless speakers for tech publications, I have decades of experience using audio hardware in my home environment, including a range of wired and wireless speakers and headphones. I’ve also spent 20 years producing music from home, which has given me a firm understanding of how to assess the balance of frequencies and stereo elements.

• First reviewed: June 2026
• Read more about how we test

• Major changes to navigation and volume control
• Available in a new beta this week
• Opt-in rather than enabled by default

Sonos has announced a suite of new changes to the Sonos app, and you'll be able to try the new version this week as a beta — if you want to.

Posting on Reddit, Sonos CEO Tom Conrad says that after "hundreds of hours watching real customers use the Sonos app" his team has identified lots of irritants and sticking points. "We've learned a lot about what hangs people up, what's confusing when you're new to the system, and what slows you down when you're just trying to change the darn volume."

In response, Sonos is making lots of changes to the app, including how you turn the volume up and down.

The post has so far generated a lot of positive responses, including the current top comment by Daveintausend: "Never thought I'd say this but I'm hyped for a better volume control."

What changes are coming to the Sonos app?

A new beta will be released this week, with significant changes to the interface. As Conrad put it: "What kept showing up was this: a lot of friction came from proprietary patterns we built that made the app harder to learn and use than it needed to be. Stacks on stacks on stacks of content cards. Swipe-up gestures to switch speaker orientation. Close boxes where any other app on your phone would have a back button. Custom interface elements that never quite felt like part of iOS or Android."

The plan is to change all of that, and Conrad has highlighted three key areas: better tabbed navigation, a "totally new" volume interface, and more control over how your players are listed and displayed.

He also promises "dozens of smaller quality-of-life fixes everywhere" including swipe to delete in playlists, new views on iPad, and a refresh to the Now Playing screen.

The main interface will be divided into three tabs: Home, System and Search, which will be styled in a way that's native to your phone's operating system, and that replace "the hidden gestures and content cards".

And the volume control will have "a core mechanism that is easier to grab and fine tune, buttons to tap up and down if that’s your thing and a new way to synchronize a across group of rooms."

The changes aren't rolling out to the main app just yet, and they're actually not even mandatory in this week's beta either — but if you install the new beta you'll be able to see the changes by enabling "Enable Improved Navigation" in Settings. It will remain an opt-in toggle post-beta, with Sonos soliciting feedback "until it's fully polished up."

The beta program is here, if you want sign up and try the changes out, but bear in mind that using beta software always comes with the risk of bugs or other problems.

I think it's fair to say that Sonos is doing things very differently since Tom Conrad took the helm in early 2025, and he was up-front about the app debacle when my colleague Matt Bolton interviewed him earlier this year.

In that conversation he told us that "In the aftermath of [the problems], you just have to show up in people's life with some humility and do the hard work of earning their trust back through great execution, great product, great software, great experiences, and never forget what you put people through". It's great to see him delivering on that promise.

Denon Home 400: two-minute review

The Denon Home 400 sits in the Japanese brand's completely repositioned Home 2.0 range for 2026, and it doesn’t take much to see the updates as a direct challenge to Sonos and the best wireless speakers on the market. The range features three speakers — the Denon Home 200, 400 and 600 — all of which promise spatial audio from a single box. They’re all tuned by sound masters, built for native stereo playback even as singular units, deliver an immersive experience, and have refined designs.

The Denon Home 400 sits right in the middle of the range, but occupies a bit of a sweet spot. Its $599 price tag puts it at the same ball park as the Sonos Era 300, and I think Denon comes out of the comparison looking like the better option.

Along with Sonos, though, there’s no shortage of competition from the likes of Apple’s HomePods, JBL’s Authentics 300 and the WiiM Sound smart speakers. While the Denon range technically supports Siri, this is a product that’s much more about the sound than it is the smarts.

In use, it sounds tremendous and is highly customizable with a full spatial audio experience where you really can hear the difference. The HEOS app works brilliantly, and set-up is a doddle. It also has a sense of style. This is a speaker that looks premium rather than plasticky, and that alone may make it easier to recommend than Sonos for many potential buyers.

Is it worth the premium price, though? I’ve been hands-on to find out what the Denon does differently.

Denon Home 400 review: price and availability

• Released on March 24th, 2026
• $599 / £449 / AU$999 (approx.)

The Denon Home 400 costs $599 / £449 / AU$999 (approx.) and is clearly positioned to rival the Sonos Era 300, which costs $479 / £449 / AU$749 officially, but it is a bit more likely to be available on offer, having gone down to $379 / £339 on Amazon within the past six months.

Other similarly sized rivals include the JBL Authentics 300, which costs $450 / £380 / AU$600, or the bass-heavy Brane X for $599 / £475 / AU$915. Apple fans will also, of course, consider whether a HomePod 2 ($299 / £299 / AU$479) may better suit their needs, as it has a few clever tricks and perks for the iOS faithful.

Denon Home 400 review: specs

Denon Home 400 review: features

• Native Dolby Atmos with adjustable height and bass
• Several connectivity options
• Voice control only via Siri, and only if you already have a HomePod

The core selling point of all the new speakers in the Denon range is Dolby Atmos support with adjustable sound modes. I’ll go into that in more depth in the 'Sound quality' section below, but it is a meaningful differentiator between this speaker and most of its competition. The vast majority of other smart speakers will either not have Atmos or rely on (the admittedly clever) digital processing trick of spatial virtualization. That’s what the Denon Home 200 does, too.

The one option offering proper Atmos is the aforementioned Sonos Era 300. The Denon Home 400, just like this rival, packs in true Dolby Atmos with a six-driver setup: dedicated left and right drivers, upfiring drive units and two 4.5-inch woofers (all powered by six independent Class-D amplifiers). What this means is that you’ll get much more width — throw a Dolby Atmos track at this speaker and you’ll hear a wider soundstage — and real height, as it bounces sound off your ceiling. The adjustability in the Auto mode means you can dial in exactly how much bass extension, width or height you want.

You can use voice assistance on this speaker, but I’m not going to pretend it’s a headline feature. Apple’s Siri is the only voice assistant on offer, so you’re not going to find Google Assistant or Alexa as an option during setup. And, in order to set it up, you need to have an Apple HomePod or HomePod mini on your Wi-Fi network to handle the Siri requests you make on the Denon speaker.

Luckily, I’ve got some HomePods in another room, so I could test this, and it works fairly well, but I wouldn’t go around suggesting that this is a speaker with built-in voice control. It’s more of a niche added extra, as long as you already have an extra accessory that would cost you at least £99.

In general, the HEOS app (HEOS stands for Home Entertainment Operating System, thanks for asking) is excellent and great if you think you might set up a multi-room ecosystem of speakers after investing in this one. It covers multiple brands, not just Denon, and works with a wide range of speakers, soundbars and receivers.

Overall, the Denon Home 400 offers a broad range of connectivity options, including a 3.5mm AUX for use with turntables or MP3 players, and a simple native Bluetooth button to connect to other devices if you’re not using the app. Bluetooth LE Audio is coming via an update, and it has support for ALAC and aptX formats over Bluetooth. You’ve also got Apple AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, and Qobuz Connect built in, too.

Through the USB-C port, you can deliver firmware updates via a pen drive or use wired Ethernet via any USB-C adapter, which is a nice benefit compared with others that might make you buy a proprietary dongle. Obviously, it’s not quite the same as built-in Ethernet, but it’s not a feature everyone would use.

There’s no remote with the speaker, it’s designed for use with the feature-filled HEOS app, where you can gather together your music services — including Spotify, Amazon Music, Deezer, Soundcloud, Tidal, Qobuz and TuneIn — and internet radio stations, along with control of the multi-room setup and audio customizations. I wish my choice of streaming service, Apple Music, were added to the picks, but it’s otherwise an app I find hard to fault.

• Features score: 4.5 / 5

Denon Home 400 review: sound quality

• Outstanding spatial audio performance from a single unit
• Excellent customization for height and width
• Pure mode for a more direct and balanced experience

We’re going to be talking a lot about spatial audio in this section, because that really is the Denon Home 400’s party piece. It can take a well-encoded Atmos mix and make it feel three-dimensional. It’s in the Auto setting by default, and that’s probably where I’d leave it in my environment, in which it’s more than capable of an immersive room-filling sound.

If spatial isn’t for you, you’ll prefer the Pure sound mode. This bypasses the DSP and works as a great mode for anyone wanting the typical stereo image experience.

I’d already had a chance to hear the Denon Home 400 in a London hotel suite, and that gave me a sense of just how impressive it would be. During Ed Sheeran’s Shivers, I could hear a noticeable height extension that makes it perceptibly different when compared with the Home 200. Listening to the Atmos mix of Riders on the Storm by The Doors reveals background vocals in the height layer, an element that’s harder to pick out in the neutral mode.

Having the speaker within my own apartment only further confirmed how adept it is with spatial sound. To test it, I mostly focused on playing Dolby Atmos from Apple Music over AirPlay, but I also used it with Spotify Connect, radio stations, and I set up both Spotify and Deezer within the HEOS app to test those, too. The experience is convincing, there’s a lot of clarity to be heard across the whole frequency range, and two woofers deliver significant bass oomph.

Listening to Raye’s Where Is My Husband! in Dolby Atmos is highly rewarding for how much extra detail you start to hear in the layers of instrumentation, all while keeping her powerful vocals right in the center. I used the HEOS app to dial up the width and height, and you can feel the backing vocals spread out on the soundstage, with the instruments becoming easier to identify in space.

Putting the 400 in Pure mode and switching over to Click Clack Symphony shows that there’s a place for both modes. Pure is much more direct and balanced. There’s clearly more vocal presence in this mode, and the stomps have far more impact. You can get a different sonic experience by switching between both modes, something this track shows so well — it’s bordering on ethereal in Auto with those spatial customisations, yet sounds intimate on the Pure setting.

In general, I find the sound hard to fault. By default, the Auto mode may have a smidge too much bass for my tastes, but it’s easily remedied by moving the slider down two notches in the app. The Pure mode is fairly neutral in its approach, but still has its fair share of energy and dynamism. If you listen to spatial tracks, play around with Auto, but most of us should find Pure less fatiguing, making it a better 'set and forget' option.

• Sound quality score: 4.5 / 5

Denon Home 400 review: design

• Durable and stylish look
• Two neutral colorways
• Will suit most living spaces

Immediately after unboxing, it’s clear that the Denon Home 400 is more than your average utilitarian speaker. The best thing about its design is the lack of visible plastic, which is only really visible on the speaker's top section. The rest is covered by a seamless piece of fabric with no obvious seams, and the bottom of the speaker — just like every model in the new Denon range — is a sturdy titanium base plate. It adds a little bulk, sure, but also the satisfaction of knowing that this is durable and not something that can be tipped over.

Underneath the speaker, a light glows to let you know it’s turned on. This was something that my wife initially felt ruined the look, but it’s easily solved because you can lower the brightness (or turn the light off entirely) in the app. Crisis averted. There are physical controls on the right side of the device, allowing you to control volume and playback, along with three quick select buttons (for your favourite internet radio stations or streaming services) and an action button to summon voice control.

The speaker also comes in the same two neutral colorways as the rest of the range – Charcoal and Stone (my review unit). I’ve got no complaints. It’s a speaker that’s designed to look good in the living room without commanding attention, and it does exactly that. It’s also worth noting that, on the back, there’s a switch to mute the microphone and that it’s a hard-wired off button that’s not connected to the network circuitry.

I find this looks much less plasticky in comparison to rival speakers (looking at you, Sonos) and that the Home 400's buttons and controls are easier to understand and use (looking at you, Apple). It ends up being a winner on multiple fronts.

• Design score: 5 / 5

Denon Home 400 review: Usability & setup

• Controls are easy to understand and use
• The HEOS app is intuitive and full of features
• But there’s not much voice control available here

The Denon Home 400 is an exceptionally straightforward speaker to set up and use. The box gives you the speaker unit itself and the power cable. Once it’s plugged in, you set it up with the HEOS app, a process that took me approximately five to 10 minutes, and connect it to your home Wi-Fi network, telling the app whether the speaker is away from walls, in a corner, or just in front of one wall, which helps it adapt its sound.

You do need to use the app so that you get all of the internet-connected features, but it doesn’t take long at all to get started. Once you pick some favourite radio stations in the app, you can also press and hold on the preset buttons to save them for quick access, and you can always just use the Bluetooth button to connect devices that might not be on your wireless network. The same applies to wired playback.

I tested both with my MP3 player, the Activo P1, and found it seamless in use. However, it’s worth mentioning that I couldn’t get the Denon to play back at one of its supported higher-res Bluetooth codecs over the P1; it stayed stuck in SBC despite supporting higher bandwidth options.

In day-to-day use, though, this is highly intuitive to use, both wirelessly and if you were to connect an AUX cable to an MP3 player, CD player or turntable. Denon has said a goal with this product is getting you to your music with minimal button presses, and that holds true in use, whether you’re using those quick select buttons, or just playing wirelessly over the HEOS app, Spotify Connect or AirPlay. The one downside would be for those who are used to voice control of their playlists. Unless you use Siri and already have a HomePod, this doesn’t work well for that.

If you were keen to set up multi-room groups, this would also work well, with controls within the HEOS app, plus the ability to create a stereo pair with two Denon Home 400s. It’s also a great feature that the ability to mute the microphone is a physical control, not something that exists only in software, something that’s great for peace of mind if you don’t want to use voice assistance or have your voice recorded.

• Usability & setup score: 4.5 / 5

Denon Home 400 review: value

• Premium price to match the Sonos Era 300
• Cheaper units don’t deliver spatial audio this good
• Rivals are a bit better for voice control, though

At $599, the Home 400 is priced at the top of the standalone premium home speaker market, making it a direct rival to the Sonos Era 300. For me, the Denon more than matches its Sonos competition when it comes to powerful spatial audio and is also a more stylish speaker with more intuitive control and better connectivity. The Denon gives you spatial customization missing from Sonos, and it also has built-in AUX, USB-C and the option of Ethernet.

While rivals like the Sonos Era 100 and Apple HomePod are cheaper, they’re also more locked into ecosystems. They’re good as affordable rivals, but the Denon offers the more powerful, more immersive and more customizable sound. And, while the JBL Authentics 300 also holds a lot of appeal, and I’m a particular fan of its style and retro controls, it lacks native Dolby Atmos, so it doesn’t feel like a direct rival.

The one thing you’ll want to keep in mind is the lack of capable voice assistance from the Denon at launch, but if that doesn’t matter to you, the customizable spatial sound, ability to connect to players and turntables, plus intuitive control make the Denon Home 400 a good value buy in this price tier. Just make sure you’re keen on spatial sound and know you want to hear the layers inside a mix, as that’s what sets this apart.

• Value score: 4.5 / 5

Should I buy the Denon Home 400?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Denon Home 400 review: also consider

How I tested the Denon Home 400

• Tested with music streamed from Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music via AirPlay, and radio stations within the HEOS app
• Also tested Bluetooth and wired performance with the Activo P1 audio player
• Used Audio Pro A10 MkII for comparison during listening tests
• Tested over several weeks of both casual and critical listening

I tested the Denon Home 400 using a wide range of different music genres and styles, including popular hits, soundtracks, ambient playlists and classical. I listened to podcasts and radio content, too, over several weeks of testing. I primarily used the Denon Home 400 in one spot, on a table in my living room, and that gave me a sense of how well it was able to fill the space in my small flat.

I used Bluetooth and wired connections with my Activo P1 music player, and also streamed using the HEOS app itself, accessing Deezer, Spotify and radio stations from this interface. Most of my spatial listening was tested via AirPlay, playing tracks mixed for Dolby Atmos through Apple Music.

For some direct comparisons, I used the other speakers that I currently have in my flat, including an Audio Pro A10 MkII and a couple of HomePod Minis in a stereo pair. And, to get a great understanding of the speaker’s performance, I made sure to listen to the widest possible range of genres at varying volume levels.

• First reviewed: June 2026
• Read TechRadar’s reviews guarantee

WiiM is one of the most interesting companies in the audio world right now, breaking out in the last couple of years in no small part thanks to capitalizing on Sonos' disastrous app update, and the company's quieter period since.

In that time, WiiM went from offering add-on boxes for traditional hi-fi, to launching sleek integrated streaming amps, to launching its own wireless speakers and subwoofer, starting with the WiiM Sound, to unveiling its first soundbar.

Ahead of the soundbar's launch, I spoke to WiiM's CEO, Dr. Lifeng Zhao, about the decisions the company made in developing the soundbar, whether WiiM has a signature sound profile, and what it means to offer "simplicity" in the context of these products, among other topics.

TechRadar: Tell me why you guys have chosen to do a soundbar now.

Lifeng Zhao: WiiM is four years old; in terms of brands right now we are a new player. So we did a streamer and amplifier, which convert or upgrade your existing audio gear. Those get really popular among our users, who start to expand [where they use them] to more environments: their living room; their media rooms. So, we always get this kind of feedback — they ask "when will you guys launch home theater, because we already have your gear, but we don't want to have separate components".

To use our streamer or amplifier, you have to have passive or powered speakers, right? But many people want to have one powerful all-in-one device in their living room. So they don't really want separate components because you know there's messing [with wires, and aesthetics], so we are always getting this request.

I'm also a big fan of entertainment, so for myself I want something simple to use with Dolby Atmos that can fulfill my music and TV experience. So, it came both from our own use, as well as a request from our community.

TechRadar: So, did you consider making an AV receiver or something like that before you decided to go the soundbar route? You already made the amps, so an AV receiver seems like it might have been the obvious way to go.

Lifeng Zhao: We already have the AV receiver if you think about it, right? We have the amps.

TechRadar: Only two channels.

Lifeng Zhao: Yeah, 2.1. But you can expand it with your surrounding channels [using wireless WiiM speakers]. That's the beauty of our systems. We don't want to make a traditional AVR, but we have a solution for those AVR users. People want a multi-channel system, but they don't want messy wired solutions. It's not flexible, and there are many limits on the placement, so we already have 2.1, but you can expand it with the surround speakers.

We are looking at more possibilities, but we don't want to make a legacy AVR; we want to make compact powerful and wireless versions of AVR.

TechRadar: The soundbar you guys are releasing is very good value considering the amount of physical channels that you've built in, and the amount of technology. A lot of soundbars at a similar price to yours are quite small, whereas yours is reasonably big. Can you talk through the design process around deciding how big you wanted the soundbar to be, and how that paired with the price you wanted to charge?

Lifeng Zhao: First of all, let's go back to our target users. We want this soundbar for both needs: watching TV plus listening to music. We don't want you to have to have two separate devices just because you watch TV and listen to music in your daily lives. So then we were thinking about how if we make [a product] only for the TV, just to improve the voice clarity, then we don't really need to go big — but we see a lot of people really want to listen to music with good bass, so the physics of that means we cannot make it too small.

So then we are thinking we can make [a soundbar with a subwoofer] but many people prefer the simplicity of an all-in-one — so that also gives us a size limit. So for our first one we wanted [to make one] people can just buy for most use cases. So with the size, our main target market is the US and Europe, and in most of Europe people have a single family [room]. So they have 55 inches or up TVs. So we did some surveys, and we think this is the kind of right size which can capture the majority of our audience.

TechRadar: You mentioned trying to balance the bass with the size and the compactness. So, you've got the four passive radiators in there. Were you designing the size of the soundbar around the size of the speakers and radiators you wanted to use, or were you choosing the speakers based on the size you wanted the soundbar to be?

Lifeng Zhao: We start with acoustic criteria. We say how deep a bass we want, based on our [previously launched devices]. We launched the amps, and we see how people set up their systems. We want to go to 50Hz, so users could get good bass — so that kind of gives us an acoustic volume. We calculate size based on this volume, but we do want it to be a sleek soundbar, so we have some height limits. But we can calculate the length, depth, and the height while leaving space for the speakers.

I always say we start from the acoustic criteria, then we calculate the size, then we design the best speaker driver according to this size limit.

TechRadar: Do you have more than one HDMI port, for passthrough?

Lifeng Zhao: We have one HDMI eARC, we don't have passthrough. We are thinking that people will connect most of their devices through the TV, because you have multiple HDMI inputs in the TV.

TechRadar: A lot of your competitors also only have one HDMI port, but there's a large number of people who have had their TV for a long time and they've collected a lot of boxes to connect to it, and so it can be really difficult to lose one of your HDMI ports to your soundbar. So, is there a reason behind this decision: was it either to do with cost or technical design or simplicity that you chose to only have one port?

Lifeng Zhao: Design is always about trade-offs, right? So, here I would say we value the simplicity, so people aren’t confusing HDMI and HDMI ARC. Before this journey [at Linkplay/WiiM] I also worked on media devices a lot in my past career, so we know that simplicity is very important. This is a choice to value that simplicity more in this device.

TechRadar: One of the interesting things about your soundbar is that you have a screen on the front, like the Wiim Sound speaker. Screens on soundbars is always quite a controversial topic, because people feel very strongly about having a light in front of their TV. Tell us about how the screen will work when you're watching content, and why you decided to include it.

Lifeng Zhao: We actually debated a lot internally. Our first screen-enabled devices [were the streamer and the amplifier], then the Sound speaker. So we actually accumulated a lot of experience in how people use a screen. To go back to your question regarding why we put a screen on the soundbar: first of all, the soundbar is made both for people using it for music and also watching TV, and in both cases we see a need for a screen. To give you some examples, when you listen to music, people always look somewhere to see what's playing, and they like looking at their favorite album art. We see people will even build a separate display just for artwork while listening, so we see this, and we want to provide integrated solutions for that.

Then we go back to the soundbar. So actually we are saying two things. One is that if you don't really need the screen, you can turn it off. Another thing is that we really want instant feedback. Think about it: if you only have an LED light right there with so many inputs, output and functions, how do you know what the status of the device is? It's really confusing even for me when I look at the LEDs, you know? I always forget, like, [what would flash] when the network doesn't work, right? How do I know it?

So, we want to give people a simple and intuitive control plus the instant feedback, because the device is so powerful. There are many statuses that may be important to your use cases. In a simple device we can just use a very simple app, but when it becomes very powerful, like your smartphone, you have to have a screen for people to interact.

TechRadar: There are obviously two ways to think about simplicity. And one is to have less information shown to keep it simple, and to have users trust that they're in the mode they like and things won’t change. Whereas I think you're saying that the way to introduce simplicity is to make sure people have all the information in front of them, so they're not questioning what the options are. That more information makes it simpler. Is it fair to say that's how you feel about it?

Lifeng Zhao: What I'm trying to say is that there are certain use cases where you need more information, but we don't want to give people too many options. So if you don't want that screen while you’re watching TV, our system will automatically turn off for you because you can separately configure the mode for each of your watching needs. But you can do even more, or we can do it automatically for you by default. You just need to set up once.

We want people using the screen intuitively. We don’t want to cause confusion; we don't want to become complicated. But [instead of] only having a red or a yellow indicator, we will tell you, oh, your network is disconnected, or your format is not supported, right? Let's say you don't support DTS, right? If you just have a yellow indicator, people will not really understand, they'll get really frustrated because they don't have any audio. So that's the kind of simplicity we want to have.

TechRadar: When it comes to expanding the system, you've got the ability to easily go to 5.1.2 channels by adding on the other WiiM products. Did you consider going beyond that? Because presumably with your technology, you could offer 7.1 2 or 5.2.2. Did you think about offering these?

Lifeng Zhao: Yeah, that's the beauty of our system, right? We started from separate components, so we accumulated a lot of experience. Another thing is that if you look at our wireless technology, we invest a lot in terms of wireless infrastructure — we have Wi-Fi 6E, so if you have the best routers we can leverage your routers, so we don't really have a limit. If your wireless environment can support it, we can expand it more.

Yes, when we launch the soundbar it supports 3.0.2, but as you mentioned we can expand it beyond 5.1.2, so that's exactly what we are doing, with the latest Wi-Fi standard you know we can expand more and with low latency.

[Editor's Note: Since this interview, WiiM has changed its stance and is aiming to support adding front left and right separate speakers for use with the WiiM Bar at launch, which can be either WiiM's wireless speakers or can be any speakers attached to a WiiM amp. Dr. Zhao gave us this additional comment: "We can confirm the bar supports wireless front, left, and right speakers. This wasn't originally intended as a launch feature, but based on community feedback and the team's testing, we decided to share it. There seems to be a lot of interest from our community, so if feedback and internal testing continue to go well, we'll look to keep it in."]

TechRadar: So are you saying that actually someone can go beyond 5.1.2 channels?

Lifeng Zhao: Right now we are saying 5.1.2, but potentially, with the software update we can expand more.

TechRadar: Speaking of wireless technology, have you guys explored Dolby Atmos FlexConnect as an option for your products?

Lifeng Zhao: We always look at different types of connectivity and the multi-channel options. FlexConnect definitely is on our radar.

TechRadar: Is there any reason why you're not supporting it now?

Lifeng Zhao: This is our first one, right? As I mentioned, we can support it with a software update, so the hardware is there. It's just about whether we feel it's mature enough, or the user experience [is ready]. We don't really want to give people half-baked technology; we want to make sure it’s really good and people can easily use it. So there's a possibility that we can do it even in current hardware with the software update, but I cannot commit on this one yet.

TechRadar: Speaking of the ecosystem, it looks like this is another piece of hardware that doesn't support Apple AirPlay 2, which is true of a lot of the new releases WiiM has launched. Are you able to say why this hasn't been included in the last few products?

Lifeng Zhao: We have many options on our devices, we support like more than 25 music services, then we have other ‘casting’ options there — and we value the people's content. If you're using Spotify, we want you using Spotify Lossless instead of a compressed [stream], and we see a lot of confusion, actually, of people using Spotify Connect with the other option you just mentioned [AirPlay 2]. So, it’s really a choice, like a design choice — we make it easy to use with high-res.

We really want people to leverage the best quality of their music on our system, and we also offer other options, which you can do very easily. We have multi-room no matter which source, via input to the Wiim. And with most of the music sources you can do lossless audio — so that’s the two options we offer right now.

TechRadar: You’re offering your RoomFit room correction here. I guess this is a very similar technology to what you've offered on the amps previously, but did you have to make any changes for working with Dolby Atmos and other formats you're supporting here?

Lifeng Zhao: It has to be different, right? Because in the soundbar we handle Dolby Atmos as a type of spatial audio, we also handle DTS, so we have multi-channel [sound to deal with]. Previously with RoomFit we started with like one device, then we expanded to 2.1 with a subwoofer — but now we’ve expanded RoomFit for the entire system. It's adding your surrounding speakers, adding your subwoofer, it’s not only doing stuff like balancing your SPL, or frequency spectrum, we also balance timing.

So we really expanded RoomFit for the spatial audio. We invested quite some time to get it right, and hopefully when we launch this soundbar people will be amazed by just how good it is. You just do one-tap calibration, it does everything for you: it calibrates the latency, the level matching, both for your front and surrounds and your subwoofer.

TechRadar: You mentioned earlier about designing the acoustic signature to deliver the right kind of sound that you wanted. And would you say that the new soundbar and the WiiM Sound speakers and your amps share a particular sound signature? Is there a sound signature that you believe is the WiiM style?

Lifeng Zhao: We are not really traditional hi-fi, if you look at our history. We really value the source. So that's why we always emphasize that, if you have a very good source, we want to replicate that in the original format. That means the resolution and in the bit depth, so we try to minimize the distortion when we do the [digital-to-analogue].

We do a lot of things mathematically to try to perfect the sound based on your existing system. In our amp we want to value your speaker signature you already have, so in our RoomFit we actually we want to just tackle the room mood most. So your high end, high frequency — we want to keep that signature [of your speakers] because that's what you paid for, right? So I would say we want to value people's preference more, and in the parts we can do well, we control that part — then we give people options. Simplicity, plus the powerful control.

If you go to advanced settings, you still can change your signature because if people whole, like, a warm sound they [can have it].

TechRadar: That makes sense, especially for the amps and things. But when you're making the soundbars and and WiiM Sound speakers, you're the ones choosing what the speaker output is going to sound like. So did you guys settle on a particular sound profile you wanted to make the default, or is it different for the soundbar than for the music speakers?

Lifeng Zhao: Exactly. Out of the box we want a really good sound, and if you talk about a sound signature, we do have different profile settings for the HDMI input or the music inputs. For the music inputs, we want to really have good clarity and a rich sound [with] respect to the original. Then for the HDMI, we tuned for more bass, for immersive audio. So we have a different profile, and I think it's a very good default for each of the sources.

TechRadar: It's interesting to talk to you about this element, because there are some companies I speak to where the speaker drivers are the things they really focus on, whereas your focus seems to be more on the processing and the signal pathway. Do you think that comes from the kind of company you are, as a digital platform company that has extended into speakers, instead of the other way around? Do you think that makes big difference as to how you approach your products compared to older hi-fi companies who did the analog part first and then are adding the digital in?

Lifeng Zhao: To make a better product, we need to marry the two sides. I would say we start from the digital world, but when we did the amplifier we actually [developed] a lot of analog, so we have a really good understanding of that digital-to-analog [process]. So we definitely are also analog people, and then when we do the speakers, our teams have people who worked in traditional [hi-fi] companies such as Harman Kardon, so we do have expertise on this area as well. Our talents will be in wireless, and in the DSP, and we also have a lot of acoustic engineers.

Sonos has offered the ability to add wireless rear speakers to its soundbars, creating an effective compact surround-sound system, for well over a decade. But this setup really hasn't changed much from the Playbar to the Sonos Arc Ultra — you can still have the soundbar with two rear speakers, and one or two subwoofers.

For years now, Sonos superfans have been begging the company to expand these options with the ability to use its wireless speakers as true front left and right channels for a home theater setup.

The frustration is width: elite soundbars like the Arc Ultra have angled drivers so that the audio sounds much wider than the soundbar itself, but there are diminishing returns with 'virtualized' width compared to the real width of just having speakers on either side of your TV, the way you would in a five-channel surround sound system made from separate speakers. And we just had a reminder from a Dolby exec about how important width is in recreating Dolby Atmos mixes.

People love the simplicity of a wireless Sonos setup compared to building out a wired separates system, and many are enamored with Sonos' sound profile. But as time goes on, the failure to innovate in the kinds of setups available starts to look stubborn at best.

Imagine that you have a Sonos Beam 2nd Gen connected to your TV over HDMI, and it receives the Dolby Atmos sound and then streams it out to a Sonos Era 300 to the left of your TV and one to the right of your TV.

These would deliver real width, especially since the Era 300 has left and right drivers, as well as forward-facing. The Beam serves as the center channel for clear dialogue, and the Era 300s deliver powerful side channels and height channels. And, of course, you could combine with wireless rear speakers, as Sonos does already.

People are choosing to buy bigger and bigger TVs, which need wider and wider sound to match their scale. We can't keep making soundbars bigger to compensate (well, we can, but I'm not sure it'll really please anyone).

Sonos has been in the perfect position to capitalize on this, and yet somehow Sony beat it to the punch by announcing the Sony Bravia Theatre Trio, an 'LCR' (left, center, right) wireless system that's more or less exactly the setup I described above, but with Sony speakers.

Here's what really galls the Sonos superfans: the tech already exists, unofficially, to do this, and many have tried it. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to a third-party app called Sonosequencr, and the developer makes it clear that they're not hacking the speakers to make this possible: they're tapping into tech already dormant in Sonos' system, that Sonos has never fully enabled.

Using Sonosequencr comes with tradeoffs, with the main one being that you can't use Trueplay to correct the sound for your room, so in some cases it's possible you're better off sticking with a regular Sonos setup that compensates for your room's reflections, especially if you have a smaller space — but in some large setups, the addition of real speakers might be the better option. Sonos could also break the third-party app at any time, since it's all unofficial.)

There were leaks that Sonos was planning to enable this kind of setup using its canceled streaming box as the centerpiece, but this obviously never came to fruition (but the tech that Sonosequencr taps into might be the vestigial remains of it, or an earlier version of it).

I wrote at the time that I hoped it would retain the exact feature I'm talking about today, but there's been no sign of it since then. That's probably partly because Sonos spent a year just trying to fix its app's problems and getting things ready for multiple launches this year (which started with the Sonos Play).

Maybe Sonos is getting ready to unleash a new world of home theater flexibility on us — when I interviewed CEO Tom Conrad, I asked him about Dolby Atmos FlexConnect and its ability to work with really flexible speaker placement, he said: "We're interested in that entire space, the entire domain of: How do you get the bits from the source to the speakers? How do you position the speakers in three-dimensional space? And how do you render? We'll continue to work on our roadmap."

In response to a question about TV makers launching their own wireless speaker tech and pushing Sonos out, Conrad said: "We're the pioneer in wirelessly distributing audio around the family room, and we'll have our own things to say about how that evolves in the coming quarters."

So it definitely sounds like Sonos has something planned for home theater this year, and I really hope it takes the chance to finally unleash extra speaker positions. The fact that Sony got there first really surprised me, but Sonos has a key advantage: price.

Sony's system costs £2000 (about $2,690 / AU$3,750) for the front three speakers. The closest Sonos setup in terms of Dolby Atmos performance would be the Beam 2nd Gen and two Era 300 speakers, as I mentioned above. At the time of writing, that costs $1,127 / £1,077 / AU$2,297 — but you could swap the Era 300s for a pair of Era 100 SL speakers, and the price would drop to $707 / £657 / AU$1,377.

When I think about the scale of performance you could get from that setup for that price… well, like I said, the whole thing

• Sonos' new app update enables you to turn SonosNet mesh networking off
• The feature may cause clashes with "more complex" home networks
• Available on iOS and Android, but not every will get it at the same time

Sonos has release an update to its app for both iOS and Android that may solve a weird networking issue for some users. The update, which is rolling out from today, adds a toggle for SonosNet that enables you to turn the feature off.

According to Liz from Sonos, who posted details of the update to the r/sonos subreddit, turning off SonosNet may "help resolve connectivity issues on more complex home network setups."

This is a relatively small update – the last one in mid-May delivered multiple changes including additional Music Library grouping options, layout improvements in iOS and for US users, changes to advertising personalization. But if you've been getting weird Wi-Fi issues it may be just what you've been waiting for.

What is SonosNet and why should you fear it?

SonosNet is designed to connect your Sonos speakers to each other, and it was created when home Wi-Fi wasn't always up to the task of smoothly streaming to your Sonos gear.

Sonos's solution was to create a Sonos-specific private Wi-Fi mesh network (before mesh routers were common) that your speakers would share, with an Ethernet-cabled Sonos device acting as the hub for everything else.

That's good, but as Liz from Sonos explains: "For most modern, high-speed routers, disabling SonosNet can actually help things run smoother. Newer routers use Wi-Fi technology that can sometimes conflict with SonosNet's mesh, so turning it off lets your system lean fully on your home network instead."

Sonos has also added the ability to see what's connected via SonosNet, which again might help with diagnosing speaker-specific weirdness.

However, it's worth noting that this tech is on by default for a reason — this option might be exactly what many people need, but I wouldn't try it until you've looked into other possible causes if you're having Sonos connection issues.

The update is a rolling update, meaning not all devices will receive it at once — so even though the new software is live today, your app might not show the option yet.

Once it's available to you, you can turn off SonosNet in System Settings > Networks > Disable SonosNet. Of course if you aren't experiencing network problems then there's no need to do this – and if you haven't done so already, it's worth trying a different SonosNet channel first to see if that solves your problem without having to take SonosNet offline.

• The Sonos app is not currently available in the Apple App Store
• No change to Google Play: it's still there
• Sonos has acknowledged the issue and is "working on a solution"

Update 2: The Sonos app is back on the App Store now. Normal service resumes. The original article and update will remain as published below.

If you're looking for the Sonos app for iOS, iPadOS or Mac, you'll need to wait: it's not there. The app is temporarily unavailable in Apple's App Store for all three platforms.

Sonos is aware of the problem: in a status update it says that "We have identified a problem with the Sonos App availability in the iOS / Mac App Stores and are working on a solution."

So far the app has been unavailable for a few hours and we don't yet know when it'll return.

Update 1: Sonos provided the following comment to TechRadar: "The Sonos app is temporarily unavailable for new downloads and updates from the Apple App Store while we complete a routine administrative update with Apple. Existing installations on customers' devices are unaffected and the Sonos app and service are operating normally. We expect the issue to be resolved soon. For the latest status, please visit https://status.sonos.com/."

What's wrong with the Sonos app?

The Sonos status page shows a clear sheet for almost everything bar the Sonos Account, which is currently labelled with a red X to indicate a major outage.

Sonos says that in addition to the app not being available to download, you might not be able to update it if it's already installed on your system.

It strongly seems like this is some kind of administrative problem, as hinted by Sonos in its statement to us — some online have speculated that it could be as basic as Sonos' developer accounts expiring, or a similar paperwork requirement not being met. If that's the case, we'd expect it to reappear and for Sonos to never speak of it again…

Having said that, at some point Sonos' Mac app will disappear permanently anyway — it's not built for Apple Silicon, and Sonos says it has no plans to adapt it, and instead is moving all desktop users to its web interface anyway.

We’re not exactly short of options when it comes to choosing a wireless speaker to blast tunes out of either at home or on the go. But how often have you chosen what you believe to be a perfect speaker, only to eventually discover it doesn’t quite meet your evolving needs?

Perhaps you have a large, powerful speaker to use at home, but then you want something you can take on the road with you. Or vice versa, you have a portable speaker that’s easy to throw into a bag, but the sound quality is disappointing. You've been forced to juggle multiple speakers to cover your life — until now.

The Sonos Play laughs in the face of that compromise. One speaker. Every scenario. Done.

Having used it at home, it really does cover all bases. Its impactful audio delivery means it can comfortably be used as a home speaker, as it has little trouble filling a room. And it’s small enough to go into a bag, and you can stream over Bluetooth when you’re away from home.

Throw in a long-lasting battery with up to 24 hours of play time, and you really do have what I would consider to be the only speaker you need.

Not convinced? Allow me to explain.

Filling a gap

Looking at Sonos’ speaker lineup, it would seem like a fair statement to say the brand has a model for every person and every scenario. There are home speakers including the Era 100 and Era 300, then you have the Move 2, which is ‘portable’ speaker but is too large to truly carry around, and finally the Roam 2, that’s about as portable as you can get but not as good as a standalone speaker like its bigger brethren.

That left a little gap between the Move and the Roam that needed filling.

The Sonos Play perfectly slots into the gap, while also crossing over into home speaker territory, sitting above the Era 100 in terms of price, but backing it up with extra features. Tom Conrad has claimed it to be a true ‘Goldilocks’ speaker — I couldn’t agree with him more, and I'm amazed it didn’t already exist.

The joy of music

The Play’s superb sound quality and its versatile design has had an unexpected knock-on effect for me — it’s got me listening to music even more. With multiple Sonos speakers dotted around my apartment, including a stereo pair of One SLs in the kitchen that I use when working from home, I didn’t think I’d have a real need for the Play, yet I’ve found myself using it the most since it arrived.

It’s been great to be able to have it right next to me on the table where I work, then take it into the bedroom where I have a Sonos Arc and another pair of One speakers already set up. But since the Play is already, well, playing, I’ve not seen the need to swap over to that bigger system.

A good reason for not needing to swap over is because the Sonos Play delivers a huge sound that gets better the more you crank up the volume. You can read more about the sound quality in our full in-depth Sonos Play review, but take it from me as someone who not only has other Sonos speakers but also a dedicated hi-fi listening room, the Play sounds tremendous.

If you’ve never owned a Sonos speaker before, I think the Play is the perfect entry point to the brand. It offers excellent sound quality and usability from the get go, while also having the capability to open up a wider multi-room audio system thanks to its Wi-Fi support.

And given Sonos found its footing in multi-room audio, I love the fact the Play makes joining that ecosystem ridiculously easy.

More than just a pretty face

I’ve always been a fan of Sonos’ aesthetic, so much so that my home is filled with its speakers and soundbars, while the Ace headphones were the first over-ear headphones I truly fell in love with. Every product is lovely to look at and to touch, and the Play continues that trend.

Yes, the buttons on the top panel could be a bit more defined to save you from needing to actually look at which one you’re pressing, but otherwise I can’t find any faults with what the Play offers physically.

There’s great cohesion across the lineup too. For example, Sonos has used the same green color for the Play’s small carry handle and its charging base that’s been used for the interior of the Ace’s case. It’s a subtle nod, but one that’s very effective and I, for one, truly appreciate.

Regaining trust

I’m fully aware of the tumultuous couple of years Sonos has had recently. While the launch of the much-anticipated Arc Ultra soundbar at the end of 2024 could be deemed a genuine success — it’s maintained a spot in our guide to the best soundbars ever since we reviewed it — the disastrous app update fiasco certainly would have soured relationships between the company and its millions of users.

Throw in a number of competitor brands — such as WiiM, Audio Pro and Denon — also offering a seamless gateway to multi-room audio, and Sonos’ position as a leader in its field was in serious jeopardy.

While many of the issues that plagued the app have been fixed and with CEO Tom Conrad confirming the company has plans to improve it further, Sonos still needed something to say to customers ‘we’re back and we’re better than ever’ — and in the Sonos Play, it’s well and truly proved it.

Sonos Play: two-minute review

The Sonos Play is one of the few products I've tested recently that really converted me to its cause over time. It's a product that Sonos pitches as a home speaker that's also portable — the one speaker you can use everywhere.

I started off thinking that the Sonos Play was struggling for value, because it's more expensive than Sonos' small purely home speaker, the Sonos Era 100, but doesn't sound quite as good. And it costs a lot more than most of the best Bluetooth speaker options, such as the excellent JBL Charge 6.

But over time, I realized that the Sonos Play excels in subtlety. Despite Sonos' claim, I don't think of it as a home speaker first and a portable speaker second. I see it as a portable speaker that's good enough to justify a place out on your furniture all the time, rather than being relegated to a drawer when you're not using it. And as a result, I started using it as both a home speaker for the room its in, and I started grabbing it to take with me to other rooms simply because I could, and it sounds good.

The charging cradle is vital to this. With no cable to fiddle with, you can just grab the Sonos Play and go without pausing your stride. It lasts for ages once it's away from the cradle (24 hours, and it turns itself off when not in use to keep going over days), so you don't need to be precious about returning it for a charge. It's solidly waterproof so you can use it anywhere without fear — It's a great shower karaoke companion.

And the Sonos Play does sound good — better than most portable speakers of its size. It's really well-rounded, with solid mids, clear treble and plenty of bass. It lacks some dynamic edge (though improves as the volume goes louder), but is still a really enjoyable listen.

It's become my speaker buddy — the one I'm using most, because it's so versatile. It's ready to go anywhere, to play in the house on Wi-Fi or out of the house on Bluetooth. You can achieve everything it does from other speakers, and arguably in a way that's better value — but not with this efficiency.

Sonos said it wanted to make a speaker that could be the one you need — powerful enough to fill nearly any room, and easily portable to take to nearly any room — and I think it nailed it.

Sonos Play review: price and availability

• Released on March 31st, 2026
• $299 / £299 / AU$499

The Sonos Play's $299 / £299 / AU$499 price is a fine balance. When it comes to Sonos' portable speakers, it sits neatly between the Sonos Roam 2's $179 / £179 / AU$239 and the Sonos Move 2's $449 / £449 / AU$799.

When it comes to Sonos' home speakers, it sits neatly between the $219 / £199 / AU$289 price of the Sonos Era 100, and the $449 / £449 / AU$749 price of the Era 300.

The difference, of course, is that the Play's performance sits correctly between the two portable speakers, while it doesn't perform any better than the Era 100 — what you get instead is a smaller design and a battery.

There are tons of competing speakers at this size, but few that offer the combination of Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and battery portability. Portable competition includes the Bluetooth-only Marshall Middleton II, which is similar in price at $329.99 / £259 / AU$499, or the JBL Charge 5, which costs $199 / £169 / AU$229.

On the non-portable side, there's the JBL Authentics 200, which is $349 / £299 / AU$449 officially (but can be found for a lot less these days) or the BlueSound Pulse Flex for around $349 / £279.

Sonos Play review: specs

Sonos Play review: features

• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB-C line-in connectivity, 24-hour battery life
• Charging cradle included, but no power adapter
• Stereo pairing option, or share over Bluetooth with other Sonos speakers even when not on Wi-Fi

The Sonos Play is the company's most versatile speaker to date. It works as a normal Sonos home speaker, complete with Wi-Fi connectivity and support for Sonos' network and app, which support Hi-Res Audio playback from compatible services. You can play to it directly over Apple AirPlay 2 or Sonos Connect as well.

There's also Bluetooth support to play from any other device, and the USB-C port on the back can be connected to an adapter to offer a line-in port for a turntable or other audio source, which then becomes available to all your other Sonos speakers on the network.

Sonos also has a new feature that enables you to group portable Sonos speakers when you're out of the house, so you connect to one of them over Bluetooth, and the sound is shared with the other speakers. There's no Auracast support, though.

The speaker setup consists of two angled tweeters facing slightly left and right, a single midwoofer facing forward, and then two force-opposed bass radiators on the left and right.

You can use a Sonos Play on its own, or you can put two into a stereo pair. You can also use a pair as rear speakers in a Sonos home theater setup.

But it also has a built-in battery, which can last up for up to 24 hours, and the speaker can still play over Wi-Fi or Bluetooth when it's running from battery power alone. The Sonos Play comes with a little battery charging cradle, which you just slot it onto to charge, and you can grab it straight off at a moment's notice without fiddling to unplug.

It's a small thing, but I think it makes a difference to its perceived versatility compared to it being plugged in to charge — I'll dig into that more in the Design section.

Be warned, though, that the cable just has a USB-C connector on the end, and no plug to connect to an outlet. Any USB-C port with 20W of charging power should work, so it could be connected to a device like a computer, or to a power adapter.

The Sonos Play can also be charged using its USB-C port, so you don't need the cable if you take it away for a weekend. You can also charge another device from the USB-C port, if you like, so it can work as a power bank for your phone.

The exact battery figure you get will depend on how you use it (Wi-Fi is more battery-consuming than Bluetooth), but I think Sonos' estimate is about right. I took it off its cradle for three days, using the speaker on Wi-Fi by my desk while I worked during the day for intermittent periods, without charging it at all. At the end of that time, it had 21% battery left.

You can get better battery life from the Marshall Middleton II (30 hours), but only over Bluetooth, not Wi-Fi. I think Sonos has found a good balance of longevity compared to size here.

The one thing about portable use that annoyed me a little was that it turns itself off a little faster than I would like, despite me making sure that the option in the settings to turn off faster to preserve battery life was off. To turn it back on, you need to use the on-off button on the back, and it takes a moment — I'd much prefer a button on top to make this feel less like a hassle.

There can also be times when the flexibility of the speaker conflicts with itself. For example, I put my two units into a stereo pair to test the sound, planning to live with the setup for a few days. But once they're in a pair, the Sonos app (and AirPlay) only want to treat them as a pair, meaning that the idea of grabbing one to take into another room on a whim no longer works. Take them both, or don't bother.

I ended up doing a more intensive stereo audio test, and then switching them back to individual speakers because I was enjoying them more in their most flexible form.

I'll finish this section by touching briefly on the Sonos app. It remains one of the best when it comes to streaming service support, and I've had no problems when it comes to reliability testing either these speakers, or with my current Sonos soundbar/home theater setups.

Setting the speakers up was absolutely seamless, and it was then easy to activate Automatic TruePlay tuning, in which the Sonos Play speaker listens to its own sound output and adjust the sound to better fit the space it's placed in.

The Sonos app can be a bit slow to load new music or screens, though, and there are some design issues that seem needlessly confusing. Sonos CEO Tom Conrad identified some that he plans to fix in an interview with me ahead of the launch of the speakers, though my own gripes are that it's silly that if you tap the cog icon in the top corner to be taken to the Settings screen, the cog icon stays in the corner, meaning it's possible to open the app, tap that because you want to go to the Settings screen, and nothing happens because you don't realize you're already in part of the Settings screen.

I also hate Sonos' design for its on/off switches. They go from black with a white dot, to white with a black dot, depending on whether they're on or off. But which is on and which is off? It's a terrible piece of user communication, you have to play to figure it out. (Black with a white dot is on.)

Now, a lot of other streaming device apps are equally flawed — some have better interfaces, but worse streaming support, for example — so at this point I find the app far from a dealbreaker, but I'm looking forward to seeing it get better. I actually nearly always use AirPlay for playing music anyway, so after setup, I don't interact with it much.

For those who don't want to use an app at all, the Sonos Play support Amazon Alexa and Sonos Voice Control options — but its mic can also be disabled using a switch on the back (which also disables Automatic TruePlay, since it fully disconnects the mic from the system).

• Features score: 4.5 / 5

Sonos Play review: sound quality

• Bass is powerful, but a little heavy handed
• Very well-rounded sound, but best with the volume over 40%
• About as good as speakers of this size sound

The Sonos Play sits in a slightly odd position when it comes to judging its sound quality, because it's a hybrid home and portable speaker. I'm going to mostly judge it based on comparisons with other portable speakers, rather than home speakers, because the design constraints of being portable affect what sound quality you can reasonably expect from it — but I will also compare it to the Sonos Era 100.

As is standard from Sonos, there's a really well-rounded sound with a fair amount of heft across the whole frequency range. The thing that immediately jumps out is the amount of bass depth there is for something pretty small, thanks to its dual passive radiators.

Much like the Era 100, the bass is controlled a little more loosely — a little more heavy-handedly — than I'd like. As with a lot of passive radiator-based speakers, it can feel boomy depending on what surface you place it on, too, but that's situational. It's a trade off in exchange for the punch it provides, and I'm quite happy with it on balance.

The second thing that jumps out is the overall power, which the bass only helps emphasize. This speaker can fill any room in my house without coming close to breaking a sweat or over-stretching itself — in fact, as I'll come back to, it's at its best once you dial up to a certain volume.

The two angled tweeters serve up high frequencies that sound clear and well elevated out of the rest of the mix, with this likely aided by the use of two angled tweeters pointing left and right.

Sonos has also claimed that this set enables stereo sound from a single speaker, but this is, alas, a fantasy. Firing up Crooked by Smilk, the opening of which is basically ‘Now That’s What I Call Stereo Imaging’, reveals only the most minimal stereo effect even from a song that really push separation to the max.

The mid-range is able to find a good amount of detail and solidity in different elements, so that even complex mixes still feel like that have all their constituent parts, rather than getting mushed together in the way that some portable speakers are prone to.

The mid-range and treble are both relatively tame and a little softer on dynamic attack than larger and more expensive portable speakers, or non-portable home speakers. That's a compromise here compared to the Sonos Era 100, for sure — that speaker just has the extra edge in enough areas of sound reproduction to feel like a slightly more robust, more gripping, more revealing listen.

However, compared to the JBL Charge 6, the Sonos Play is a significant step up in the overall reproduction of a song, with the mid-range the clear area of difference. On the JBL Charge 6, it's simple way too thin, lacking in expression, presence within the sound balance, and really limited in range — in particular, the Charge 6 really struggles to ramp from mid-range down through to bass, compared to the Sonos Play.

Young Blood by The Naked & Famous relies on a foundation of lower-mid synth in its verses, and without this, the song is unbalanced. The JBL Charge 6 just doesn't have this balance in its register, but the Sonos Play is able to add the weight.

The Charge 6 also has less deep bass reach than the Sonos Play — it handles its bass well, but there's just less lower-frequency grunt going on.

I should note here that we have highly rated the JBL Charge 6 for its sound reproduction compared to other portable speakers — this is just what spending the extra on the Sonos Play gets you.

That said, the JBL Charge 6 has a slightly more dynamic treble than the Play, though, with a little better handling of transients (ie, handling the sudden start of a sound) that make it feel more detail-rich. I still prefer the Sonos Play overall, for sure.

However, I mentioned above that going above a certain volume opens things up for the Sonos Play. Pushing past the 40% mark leaves the bass working in the same way that it was before, but suddenly the upper-mids and treble get a boost — a subtle but clear change in profile when ticking up.

This adds to the expansiveness of the sound, and where certain songs that should be thrilling could feel tame at times at lower volumes, they all really wake up past 40%. The Sonos Era 300 had this trait as well, when I tested it.

The only question is whether you want the Sonos Play that loud all the time — in my bedroom, 25% was the volume where I mostly wanted to use it, for example. But again, I still think the sound is very good for a portable speaker even at the lower volumes. It's just that when you can let it off its leash, it improves further.

Speaking of letting it off its leash, I also tried the sound in a stereo pair. As is often the case, it gives the speakers room to do a little more by sharing the burden, and in particular I noticed that the bass felt like it was able to be a little more controlled at the same level of power, but the mids came across weightier, again improving on the lower-mids particularly.

I don't think it opened up more detail in the treble or anything like that, but two of these are really good at filling even a large room with well-rounded, well-dispersed sound, without pushing themselves hard in a way that can affect the sound quality. You'd rarely need to push them even as far as the 40% volume mark — a pair of Plays is such a powerful system consider how small they are.

For my last sound comparison, I broke out the Sonos Roam 2. This comparison actually made the Sonos Roam 2 look impressive, because it's remarkable how close its sound signature comes to the Play. But the Play's audio is much bigger, much deeper, and more refined in all areas.

• Sound quality score: 4.5 / 5

Sonos Play review: design

• Home-friendly design, but still IP67-rated and drop-proof
• Great size, weight and charging design to grab quickly
• Buttons aren’t as clear as they could be

The design of the Sonos Play sits very much in line with other Sonos speakers. It has a hard dotted grille like most of its designs, with a rubbery top and bottom, like the Sonos Roam 2. The rubberized portion has a hefty lip at the top where it overlaps with the hard grille, and this makes me thing more of older Sonos speakers (like the Sonos One) than the Era 100, in a fond way.

I like the size of the Sonos Play a lot. I can grab it easily in one hand from the side, thanks in part to a smart concave groove on the back that's also rubberized, giving you a little grip aid.

It's weighty, but not too heavy to happily grab and carry around. It's about a third heavier than the JBL Charge 6, but is nearly a third lighter than the Marshall Middleton II, so finds itself in a good balance.

It has a flexible hook on the top of the back, which can use to carry it around or to hang on a bathroom door or something. This feels nice and sturdy.

It's IP67-rated, so should be able to handle all but the worst of water-related accidents. It should be able to handle complete immersion for a short time, so it's no risk for baths or for pool parties.

The charging cable is a little oval of plastic with a lip, and there's not much to it, but it holds on surfaces well enough when you're removing or replacing the speaker, and the charging points always line up perfectly.

I really think Sonos has nailed it with the core physical design here, and not just in a physical sense. Yes, it's durable, it's got a hook, and perhaps most importantly it looks nice — you'll happily have this thing out on a shelf, whereas a lot of people would choose to hide the JBL Charge 6 in a drawer.

But the design also make a different to my mentality, I've found. It's about how its size, weight and charging cradle lodge into my mind that this is a speaker that I not only can grab to take with me for a music blast, but that I should grab because it's so easy. There's no downside.

The Sonos Move 2 has an identical setup — durable, powerful, portable, easy charging cradle — but it's too large and heavy. You have to reach around to carry it from the back using its carry handle. If I'm taking that anywhere else, it's because I'm committing to being there for a while. I plan ahead.

And I have small portable speakers already in my house (shout out to by beloved B&O A1) that I could grab and take anywhere with me easily — but they're stored in a drawer upstairs, because I don't have them out most of the time.

But the Sonos Play has become my new kitchen speaker, so it's always out on the side, ready to grab. And it's so grabbable because it's about the thickness of a drink can, and I don't need to fiddle to unplug it because it uses a charging cradle, so I can just swipe it one-handed as I walk past. And it's already turned on and ready to play, assuming it's not already playing, because it's the main speaker in that room.

These are small, subtle design elements that add up to me feeling quite differently about the Sonos Play than almost any other speaker I've had, from the many Wi-Fi options to many portable Bluetooth speakers. As the weather where I am improves, the Sonos Play has quickly become my buddy that I take with me more; I grab the one from my kitchen to take outdoors when I sit out there, and I grab the one from my bedroom to take to the bathroom to blast tunes while I shave.

There must be a 'however', though, and it's the controls. I already mentioned that the on/off button is on the back, and while it's large and easy to find, I would prefer that you could get it to turn back on just by pressing something on top.

But the top buttons are also annoyingly disguised. They're distinguished only by symbols, not any kind of actual raised button element. And 'distinguished' is far too strong a word, because they're the same color and matte material as the rest of the top, so they're genuinely hard to see in some lighting conditions.

They also don't feel super distinct under the fingers. You get used to it, because you've only got four controls — volume down, play/pause (which also skips tracks with a multi-press), volume up, and voice assistant activation — but they just seem unnecessarily disguised.

• Design score: 4.5 / 5

Sonos Play review: value

• It's pricey for a portable speaker…
• But few things are as versatile for the same cost
• It's priced in line with competitors at the same audio level

The Sonos Play is not cheap. For only a little more than the Sonos Play, you can get both a Sonos Era 100 SL and the JBL Charge 6, providing you with the core versatility of the Sonos Play — a powerful home speaker and robust portable speaker. But that's two devices, and part of the draw here is one device that can do both — simpler and more efficient.

But the price is also right in line with other powerful speakers at a similar level of audio quality, like the Marshall Middleton II — and it does things the Marshall doesn't. The JBL Charge 6 is a five-star portable speaker that's nearly half the price, so if the portable side is your priority, it makes sense to get that and save so much money… but the Sonos does sound better, offers more versatility, and looks way nicer to have as a home speaker.

When I look at other options at the same price, is anything ticking as many boxes as the Play? Pricey, yes, but more than justified. I'm not sure I'd buy a stereo pair over other wireless options you can get for $600 / £600 though, such as the Kanto Ren, since you lose some of the versatility in a pair.

• Value score: 4 / 5

Should I buy the Sonos Play?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Sonos Play review: also consider

How I tested the Sonos Play

• Tested over three weeks at home
• Compared with other Sonos speakers, and options from other brands

I had two Sonos Play units at home to test, over the course of three weeks. They were updated with the same software that the products will launch with, including all the various features.

I tested over Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and using the Sonos app and Apple AirPlay 2. I mainly listened to music on Apple Music.

I've been reviewing speakers for 15 years, and I test audio products of all kinds, from Bluetooth speakers to floorstanding passive speakers.

• First reviewed: March 2026
• Read TechRadar’s reviews guarantee

In the build up to the launch of the new Sonos Play and Sonos Era 100 SL speakers, I had the chance to speak to Sonos CEO Tom Conrad not just about these speakers, but about the many changes he's made to the company since taking over in January 2025, and other changes happening in the industry at the moment.

Below is our full conversation, covering every topic — but you can read just our conversation about the app disaster and how the company is changing as a result (and what Conrad still doesn't like about it) here, or just our discussion of wireless soundbars and Dolby Atmos FlexConnect here, or just our talk about what the music streaming services can do better here.

Conrad has been a part of Sonos as a board member for eight years, and became the boss when former CEO Patrick Spence left following a disastrous app update in 2024 that changed the company's perception drastically. It seems like an appropriate position for a man who had a tattoo of the Sonos Ace headphones on his arm even before he got this job.

After our initial introductions, Conrad wasted no time in jumping into his pitch for the direction of the company, and how that informed the launch of these new products.

Tom Conrad: One of the first things that I said to the team when I took the job as CEO was that I think we really make just one product, which is a sound system for the home. Any individual device is just a way into the system or to deepen your attachment to it. The system of Sonos really is the product.

Now, of course, we sell speakers and soundbars and headphones and components. But what has always made Sonos special is that the experience gets better every time you add another room, a stereo pair, surround sound in the living room, music moving with you from the kitchen to a road trip — really a system where the whole is genuinely greater than the sum of the parts.

And I think that really sets Sonos apart from every other audio company on the planet. And so I think that's the context to understand [Sonos Play]. We're not launching a new speaker, but we're really opening a new front door to the system.

13 years ago, Play:1 introduced millions of people to this idea. Actually we sold more than 10 million of them, and remarkably, nine out of 10 are still in use today.

And Play:1 didn't just introduce an audience to whole-home audio, it really invented the category and defined what internet-connected home audio could be.

When we started this project [the Sonos Play], we asked a simple question: If we were designing the perfect fundamental building block for the Sonos system today, knowing everything we've learned over the last two decades, what would it look like?

And as an intentional callback to the speaker that started it all, we're calling this new product Sonos Play.

And when you put Sonos Play next to the Play:1, you can see how much has changed. Play:1 was a mono single tweeter speaker with a midwoofer. Sonos Play is true stereo with dual tweeters, a dedicated midwoofer and, frankly, a soundstage that just absolutely fills the room.

The bass is deeper, the amplification architecture is three generations ahead of where we were with Play:1. It has automatic TruePlay that continuously adapts the sound to wherever the speaker happens to be sitting, and then there's just all of the technological stuff that didn't exist in 2013 — Wi Fi 6, microphone arrays for AI conversation.

Matt Bolton: I also feel like there's a couple of design elements in the Play that look more like the Play:1 and the Sonos One than the Era 300. It's got this bigger like white lip at the top and some elements of the slightly more old-school Sonos design aesthetic.

TC: That's right, it is a callback in a bunch of ways. I mean, it looks really nice next to a 300, certainly from the same family.

As beautiful as the, as the Play:1 was in its day, and you still see them all over the world, we have moved dramatically beyond the design language of that product, from that era. So [the Play is] just aesthetically, it's a great step forward.

The last exciting thing about Play is that while Play:1 was designed to sit kind of permanently on a shelf in your home, Sonos Play comes with a charging cradle and has a full-day battery in it.

So in addition to being the perfect speaker for your kitchen or for a stereo pair for your office, it's also the best speaker for you to take with you, whether it's into the backyard for a dinner party or to throw in your bag to take on vacation.

It's beautifully between the audio characteristics of Sonos Roam and Sonos Move. it's a pretty remarkable Goldilocks speaker, if I do say so myself. We're really, really excited about it.

MB: I feel like the fact that you're talking about fresh front door products is an indication in itself that, after 15 months of being quiet, you've had to go through some kind of reset. So can you you talk through what you guys have been changing internally?

TC: If you think about the history of the company, we had a decade under the stewardship of John McFarlane, the company's founder. His vision was really all driven by the idea of filling every home with music on the backs of this emergent streaming moment, that he predicted so accurately.

But if you were to critique his decade, it might only be that we didn't ship that much hardware — a couple of amplifiers, a controller, you know, the initial Play:5.

It wasn't until Patrick became CEO, in our second decade, that the company really found its footing with respect to reliably shipping a couple of new products every single year. In fact, his stated goal for the company was to turn it into kind of a new product introduction machine. And, I mean, I'm the incredible beneficiary of that work!

But if you were to critique his chapter, I think the unintended consequence of that laser-like focus on new products was the company lost some of its connection to the idea that the product is actually Sonos. That the individual product launches are meant to extend the idea of what the system can be in a home and in the world.

The shift in my chapter, in some ways, is to marry the best of both of those worlds, to return to the idea that Sonos is a comprehensive system for audio in the home that you need in the same way that you need lighting and plumbing and Wi Fi; you need a sound system for your home. But to also build on our capability around new product introduction.

For my first year at the company, we had to pour so much of our energy into righting the ship with respect to the software platform that underpins all of the system experiences, that we purposefully paused our new hardware introductions to get back to par on that front.

And so it is an exciting moment to be able to say, OK, we're back, and we're launching new products again, and we'll have more in the back half of the year, because, you know, I like to say that Sonos is a company that's 100% software and 100% hardware, and so it's nice to get the 100% back that's hardware.

MB: It's interesting you mentioned that moment, because with something like the Era 100 SL, it's not like it requires a huge amount of new R&D to develop it, so it's clearly a decision you've made to wait for this time to release it. So what is it about the stage you've reached with the platform or the other work you've been doing that made now the right time?

TC: Then you look at where we were when I came in the door, we were in the middle of trying to recover from our missteps in the spring of 2024 with the launch of the new app and software platform.

Candidly, the real story there is that we just changed too much too fast, and made a bunch of tactical errors along the way of rolling it out to our customers, and then paid a very dear price. As did our customers.

I've been a customer for nearly 20 years. I've been a partner to the company for 15 or something, going back to the integrations we did between Pandora and Sonos in my days building Pandora. I've been on the board for eight years. I love this company

And Sonos in my own home is a huge part of, you know, the daily delight and satisfaction and ambiance I enjoy when I'm at home. As much as anything, I took the job to fix the product and, and get the company back to a place where we're just reliably delighting tens of millions of customers around the world again.

A lot of that was on the back of getting the software right. And so I wanted the company to be just laser focused on that return.

And with respect to the timing on Era 100 SL, our goal with Era 100 SL, frankly, was really to anchor the product line in an attainable price point for our customers. There's a lot of work that went into Era 100 SL to get us to a point where we could offer it at this entry-level price point while not compromising on audio quality at all.

So while it might look like this is as simple as removing some microphones, there's a comprehensive look at the cost of the product from top to bottom to get it to this new entry-level price.

MB: So there's an amount of re-engineering inside to to help you get it there?

TC: That's right.

MB: The other outcome of everything you guys have been through with the app is that it now means that any further updates you make to the app are automatically a huge deal, whether they deserve to be or not. Does that affect how you're approaching it or how you communicate about it?

TC: I think that when you make software that people use every day, and it's a big part of their life, it's always a big deal when you make changes. It's certainly true that there's additional scrutiny on Sonos, but as a software creator, I've always felt a keen responsibility to move my audience along with the changes and updates that we're making, in a really thoughtful and methodical way.

And so, as an example of that playing out at Sonos, you know, I'd say there were kind of three things that we had to improve upon after the disastrous launch in 2024. We had to fix performance and reliability — we had to restore baseline functionality that had been dropped from the product in its initial release. And we had to improve the user experience of the offering as well.

And it's really the third thing that we're only just now able to tackle [now]. If I'm candid about my assessment of the app, I think it's peculiar. I think the company made a range of decisions about the user interface that are just not consistent with what you see in any other music streaming app, for example.

I mean: all kinds of strange swipe behaviors and a search affordance that floats above the screen in a kind of weirdly invisible way — cards upon cards upon cards as you navigate through the app, none of which is conventional.

So when we sit with our customers in their homes and observe them using the app, they get lost, they don't know where they are. It's not clear to them how to get to just basic functionality. There's a funny kind of search blindness — the interface that we chose for search actually takes up more pixels on the screen than a typical search interface, but people don't even see it. They're like, 'I can't find search' because it's presented in such an unconventional way.

And so, we're now at the place where we can update the app to return it to more conventional choices. But it is, as you point out, another set of changes for our customers.

We're handling this opportunity in a really different way. I've been on Reddit, for example, describing the changes and asking our customers there to give us feedback back about their own experience learning to use Sonos and living with it every day. We will roll changes out to our beta channel and even there, our users will be able to opt into the experience.

And then when we take it to production, we'll similarly have opt-in experiences and a gradual roll out and iteration. We've already learned a lot from the perspective of our customers on Reddit after my invitation to them [recently] to share their thoughts.

None of this is a surprising way to operate a scale consumer software product, but it's certainly the set of best practices and, frankly, one of the missteps of the company in 2024 is that we didn't more closely adhere to these norms.

MB: There was a real sense that your competitors could smell blood in the water in 2024, and they really went hard on their own products going for, going for the switchers. Do you think you can win back people who did switch to WiiM or other platforms? Or do you think it's more about using these new "front door" products to go after an expanded market?

TC: Certainly, anyone that was frustrated with Sonos in the last couple of years, I hope will consider us again. When I wear my business hat, there was a cost of goodwill with our customers from this chapter, I think it really most impacted advocacy and repurchases. I don't think it was a huge driver of people fully leaving Sonos and going to other platforms.

So my my hope is that all of the people who had a bad experience in 2024 are having good experiences today, and are starting to feel better about Sonos, and can be excited about a product like Sonos Play or Era 100 SL to extend their experience in their own home, or to evangelize it to their friends and family as something that they have to have in their homes.

I think that was the real cost, it was sort of a cost of advocacy and evangelism more than it was people switching to one of the the smaller players who purports to do the same kinds of things we do.

MB: You guys certainly were one of the most recognizable brands in tech — I mean, still are, no doubt — but that must have been a real eye-opening moment that momentum and past performance only takes you so far, right?

TC: Yeah, for sure. I mean, it certainly was a moment that changed my life.

In the aftermath of that, you just have to show up in people's life with some humility and do the hard work of earning their trust back through great execution, great product, great software, great experiences, and never forget what you put people through.

MB: I believe you restructured the company. How is that changing how you're working and helping to make improvements?

TC: When I came in in January of 2025, I quickly made a bunch of changes. I moved us from a business-unit orientation, where we had a home theater team, and a portables team, and a professional team, a headphones team — to a functional [organization], where we have a hardware organization and a software organization, and a product design organization.

And the benefit there is that it really allows you to get the company thinking about what we do as a system and not a collection of categories.

In the process of doing that, we also eliminated a bunch of management layers, which were standing in the way of execution. So yeah, we're definitely functioning differently today than we were a year ago.

MB: How would you say that change in function manifested in designing and launching these two products?

TC: It allowed us to really think holistically about how the product fits into the lineup. I think under the old guard, a product like Play might have been principally conceptualized alongside the various other kinds of mid-tier portable speakers, and would have been scrutinized internally and marketed on [technical specs] around battery life and portability and so forth.

We've really focused on how we make this a really great part of the Sonos system — the 'Goldilocks' perfect speaker, if you like.

MB: It's interesting you say that because I remember when the Move 2 came out, one of the things that occurred very quickly to me is that it has, if not the exact same speaker configuration, an extremely similar speaker configuration to the Era 100. Are you saying that with the Play, you're just working on the Play, you're not looking at what technology you have elsewhere that you can borrow?

TC: Well, no, in some ways the opposite, particularly as it relates to software. We're thinking more fundamentally about: How does this fit into the overall offering? How does it make the the system of Sonos more comprehensive?

With Play, I really do think it's kind of the ideal building block. I mean, when my friends and family ask me about Sonos, I'm going to start telling them they should put a Sonos Play in every room, or a stereo pair in their family room.

It's a phenomenal-sounding speaker and just has so much utility relative to anything that we've ever done before

MB: We've talked a lot about the Sonos system in particular as it pertains to the music side. I wanted to ask about home theater as well, because we're on the cusp of a major change in that sector with wireless connectivity, particularly from the TV to the soundbar. LG and Samsung are exploring proprietary options that lock out companies like Sonos, and push people to buy the same soundbar brand as their TV. Is this a trend you are concerned about?

TC: As you know, we're by far the most successful player in home theater, and consistently taking more and more market share from the companies that you're talking about

It's a huge part of our business, and we're the pioneer in wirelessly distributing audio around the family room, and we'll have our own things to say about how that evolves in the coming quarters.

MB: What do you think of Dolby Atmos FlexConnect? Is that something you would support?

So FlexConnect is interesting. There are really three things that have to happen in a FlexConnect-style implementation. You've got to get the bits from the media to the speaker, whether that's through the television or through the set-top box or through the soundbar, something has to get the bits into the air.

And then you have to position the speakers in the room, understand where they are and what their orientation is.

And then the last piece is that, understanding the speakers' position and the bits from the device, you have to render the bits appropriately for that position and orientation.

Dolby has done a great job of telling the story of FlexConnect as encompassing all three dimensions, but the technology of FlexConnect is actually just that last bit. It's taking the positional information [of the speakers] and the bits [from the media] once they're on the speaker, and rendering it.

And, the other two dimensions — positioning, and the transmittal of the bits actually from the source to the speakers — is sort of left as an exercise for the student, which is why the LG solution is proprietary to LG and the TCL solution is proprietary to TCL.

And you can imagine that — even as much as Dolby wants to talk about the universal character of FlexConnect in the same way they talk about Atmos — the LGs and TCLs of the world might not be that motivated to create a system whereby you can mix and match speakers [from other brands] with their televisions.

I guess I could just say that we're interested in that entire space, the entire domain of: How do you get the bits from the source to the speakers? How do you position the speakers in three-dimensional space? And how do you render? We'll continue to work on our roadmap.

MB: The old Sonos was a really leaky ship when it came to product launches before your time. Is that something you want to change? I've got to say, I yearn for us to go back to the days when companies showed us tech six months, eight months, before it launched — to get a feel for how people responded to it. Could you imagine the company operating in that way?

TC: You know, the funny thing about the period where Sonos was sort of a leaky ship is that it was a period where the company, I think, was trying to be at its most secretive. In some ways, I think that Sonos culturally, internally, fashioned itself like a mini Apple, and really tried to hold its cards close to its vest.

As much as I've been a little evasive about some of the things you've asked about our roadmap, I'm conscious that we're not Apple, and that I think we can talk a little bit more about where we're going and the future that we see without being so concerned about the secrecy of it all.

I sort of love that since I've gotten here, the leaks have dried up from that standpoint, and I think it suggests that the people inside the company are feeling excited and proud of their work, and not wanting to see it out in the world in advance of when the company decides to reveal it.

Where my head is, is somewhere between where Apple sits and what you would like for us to do. So stay tuned, we should keep talking!

MB: I want to ask about the largely rumored but semi-confirmed set-top box and smart software that seemed to be developed in partnership with another company. Are you willing to talk about how far it got, or what your relationship to it was?

Without getting into specifics of that project, if it exists, I will say that part of what I had to do when I came in the door was to make some hard decisions about where we were going to focus. The company was, demonstrably, spread too thin, was trying to do too many things, and was struggling to execute with excellence across all of them.

So I tried to focus our energies on the programs that I thought that were most aligned with our differentiating power in the market. I remain really confident that the things that we chose to focus on are the things that are going to have the most impact on Sonos, in the near term.

MB: Given your background at Pandora, what do you think of music-streaming services today and how they integrate into the Sonos app? Do you, from the Sonos side, have any frustrations with them, and then personally what do you think?

TC: One of the things I'm really excited about in terms of our software roadmap is working more closely with our music service partners. All I really care about with with respect to listening to music on Sonos is getting the customer as quickly and seamlessly as possible to their outcome.

If that means AirPlay or Bluetooth or Spotify Connect or experiences inside of Spotify versus experiences inside of our app… I don't care. I just want it to work every time, and have it be completely seamless. I feel like we have a better relationship with Apple, Amazon, Spotify than we have in years, and I'm really excited about the work we're driving together.

I think the only thing I will say about the state of streaming music is that, you know, the iPod invented the core conventions of modern digital music, and then in 2004, Pandora and Last FM, I suppose, kind of invented the modern conventions around personalized streaming audio. And it's been 20 years, and it's surprising to me how little has changed in that experience.

We've gone from a world where you had access to just the CDs you bought to a world where you have access to hundreds of millions of songs in your pocket, and yet the user interface of it all is kind of just some hierarchical browsing, and then a fullscreen audio player with skip buttons and things.

I guess quietly, at night, I sort of imagine a future where there's more innovation and [questioning] what does it mean to navigate the whole entire world of music with something that wasn't designed for 1,000 songs in your pocket.

MB: Do you think that the physically small size of phone screens is holding us back in that regard?

TC: You know what I think is mostly holding us back in that regard? Apple is motivated by selling hardware, and Spotify is motivated by reducing licensing costs, and no one is motivated by: let's make a great and innovative music discovery experience for the consumer.

I spoke to Sonos CEO Tom Conrad recently, to discuss the launch of the company's new Sonos Play and Sonos Era 100 SL speakers, and how the company's big changes under his leadership influenced their development.

Naturally, we also discussed what really went wrong with the Sonos app disaster and how he's directing the team the fix it, and I also asked Conrad whether the launch of Dolby Atmos FlexConnect is a danger or an opportunity for Sonos.

But given the fact that Conrad's history includes 10 years at Pandora in the early days of music streaming — he was Chief Technology Officer when he left in 2024 — and that Sonos is so deeply connected to the music-streaming services, I wanted to ask what he thought about these services today, both in terms of working with them now on the Sonos app, and personally as a streaming pioneer.

"One of the things I'm really excited about in terms of our software roadmap is working more closely with our music service partners," he begins. "All I really care about with with respect to listening to music on Sonos is getting the customer as quickly and seamlessly as possible to their outcome.

"If that means AirPlay or Bluetooth or Spotify Connect or experiences inside of Spotify versus experiences inside of our app… I don't care. I just want it to work every time, and have it be completely seamless. I feel like we have a better relationship with Apple, Amazon, Spotify than we have in years, and I'm really excited about the work we're driving together."

I expect those who use the Sonos app instead of AirPlay or other direct streaming tech will be pleased with the idea of being able to get into music quicker and more easily, but it's the more personal insights I'm more interesting in, and Conrad shared some of those too.

"You know, the iPod invented the core conventions of modern digital music, and then in 2004, Pandora and Last FM, I suppose, kind of invented the modern conventions around personalized streaming audio," he told me. "And it's been 20 years, and it's surprising to me how little has changed in that experience.

"We've gone from a world where you had access to just the CDs you bought to a world where you have access to hundreds of millions of songs in your pocket, and yet the user interface of it all is kind of just some hierarchical browsing, and then a fullscreen audio player with skip buttons and things.

"I guess quietly, at night, I sort of imagine a future where there's more innovation and [questioning] what does it mean to navigate the whole entire world of music with something that wasn't designed for 1,000 songs in your pocket."

Motivational speaker

I asked if Conrad thinks the physically small size of phone screens is a restrictive element that holds us back from developing new ways of interacting with music.

"You know what I think is mostly holding us back in that regard? Apple is motivated by selling hardware, and Spotify is motivated by reducing licensing costs, and no one is motivated by: let's make a great and innovative music discovery experience for the consumer."

I point out that Qobuz and Tidal are more focused on music discovery, but don't have the bottomless resources that Spotify and Apple do, which Conrad agrees with — but overall, I agree with him.

I always say that the vinyl revival and the popularity of the best turntables here in the 2020s is in no small part because people want music to feel special, with the thrill of discovery. Physical media gives people the excitement of successfully finding something they didn't have before when they're looking through a record store's boxes — the power of a surprise.

Obviously, it would be foolish to replicate the scarcity element of physical media in a streaming app, but Conrad's suggestion of new ways to navigate and discover music seems like a way to scratch that same itch of making music apps exciting by providing more ways for you to find something you've never heard before, and to then explore that artist or genre.

The discovery features of music streaming services feel so narrow — they either replace radio or throw a pipeline of music at you without context, and with only the foggiest sense of why you'd be interested in it.

I'd like it to feel interactive, like by opening the correct door, searching in the correct box, or asking the correct source, I can find something new to experience. I hope we'll see more innovative interfaces to create the experience of being a smart record hunter in the future.

• Sonos launches two new speakers: Sonos Play and Sonos Era 100 SL
• Sonos Play is a new portable speaker, costing $299 / £299 / AU$499
• Sonos CEO Tom Conrad tells us it's designed as a "front door" to the Sonos system, like the Play:1 speaker was 13 years ago

Sonos has just unveiled its first new music speakers since May 2024: the Sonos Era 100 SL, and a new portable speaker that sits between the Sonos Roam 2 and Sonos Move in the company's lineup. It's called the Sonos Play, and Sonos CEO Tom Conrad tells me that with the Play, "we're not launching a new speaker, but we're really opening a new front door to the system."

The new Sonos Play's name is "an intentional callback" to the Play:1 as the original introductory Sonos speaker, Conrad says, because the idea here is to create a speaker that is the best of all worlds at once. "It's a phenomenal-sounding speaker and just has so much utility relative to anything that we've ever done before," he promises.

The Sonos Play has a smart audio setup for its compact size: there are two angled tweeters for a little stereo separation, with a mid-woofer for mid-range and bass. This is the same approach used in the Sonos Era 100, but because the drivers need to be smaller than in the Era 100, the Play also has two force-opposed bass radiators to help improve low-end power without adding vibrations. "It's beautifully between the audio characteristics of Sonos Roam and Sonos Move," says Conrad.

The idea is that it can provide enough audio power and quality to fill any room at home, either alone or in a stereo pair, but is small enough to take away with you — the Move 2 is a little hefty to take anywhere, even though it's technically portable, as I said in my Sonos Move 2 review.

The Sonos Play supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, and promises up to 24 hours of battery from a single charge, which is impressive compared to even the best portable speakers. It has a USB-C port that can be used as a line-in via an adapter (for one of the best turntables or a similar source) — Sonos really wants this to be able to do anything its other speakers can, as far as possible.

The Sonos Play is IP67-rated, meaning it's pretty dustproof and can be fully immersed in water for a short time without problems. It weighs 2.87lb (1.3kg), and at 4.43 x 7.56 x 3.02 inches (113 x 192 x 77mm), it's small enough to easily take around with you, even if it's not exactly pocketable. It has a little hook on the back for carrying or hanging somewhere.

Obviously, it works as part of the Sonos ecosystem on Wi-Fi (and includes Apple AirPlay 2 support), and comes with a charging base. But it also expands the Sonos system in a new way: multi-speaker support over Bluetooth. You can connect your phone to a Sonos Play over Bluetooth, and then it can transmit the sound to up to three other Play or Move 2 speakers, no matter where you are. It's not as broad a system as Bluetooth Auracast support on some speakers, but that's not available on all phones, and this is a nice upgrade anyway.

The Sonos Play will be released on March 31st, 2026, priced at $299 / £299 / AU$499, so it's definitely not a cheap thing to add to every room. As mid-size Bluetooth speakers go, you're paying a lot more than you would for the five-star JBL Charge 6, for example. But then you wouldn't get the Wi-Fi features that are essential to the best wireless speakers — and, significantly, the Sonos has a much nicer home-friendly design compared to the JBL.

The Era 100 SL looks like a great budget buy

The Sonos Era 100 SL follows the pattern of Sonos' other SL products — it's a cheaper version of the Sonos Era 100. It has the same speaker configuration of two angled tweeters to provide some sense of stereo sound, with a single mid-woofer for mid-range and bass.

It still includes both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, plus a USB-C port that you can connect an adapter to for line-in audio from a turntable or another source. However, it doesn't include any voice control option at all — the mics have been removed to help lower the price. (This also means it doesn't support TruePlay Quick Tuning for iOS and Android, only the iPhone-only full TruePlay.)

With a launch price of $189 / £169 / AU$289 (available on March 26th), it's the cheapest Sonos speaker you can buy in the UK and Australia, though in the US it costs $10 more than the Sonos Roam 2.

Tom Conrad told me that it wasn't just a case of removing the mics to get the speaker to that price, though, and that the speaker was actually reengineered inside to make it less expensive to produce:

"There's a lot of work that went into Era 100 SL to get us to a point where we could offer it at this entry-level price, while not compromising on audio quality at all. While it might look like this is as simple as removing some microphones, there was a comprehensive look at the cost of the product from top to bottom to get it to this new price."

Refocusing on the system, not the devices

I asked Conrad why these models are the choices to lead Sonos' return to launching music-focused speakers, and he emphasized that the big change in how he's approaching the company is to stop treating individual launches as separate products, but to focus on the whole.

"One of the first things that I said to the team when I took the job as CEO was that I think we really make just one product, which is a sound system for the home. Any individual device is just a way into the system or to deepen your attachment to it. The system of Sonos really is the product."

So when it comes to planning launches, he says, "We're thinking more fundamentally about 'how does this fit into the overall offering?' How does it make the the system of Sonos more comprehensive?"

As I mentioned earlier on, he was very keen to reference the original Play:1 (and showed me that he uses one at his desk even today). The name and even some design elements of the new speaker are a callback to that model (the thicker band of plastic at the top of the Play is reminiscent of the Play:1 or Sonos One, compared to the Era 100), but he says it was also about the philosophy:

"13 years ago, Play:1 introduced millions of people to [the idea of the Sonos system]. Actually we sold more than 10 million of them, and remarkably, nine out of 10 are still in use today.

"When we started this project, we asked a simple question. If we were designing the perfect fundamental building block for the Sonos system today, knowing everything we've learned over the last two decades, what would it look like?"

As part of thinking about Sonos itself as a product, Conrad started to restructure the company quickly after he joined permanently in January 2025.

"I moved us from a business-unit orientation, where we had a home theater team, and a portables team, and a professional team, a headphones team — to a functional [organization], where we have a hardware organization and a software organization, and a product design organization.

"And the benefit there is that it really allows you to get the company thinking about what we do as a system and not a collection of categories."

Conrad says the development of the Sonos Play is an example of how changing the structure of the company changes the products themselves.

"It allowed us to really think holistically about how the product fits into the lineup," he says. "I think under the old guard, a product like Play might have been, principally conceptualized alongside the various other kinds of mid-tier portable speakers, and would have been scrutinized internally and marketed on [technical specs] around battery life and portability and so forth. We've really focused on how we make this a really great part of the Sonos system — the 'Goldilocks' perfect speaker, if you like.

"I really do think it's the ideal building block. When my friends and family ask me about Sonos, I'm going to start telling them they should put a Sonos Play in every room, or a stereo pair in their family room."

Of course, any discussion about the direction Sonos is moving in can't ignore the app debacle that led to Sonos' nightmare year in 2024, and Conrad and I discussed that in depth.

You can read Conrad's analysis of what went wrong before he joined, how mistakes were made, what's being improved, and what changes still need to happen in my discussion with him here — but here's a little tidbit:

"If I'm candid about my assessment of the app, I think it's peculiar. I think the company made a range of decisions about the user interface that are just not consistent with what you see in any other music streaming apps, for example.

"I mean: all kinds of strange swipe behaviors and a search affordance that floats above the screen in a kind of weirdly invisible way, cards upon cards upon cards as you navigate through the app, none of which is conventional. And so when we sit with our customers in their homes and observe them using the app, they get lost, they don't know where they are. It's not clear to them how to get to just basic functionality."

Sonos has just unveiled its first new music speakers since the Sonos Roam 2 in May 2024, and the first since its infamous app change that shook the whole company and led to the replacement of then-CEO Patrick Spence with current CEO Tom Conrad in January 2025.

For the launch of Sonos Play and Sonos Era 100 SL, I spoke to Conrad about his big structural changes to the company and how they impacted the development of these speakers. So my next questions are about what else Sonos was actually doing during its quiet 2025.

What's the inside story on the app's changes, and how does the company plan to win back the trust it used to have?

"For my first year at the company, we had to pour so much of our energy into righting the ship with respect to the software platform that underpins all of the system experiences, that we purposefully paused our new hardware introductions to get back to par on that front," he explains.

"We were in the middle of trying to recover from our missteps in the spring of 2024 with the launch of the new app and software platform. Candidly, the real story there is that we just changed too much too fast, and made a bunch of tactical errors along the way of rolling it out to our customers, and then paid a very dear price. As did our customers."

Taking stock of history

Conrad is generally in a pretty candid mood for our conversation about the problems with the app, and why people were so frustrated with it — but he's also clearly incredibly proud to be at Sonos, even if he's trying to be clear-eyed about it.

"If you think about the history of the company, we had a decade under the stewardship of John McFarlane, the company's founder. His vision was really all driven by the idea of filling every home with music on the backs of this emergent streaming moment, that he predicted so accurately. But if you were to critique his decade, it might only be that we didn't ship that much hardware — a couple of amplifiers, a controller, you know, the initial Play:5," Conrad says.

"It wasn't until Patrick became CEO, in our second decade, that the company really found its footing with respect to reliably shipping a couple of new products every single year. In fact, his stated goal for the company was to turn it into kind of a new product introduction machine. And, I mean, I'm the incredible beneficiary of that work!

"But if you were to critique his chapter, I think the unintended consequence of that laser-like focus on new products was the company lost some of its connection to the idea that the product is actually Sonos. That the individual product launches are meant to extend the idea of what the system can be in a home and in the world."

Digging into that topic with Conrad, it seems like he's identified a disconnect between how the company treated the software, and how the users treat it.

"In the aftermath of that, you just have to show up in people's life with some humility and do the hard work of earning their trust back through great execution, great product, great software, great experiences, and never forget what you put people through," he says.

I mention that any changes the company makes to the app in the future will automatically become a big deal, whether the changes really deserve to be or not.

"I think that when you make software that people use every day, and it's a big part of their life, it's always a big deal when you make changes. It's certainly true that there's additional scrutiny on Sonos, but as a software creator, I've always felt a keen responsibility to move my audience along with the changes and updates that we're making, in a really thoughtful and methodical way."

How are things looking now?

I obviously want to get into the work that Sonos has been doing, and how happy Conrad is with it now, and he's pleasingly open and unsparing with his assessment.

"I'd say there were kind of three things that we had to improve upon after the disastrous launch in 2024. We had to fix performance and reliability — we had to restore baseline functionality that had been dropped from the product in its initial release. And we had to improve the user experience of the offering as well.

"And it's really the third thing that we're only just now able to tackle [now]. If I'm candid about my assessment of the app, I think it's peculiar. I think the company made a range of decisions about the user interface that are just not consistent with what you see in any other music streaming app, for example. I mean: all kinds of strange swipe behaviors and a search affordance that floats above the screen in a kind of weirdly invisible way — cards upon cards upon cards as you navigate through the app, none of which is conventional.

"So when we sit with our customers in their homes and observe them using the app, they get lost, they don't know where they are. It's not clear to them how to get to just basic functionality. There's a funny kind of search blindness — the interface that we chose for search actually takes up more pixels on the screen than a typical search interface, but people don't even see it. They're like, 'I can't find search' because it's presented in such an unconventional way.

"And so, we're now at the place where we can update the app to return it to more conventional choices. But it is, as you point out, another set of changes for our customers."

The ill-fated set-top box, and the leaky ship

At the end of 2024, while unhappiness with the app was still strong among the Sonos community, information leaked that Sonos was preparing a streaming box, which would be high-priced and yet supposedly developed using ad-based tech from a software partner called The Trade Desk. Sonos later confirmed this partnership, adding that it was "excited to explore" integration with The Trade Desk's Ventura OS.

And then, after previous CEO Spence left and Conrad took over, reports said that the project had been quietly dropped. I asked Conrad about this, and how it factored into the rethinking and restructuring at Sonos over the last year.

"Without getting into specifics of that project, if it exists," he says, smiling, "I will say that part of what I had to do when I came in the door was to make some hard decisions about where we were going to focus. The company was, demonstrably, spread too thin, was trying to do too many things, and was struggling to execute with excellence across all of them.

"So I tried to focus our energies on the programs that I thought that were most aligned with our differentiating power in the market. I remain really confident that the things that we chose to focus on are the things that are going to have the most impact on Sonos, in the near term."

I pointed out that Sonos has been a very leaky ship in the past, with upcoming product info regularly splashed across the tech press — the Sonos Era 300 leaked in detail nearly a year before its introduction. I asked Conrad if that's something he actually wants to change, because I personally with we could go back a few decades to when tech companies talked openly about products months and months in advance so we could get a feel for them.

"You know, the funny thing about the period where Sonos was sort of a leaky ship is that it was a period where the company, I think, was trying to be at its most secretive. In some ways, I think that Sonos culturally, internally, fashioned itself like a mini Apple, and really tried to hold its cards close to its vest.

"As much as I've been a little evasive about some of the things you've asked about our roadmap, I'm conscious that we're not Apple, and that I think we can talk a little bit more about where we're going and the future that we see without being so concerned about the secrecy of it all.

"I sort of love that since I've gotten here, the leaks have dried up from that standpoint, and I think it suggests that the people inside the company are feeling excited and proud of their work, and not wanting to see it out in the world in advance of when the company decides to reveal it. Where my head is, is somewhere between where Apple sits and, and what you would like for us to do. So stay tuned, we should keep talking!"

Working better with the users

Speaking of keeping talking, I also asked if Sonos' experience with the app update has led it to think differently about communicating with its users, and Conrad says that's something he's tried to change.

"We're handling this opportunity in a really different way. I've been on Reddit, for example, describing the changes and asking our customers there to give us feedback back about their own experience learning to use Sonos and living with it every day. We will roll changes out to our beta channel and even there, our users will be able to opt into the experience.

"And then when we take it to production, we'll similarly have opt-in experiences and a gradual roll out and iteration. We've already learned a lot from the perspective of our customers on Reddit after my invitation to them [recently] to share their thoughts."

He's quick to point out that he know this isn't a revolutionary approach, though: "None of this is a surprising way to operate a large-scale consumer software product, but it's certainly the set of best practices and, frankly, it's one of the, the missteps of the company in 2024 is that we didn't more closely adhere to these norms."

I point out to Conrad that its competitors really sensed blood in the water after the app update, and pushed hard to win people over to their own platforms — with WiiM, for example, launching a direct competitor to the Era 100 with a very similar audio setup — so I asked if he felt that they could win back any 'switchers'.

"Certainly, anyone that was frustrated with Sonos in the last couple of years, I hope will consider us again. When I wear my business hat, there was a cost of goodwill with our customers from this chapter, I think it really most impacted advocacy and repurchases. I don't think it was a huge driver of people fully leaving Sonos and going to other platforms.

"So my my hope is that all of the people who had a bad experience in 2024 are having good experiences today, and are starting to feel better about Sonos, and can be excited about a product like Sonos Play or Era 100 SL to extend their experience in their own home, or to evangelize it to their friends and family as something that they have to have in their homes.

"I think that was the real cost, it was sort of a cost of advocacy and evangelism more than it was people switching to one of the the smaller players who purports to do the same kinds of things we do."

There's more to come

Something that really comes across speaking to Conrad is that he feels a deep affinity for Sonos and the things it actually makes, in a more genuine way than a lot of tech CEOs.

"I've been a customer for nearly 20 years. I've been a partner to the company for 15 or something, going back to the integrations we did between Pandora and Sonos in my days building Pandora. I've been on the board for 8 years. I love this company," says Conrad.

"And Sonos in my own home is a huge part of, you know, the daily delight and satisfaction and ambiance I enjoy when I'm at home. As much as anything, I took the job to fix the product and, and get the company back to a place where we're just reliably delighting tens of millions of customers around the world again.

"A lot of that was on the back getting the software right. And so I wanted the company to be just laser focused on that return."

As Conrad mentioned above, there are things he wants to change further about the app, but he's clearly happy with the changes so far, and says Sonos absolutely isn't done with hardware yet in 2026:

"We're back, and we're launching new products again, and we'll have more in the back half of the year, because, you know, I like to say that Sonos is a company that's 100% software and 100% hardware, and so it's nice to get the 100% back that's hardware. "

Bluesound Pulse Flex: two-minute review

The Bluesound Pulse Flex is a reboot of the brand’s 2018 wireless speaker. Capable of hi-res playback and being part of a multi-room setup, its most obvious rival is the Sonos Era 100. But is it capable of squaring up to Sonos’s entry level option?

First off, it deftly handles the separation of various elements in the mix. Listening to Nervous Tics by Maribou State, I was impressed with how judiciously it balanced each instrument, with the guitar and the arpeggiated synth given plenty of room. Vocals especially always felt like they were given their due deference, sounding fantastically clear and soaring above the rest of the mix.

A big part of this is that the Pulse Flex dedicates plenty of space in the mix for the mids to express themselves, rather than boosting bass and treble as a cheap way of adding punch. Playing Cirrus by Bonobo, I was immediately struck by how energetic the Kalimba sounded and the satisfying resonance and reverb to the chimes. Honestly, its performance in this frequency range is as good as I’ve heard from any of the best wireless speakers in this price range.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have any sonic shortcomings though. For example, as it doesn’t have stereo drivers, it’s only capable of mono playback unless you pair it with another Bluesound speaker, meaning you’re not going to get as satisfying a soundstage as you might otherwise. The speaker’s also surprisingly quiet – I rarely need to run most speakers at more than 50% volume, whereas I had to crank the Pulse Flex at around 65% just to get a similar level of loudness out of it.

There are also some areas of the mix it handles less well than the mids. For example, when playing Us (Pola & Bryson Remix) by Alchemist, I was immediately struck by how subdued the sub felt, particularly compared to a more bass-heavy wireless speaker like the Sonos Era 100. On occasion, transients like hi-hats can also feel like they’re lacking in crispness and bite, suggesting the treble is a little muted.

Of course, this is where many speakers would fall back on their EQ settings as a defence, reasoning that at least you can compensate for their audio weaknesses here, should you wish. Unfortunately for the Pulse Flex, its EQ settings are seriously limited, only allowing you to boost or reduce bass or treble. It also doesn’t have any form of built-in room calibration, meaning it won’t compensate for unfavorable placement.

But while it’s a little lacking in audio features, it makes up for it in terms of connectivity options. Wireless options are impressive enough, with integrated streaming apps, AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth aptX HD. However, it’s the variety of wired inputs that really impressed me – it offers a staggering range for a speaker of this price, including a 3.5mm analog jack, optical in, USB for connecting external drives and USB-C for running a digital input from your PC or laptop.

This smart physical design is echoed elsewhere throughout the Pulse Flex’s build. I’m a big fan of its styling, with its flattened front face and attractive colorways helping it to stand out from the crowd of interchangeable wireless speakers. Meanwhile, the acoustically transparent fabric of its grille and matte plastic of its body feel wonderfully tactile. I only wish that its buttons were slightly less fine, as they’re not as pleasant to press as circular buttons would be.

All things considered, the Bluesound Pulse Flex is an effective speaker for its $349 / £279 price. It offers excellent resolution and handles crowded mixes pretty deftly, as well as making vocals and other mid-range elements shine. Unfortunately, it does lack where sub is concerned and offers too few sound-tweaking features though, so if you’re into a bassier sound or just like tailoring audio to suit your preferences, you might be better off with one of the best wireless speakers instead.

Bluesound Pulse Flex review: price and availability

• Launched on December 16, 2025
• List price: $349 / £279

Having launched on December 16, 2025, the Bluesound Pulse Flex is available direct from Bluesound, as well as from third-party sellers such as Amazon. Its list price is $349 / £279, making it a shade more expensive than the Sonos Era 100, which originally had a list price of $249 / £249 before dropping down to $219 / £199.

For that price, you get your choice of three colorways: Black / Charcoal, White / Pebble Grey and the stunning looking White / Tan finish. Each speaker is mono though, so if you’re dead set on having a stereo, you’ll want to budget for two units, not just one.

Bluesound Pulse Flex review: specs

Bluesound Pulse Flex review: features

• Great range of connectivity options
• Basic EQ settings
• No room calibration tools

Setting up the Bluesound Pulse Flex is pretty simple. Like many other wireless speakers, you simply need to connect to its built-in Wi-Fi using your device’s settings, then authorize it to use your chosen Wi-Fi network. Admittedly, this process failed the first time I tried it but the second time it connected with minimal drama, so I’ll give it a pass here.

The Bluesound app is easy to use overall and offers decent functionality. It allows you to manage your streaming services – including Amazon Music, Deezer, Spotify and Tidal – and group or ungroup all of your Bluesound speakers into a multi-room system. Additionally, it allows you to create presets for its three preset buttons, for example triggering your fave playlist on Tidal at a single tap.

Unfortunately, there are some areas that are much more limited, particularly when it comes to sound-tweaking features. The EQ settings are the most rudimentary you’re likely to get in a wireless speaker, literally only allowing you to boost or duck treble or bass by 6dB either way. There’s no six- or nine-band EQ available here, let alone the innovative parametric EQ offered by Wiim’s speakers, which really limits how much you can rebalance and refine its sound profile.

There’s also no room calibration here. The "flexible placement options" I originally hoped would refer to algorithmic calibration just mean it can be placed on a table, wall or stand-mount. Meanwhile, Bluesound says that its Front Row feature "shares several traits with the equalization principle of loudness compensation". I’m assuming this milquetoast statement means that it is essentially loudness compensation, but your guess is as good as mine here.

One area I will absolutely give the Pulse Flex its dues though is when it comes to connectivity. For a speaker at this price point, it offers an absolutely chasmic range of connectivity options. Not only do you get multiroom connectivity and hi-res audio at up to 24-bit/192kHz over Wi-Fi but it also offers Bluetooth aptX HD, meaning you can still stream in near lossless quality from devices that don’t offer AirPlay 2.

But, perhaps even more impressive, it offers a whole load of physical ports. Its optical and 3.5mm inputs allow you to hook up digital and analog sources with ease, while its USB-A port lets you play content from an external drive and its USB-C connection means you can stream digital audio straight from your laptop or PC. In comparison, the slightly cheaper Sonos Era 100 only offers a single USB-C port and even then you’ll need the sold-separately Sonos Line-In Adapter to plug anything into it.

All in all, the Pulse Flex has some strong features for its price. But it really is far behind the competition when it comes to sound polishing functionality – these days, I’d expect more granular options than just bass or treble boost and reduction.

• Features score: 3.5 / 5

Bluesound Pulse Flex review: sound quality

• Well-rounded mids and decent treble
• Effective instrument separation
• Lacking in the low-end
• Quite quiet compared to other speakers

Of course, lackingcomprehensive EQ settings is less of an issue if a speaker nails its sound in the first place. The Bluesound Pulse Flex performs reasonably well on this front, although it is lacking in one or two significant areas.

On first playing the Bluesound Pulse Flex, I was impressed with how gorgeously well-rounded the mid-range frequencies were. Playing No Skin by Frameworks, I loved how clearly expressed and resonant those mallet noises were, while the vocals soared clear of the mix. There’s a real warmth and presence to these frequencies that suggest the Pulse Flex doesn’t scrimp in the lower-mid range, a real pet peeve of mine.

When it comes to bass though, it’s immediately apparent that something is lacking. Spinning Us (Pola & Bryson Remix) by Alchemist, I was pleased to hear that the torn edges of its distorted bassline had a real sense of definition when they ripped right up into the lower mids. But there’s often a palpable void where the sub would be, making you keenly aware you’re hearing a reproduction of the recording, rather than a perfect facsimile. A little more emphasis on the low end here would just help ground everything a little better and place it on a firmer footing.

The treble is much less problematic, at least on first impression. Few songs are as good at diagnosing a flaky high end as Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac and certainly it didn’t betray any unnecessary sharpness or limiting. Again the vocals sounded fantastically well-defined, although this did come slightly at the expense of the guitars – these usually sound as taut as piano wire, so it does feel like the treble is occasionally sacrificed on the altar of that expressive mid-range.

Generally, I found the Bluesound Pulse Flex was pretty tolerant of lower quality recordings, which is a real plus if you’re likely to use it in Bluetooth mode – especially if your device doesn’t have Bluetooth aptX HD. Yes, I could detect a bit of downsampling on elements like hats and cymbals and it could be a little less dynamic than I’d like but it honestly wasn’t that different to some of the Bluetooth speakers I’ve tested.

Give it a slice of hi-res audio and it really shines though. Playing Wasting My Young Years by London Grammar on Tidal’s hi-res tier, it really communicated the gorgeously honeyed timbre of the vocals and yet didn’t crush the piano or guitar too much, allowing both elements to interplay with the long reverberant tail of the vocals. It’s a spacious sound that really allows instruments plenty of room to express themselves.

It is worth noting though that this speaker is mono, unlike rivals like the Sonos Era 100 – as a result, its soundstage is naturally very one dimensional. That’s a shame as the extra width could really help carve out a distinct space for each element. And yes, you could pair two into a stereo pair but that means spending twice the price, which really changes the value you’re getting out of the speaker.

One other minor criticism I have of the Pulse Flex is it’s a bit of a shrinking violet. While some affordable wireless speakers can be overconfident in terms of their output levels, the Pulse Flex seemed a little on the quiet side to me. While I rarely ever play the Sonos Era 100 louder than about 50% volume, I had to boost the Bluesound’s speaker up to 65% - 70% just to get the same subjective volume. Yet if I cranked it up a few more notches to 80% volume, it quickly started to sound harsh and a bit squeezed, even if it wasn’t quite actively limiting yet.

All in all, the Pulse Flex’s sound quality is good. Don’t get me wrong: my socks remained unblown when it came to either bass or volume but it’s performance in the mid-range is surprisingly capable and I liked how deftly it handled the dynamic separation of different instruments. Vocals in particular sound fantastic for a mid-price speaker, so if you’re not as bass-obsessed as I am, you’ll likely find it serves you well.

• Sound quality score: 4 / 5

Bluesound Pulse Flex review: design

• Unique design
• Chic colorways
• Buttons not the most comfortable

Unboxing the Bluesound Pulse Flex, I found its look to be pretty refreshing. In the main part, I think that’s because it eschews the basic cylinder shape that’s become almost ubiquitous in wireless speakers at this price point. Instead, it has a flattened front face – from above, its cross-section gave me gumdrop vibes – making it perfect for nestling into a corner and projecting its sound into the room.

And this flexibility is supported by its Lilliputian size. At 5.15 x 7.73 x 4.37 inches / 131 x 196 x 111 mm, it’s more the size of the Sonos Era 100 than a beast like the Wiim Sound. And weighing in at just 3.55lbs / 1.61kg, it’s not particularly heavy either – not only is that less than the Era 100 at 4.45 lbs / 2.02kg, it was light enough I could easily pick it up and reposition it with one hand.

Elsewhere, its design is a little less adventurous, but still appealing. Both its top and bottom are fashioned out of tactile matt plastic, while its drivers are covered with a fine, acoustically transparent fabric grille – Bluesound’s data sheet alleges this is removable but honestly I couldn’t work out how and felt like I was going to break it every time I tried.

I’m a big fan of the colorways on offer though. Black / Charcoal looks a little basic to me but the White / Pebble Grey version I tested here is stylish enough. And I flat out love the White / Tan finish, as it would be easy to match with a warm decor.

Along the top surface, the Bluesound Pulse Flex has the standard array of buttons, covering increasing and decreasing volume, skipping forward and backward and play / pause. There are also three shortcut buttons, which work nicely – using the app, I set one to launch our testing playlist in Tidal and it worked pretty seamlessly. But while the buttons themselves are pretty responsive, giving nice clicky feedback, I’m not totally sold on the shape of them, with their slim lines feeling a little too angular under your fingertips.

The good news is those buttons aren’t your only option for controlling the Pulse Flex. It’s also compatible with the Bluesound RC1 Remote Control, meaning you can operate it from the comfort of your couch. The bad news? It’s sold separately so you’ll have to spend an additional $69 / £49 if you want to get your mitts on it.

• Design score: 4 / 5

Should I buy the Bluesound Pulse Flex?

Buy it if…

Don’t buy it if…

Bluesound Pulse Flex review: also consider

How I tested the Bluesound Pulse Flex

• Tested over a week
• Played a wide variety of genres
• Tried out a range of connectivity options

I tested the Bluesound Pulse Flex over the course of a week. To put it through its paces, I played a diverse range of music across many genres, including pop, classic rock, melodic techno and drum and bass. This helped me assess its performance in different frequency bands and ascertain how well it conveyed sparser and busier mixes.

To really get a picture of how it handled different quality recordings, I played music at a range of qualities, from Tidal's hi-res tier to basic AAC files. I also made sure to try out a range of connectivity options, whether that was integrated streaming apps, AirPlay 2 or via Bluetooth.

In terms of my experience, I've been testing speakers for around six years. On top of this, I use a wide range audio gadgets on a daily basis at home. I also produce music as a hobby, giving me a keen understanding for assessing the balance of frequencies and weighing up the expression of various elements of a recording.

• First reviewed: March 2026
• Read TechRadar’s reviews guarantee

• A reliable leaker says a Sonos Era 100 SL is coming
• It would be a cheaper version of the Sonos Era 100 speaker without mics
• It follows the recent leak of a new Sonos portable speaker and app refresh

It looks like Sonos is planning to launch a new Sonos Era 100 SL speaker, which would essentially be a cheaper version of the Sonos Era 100 that cuts out voice control in order to lower costs — at least, that based on previous Sonos 'SL' products, which have all done exactly that.

The leak comes from well-known tech leaker Evan Blass on X, with images of the bottom of the new speakers, in black and white, with the name clearly visible.

When I reviewed the Sonos Era 100 upon its launch, I thought it was a great speaker overall, but the price was a just a little too high. Since then, Sonos has cut the price from $249 / £249 / AU$399 to $219 / £199 / AU$319 (and often further during sales events), which I think is more where it should be.

With the promise of the SL offering an even cheaper option, I think this new model will probably become the default wireless speaker. We've been recommending the JBL Authentics 200 over the Era 100 in our guide to the best wireless speakers, but this could turn things in Sonos's favor.

What price should you expect for this? To be clear, it's not like the Sonos Era 100 SL is likely to be half the price of the current model, but the Sonos One SL was $20 / £20 cheaper than the Sonos One, and the Sonos Roam SL was about the same difference from the Sonos Roam. So I'd expect the same here, with the Era 100 probably launching for the same $199 / £179 / AU$389 price that the Sonos One SL launched for back in its day.

Bearing in mind that Sonos happily takes part in Black Friday and other sales events, you could end up paying under $170 / £150 for this new speaker, and I think it'll be wildly popular at that kind of price, including as a pair. Simple, good-looking, well-made, with nice sound – it's the kind of thing that'll get Sonos's reputation back at the top of the pile.

In the past, the microphones and voice assistant feature have been the only thing that Sonos has cut from the SL models, but it's possible that it will choose to cut more here – for example, it would be a shame to lose the USB-C port that enables you to connect a line-in adapter, but people might be happy to live with it in favor of the savings.

Sonos is back in action

It's been a busy week in the world of Sonos leaks. First was news that the company is planning a new refresh to its app, including some fast-access music controls on iOS, which is something I've wanted for a while.

Then we saw clear leaks that the company is planning to launch a new portable speaker mid-way between the Sonos Roam 2 and the Sonos Move 2 for price and size. (Something that we anticipated in our round-up of what we hoped to see from Sonos, so well done to my colleague James Davidson for nailing that.)

Now we have the Era 100 SL appearing too (pictured along with more images of the Sonos Play portable speaker in that leak). We already knew that Sonos was planning to "ramp up" its launches after releasing nothing in 2025, and it looks like it's going to come racing out of the blocks with two early speakers, any maybe more to follow.

• The Primare Allt-i-Ett combines speaker, streamer and amp
• Designed as an all-in-one audio device, including touchscreen for streaming
• Sells for $3,500 / £2,700 (around AU$5,200)

If you don't like poring over speaker specs list, trying to discover whether it has whichever connection or port you need, here's a new gadget for you. The newly-unveiled Primare Allt-i-Ett has basically every modern connection you could want from one of the best wireless speakers.

The Allt-i-Ett — a phrase which apparently translates to "all-in-one" in both Norwegian and Swedish — is no budget Bluetooth speaker. It costs $3,500 / £2,700 (roughly AU$5,200) and takes up an entire cabinet-top, as you can see in the picture above – it looks very much like the five-star Cambridge Audio Evo One, but with a good-size touchscreen to make it even more versatile.

For that price, you get a speaker, streamer and amplifier all in one.

Let's look at the first: a speaker. The Allt-i-Ett has six woofers, two mid-range drivers and two tweeters with waveguides, and outputs 300W of power. It really is an all-in-one speaker setup, though you can also connect a subwoofer.

Staying connected

As mentioned, connectivity is the real draw. Primare has allowed for – deep breath – USB-A, coaxial, optical, HDMI eARC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, FM and DAB+ radio, and 3.5mm input – as well as support for AirPlay 2 Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect and Qobuz Connect. Oh, and there's input from RCA stereo or a phono preamp, if you want to connect one of the best turntables.

In short, you can connect (wired, or wirelessly), almost any other device, to get the Allt-i-Ett to play your music. HDMI eARC also points to this being able to operate as one of the best soundbars, despite that not being the primary function – though perhaps that's where you'd most appreciate the sub output option.

To try and manage some of those connections, the Allt-i-Ett has a range of control options. You can use a phone app, a remote or a touchscreen that's built into the body. You can use them to manage a few extra features: an 11-band equalizer, auto room calibration, 3D sound and various placement modes.

Despite the high price, the Primare Allt-i-Ett seems designed for people who want a room-encompassing audio set-up, but can't fit (or simply don't want) a multi-unit setup. The speaker lets you manage various media sources all in one model, without needing to buy a separate amplifier, adaptor or receiver – we hope we get to try it out, to see if it can best the might of the Cambridge Audio Evo One. After all, that 'only' costs around $1,599…

Sonos had a quiet 2025. After the company got a new CEO, having fired the one who oversaw the app update debacle that turned the brand's most ardent fans against it, it's been licking its wounds. It canceled an ill-fated streaming TV device, and didn't announce any new hardware at all last year – its last consumer product was the Sonos Arc Ultra.

But now it appears that Sonos is ready to get back to business, and reportedly "hardware launches will ramp up in the second half of its fiscal 2026" – which in Sonos' case, means between April and September.

Sonos has already started by unveiling the Amp Multi, which is a niche music amp designed for custom-install needs, capable of powering lots of speakers in multiple Sonos zones from a single box.

There haven't been many leaks on what to expect for more mainstream releases (which is maybe a sign things are changing for Sonos on its own; it used to leak like a particularly structurally compromised sieve ), but here's what I'm hoping to see.

1. A 'Sonos Era 500' hi-fi focused speaker

The Sonos Five has been around for a long time, and is surely due for its retirement. The Sonos Era 300 isn't quite the same kind of thing – its focus on spatial audio means that's impressively expansive, but it doesn't have the pure focus on detail and depth that a real hi-fi speaker offers.

Sonos' Sound Motion bass speaker is the cool addition I hope to see as the foundation here. It debuted in the Sonos Arc Ultra, and is basically an ingeniously small dual-diaphragm low-end speaker with a force-opposing design, so it can move a lot of air in a small space, without shaking the unit.

I'd love to see this used with a traditional forward-facing driver system, rather than the angle speakers of the Era 300. Allowing this driver to handle the low end would leave the other drivers to handle mid-range without also needing to wade into the low-end, hopefully allowing for really strong mid detail reproduction, but with a bigger dynamic range overall.

And I'd be happy for this speaker to borrow the compression driver and horn system used in the Era 100. This is the kind of system used in studio monitors, so would be a great fit for a hi-fi focused speaker.

Naturally, I hope that instead of needing a dongle to connect a turntable or other wired input (as the Era 100 and 300 do), this would just have a range of inputs on it, like the Sonos Five does.

2. A Sonos Beam Gen 3 soundbar with Sound Motion and upfiring speaker

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 is still a great soundbar that we highly recommend, following its price drops. It produces impressively full sound from its small frame, but it's a shame its Dolby Atmos support is totally virtual, when the Bose Smart Soundbar is able to fit in real upfiring speakers for a better 'dome' of sound effect.

I hope a new Beam could use the Sound Motion bass driver again to add even richer bass, but in a small space that hopefully leaves Sonos free to add upfiring speakers, and to make even better use of its forward speakers.

I'd personally also love if Sonos would finally start adding HDMI passthrough ports to its soundbars, but that seems like a distant dream, alas. I'll settle for the audio upgrades.

3. A wireless home theater HDMI dongle

Speaking of soundbars, for the last few years, they've slowly but surely been going wireless. Samsung and LG both offer wireless connections from their TVs to their soundbars, and LG in particular has gone to the next level by offering Dolby Atmos FlexConnect in its new soundbar and speakers. TCL is also on board with Dolby Atmos FlexConnect's wireless speaker skills. You can get wireless surround speaker system from both Sony and Hisense.

Sonos clearly should have been the leader in fully wireless home theater (sort of its raison d'être, you know?), but lacking the ability to transmit from the TV to its soundbars/speakers means it hasn't made progress. All it needs to start is a little HDMI attachment, so I'm hoping we'll see one soon.

I'd also love for this attachment to offer the ability to have wireless surround sound using satellite speakers only, no soundbar – and this apparently was on the cards with the canceled streaming box, and I said at the time that the company shouldn't abandon this feature.

4. A portable speaker between the Roam and Move

Sonos has two portable speakers: the Sonos Roam 2 and the Sonos Move 2. The former is pretty small and costs $179 / £179 / AU$299, while the latter is large and costs $449 / £449 / AU$799. So there's a big gap in terms of both size and price for something else – something closer to the JBL Charge 6.

Maybe this is a good size to include a mini version of the Sound Motion speaker, which Sonos told me it's exploring: "We're exploring all kinds of applications, whether it's more bass, more compact form factors, more energy efficiency."

One of the nice things about the Roam and Move is that they can work as a home speaker most of the time, and then you just grab them to go out. There's definitely scope for something with a meatier sound than the Roam but a lower price than the Move that could fill the bedroom, office or kitchen of most people.

5. An Era 100 with a screen

The WiiM Sound is a direct competitor to the Sonos Era 100, with a nearly identical speaker setup and multi-room skills – but with the addition of a touchscreen on the front to add some personality and easy control options to the whole package. And we really liked it!

It made it notably more expensive than the Era 100, so we still preferred Sonos' option for value. However, just as WiiM then followed that up with the Sound Lite, which omits the screen and competes with the Era on price, we'd love to see Sonos go the other way and offer an Era 100 with a touchscreen.

The screen doesn't need to function like a full Sonos app, but the Sonos app already has a 'Favorites' bar, so it could replicate that part only on the touchscreen, so you can easily find your favorite streaming stations, playlists or artists – and control which speakers the music is playing on.

6. A big party speaker

The Sonos Move 2 is a very powerful portable speaker, but I've been told by many audio companies that huge party speakers are getting more and more popular – the kind of thing that sometimes comes with wheels, and is for mid-size events (parties in a hall, weddings, and big outdoor parties) more than home listening. The likes of JBL, Anker Soundcore, LG and many more make these.

It'd be great for Sonos to get in on the action too – waterproof, beefy, great sound quality, and perhaps a classier design than most of these have. It could be another good fit for Sound Motion – maybe in a bigger guise, or even multiple of them to provide a ton of bass kick – but it'd also be fun to again see Sonos use the pro-like compression drivers used in the Era 300, to bring a touch more 'studio' accuracy to the sound than these big speakers usually strive for.

Those are the picks from me and the TechRadar AV team – we'd love to hear what products you hope Sonos will launch or update in the comments!

• Sonos' new Amp Multi is a sign that app problems "have been resolved"
• Hardware launches will "ramp up" in the second half of 2026 says report
• Sonos wants customers to love it again

Sonos has just announced its first new products since late 2024: new Amp Multi amplifier for professional installations. It isn't just a new Sonos product: it's a new dawn for the company. That's what Sonos insiders are telling Bloomberg, which reports that Sonos believes that its app-related shenanigans have come to an end.

Sonos "believes the majority of bugs and issues that once plagued its mobile app have been resolved", and the launch of the Amp Multi marks the end of "an intentional lull in product launches… Hardware launches will ramp up in the second half of its fiscal 2026".

It's worth noting here that Sonos' fiscal year ends in September, so it looks like the next eight months could be busy for Sonos believers.

What's the story behind Sonos's new hardware plans?

To the best of our knowledge, only one planned product, Sonos's streaming video player, was outright cancelled – but other products had been rumored and failed to appear. And Sonos execs had talked about launching at least two new products per year, and that definitely wasn't the case in 2025.

Sonos' woes stemmed from the ill-fated upgrade to its app, a PR disaster that was still rumbling on in early 2025: the upgrade turned out to be a downgrade for a lot of users and many of Sonos' most vocal advocates were extremely unhappy about it.

Then-CEO Patrick Spence was replaced by new CEO Tom Conrad in January 2025, who said that "we've let far too many people down" and promised "to get us back on track [by] getting back to the innovation that is at the heart of Sonos' incredible history." The Amp Multi is the first new Sonos product on his watch.

The Amp Multi isn't made for people like me – it's a pro-level product for high-end installations – but it does indicate that Sonos is back in the ring, and that's a reason to be optimistic. Conrad has said that his goal is to get Sonos customers to extend their Sonos investments, and in order to do that you need to make those customers happy.

As we reported last year, Sonos used to have the best word of mouth in tech; it does seem that Conrad intends to make that happen again.

With the Sound range, it’s safe to say WiiM has entered the wireless speaker market swinging. Not only has it released the more audiophile-baiting WiiM Sound, but it simultaneously released a cheaper version, the WiiM Sound Lite. Given both are multi-room speakers with an unabashedly mid-market price, it’s pretty clear it’s gunning for Sonos with these devices. I couldn’t resist seeing how they stack up against their closest rival: the Sonos Era 100.

As you may have seen, I’ve already compared the full version of the Lite to Sonos’s speaker in my WiiM Sound vs Sonos Era 100 piece. And while you might think this comparison is going to be more of the same, it’s worth bearing in mind that the Lite is quite a different proposition.

Priced at $229 / £229 / AU$399, the Lite is much closer in cost to the Sonos Era 100’s $219 / £199 / AU$319 than the full WiiM Sound’s $299 / £299 / AU$499 list price. And while it’s had quite a bit of its price slashed, it hasn’t lost a whole lot of functionality to get there, making the Lite a much more nimble opponent for the Era 100 and a credible contender for a spot on our list of the best wireless speakers.

So how did it fare during my testing? Read on to find out.

WiiM Sound Lite vs Sonos Era 100: features

Just like the WiiM Sound, the Sound Lite packs a 4-inch, 50W woofer for driving bass and a pair of angled, full-range 25W tweeters to broaden its stereo field. Meanwhile, the Sonos Era 100 is similar, containing a mid-woofer for both mid-range and bass and two angled tweeters, only this time with a waveguide frame to disperse sound across 180 degrees per tweeter.

Refreshingly, despite costing less, the Sound Lite offers connectivity as excellent as the full-fat Sound, and that includes its hi-res 24-bit/192kHz playback. It can also connect to WiiM, Google Cast, and Alexa multi-room systems, as well as stream directly from a wide array of services, including Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube Music, TIDAL, Qobuz, Deezer, Napster, Pandora, Plex, SoundCloud, and more. On top of this, it offers a 3.5mm jack input, which is always handy if you’re likely to want to hook it up to external audio kit.

Unfortunately, there is a catch, and if you’re heavily invested in Apple’s ecosystem, it may be too big for you to overlook. The Sound Lite doesn’t support Apple Music or AirPlay 2, meaning you won’t be able to connect your iPhone or MacBook to the speaker via Wi-Fi. If you’re an Apple fan, you might find that a speaker like the Sonos Era 100 gives you far more flexibility.

On top of AirPlay 2, the Era 100 offers access to all the streaming services above and throws Apple Music support in for good measure. There are a few trade-offs here, too, though. While the Sonos is capable of lossless playback at 24-bit/48kHz, you won’t get the same super-high-quality as the WiiM, though it’s worth noting there’s debate around how much this extra quality is even discernible. And, regrettably, an analog in is also absent, although you can purchase an additional adapter to convert the Era 100’s USB port into either a 3.5mm jack or an Ethernet port.

Of course, both speakers come with additional functionality packaged into their apps. Each app offers multi-room connectivity and the ability to hook them up as part of a stereo pair.

EQ is handled a little differently by each brand. Sonos offers treble and bass adjustment and automatic loudness correction for increased bass at lower volumes. Conversely, WiiM offers much more granular control: not only does it come with a 10-band EQ, but its parametric EQ lets you create curves to boost or duck frequencies throughout the whole spectrum, which is seriously impressive. I tested it out in a pretty echoey room and was honestly blown away by how easy it was to smooth out errant frequencies this way.

Finally, both speakers offer room correction algorithms. The process of the Era 100’s advanced tuning mode involves pinwheeling your phone with your arm while you walk around the room, but it achieves pretty credible results. Testing it near a wall, I found it brought the high end more into focus and made the overall sound more cohesive. It also did an impressive job of taming the outrageously resonant bass when I placed the speaker in the middle of an acoustically reflective laminate floor.

Although I gave the WiiM Sound a hard time for its room correction, it seems to have been tightened up for the Sound Lite in a recent update. It may not be a sonic silver bullet, but it does seem to go a little further, occasionally boosting weaker frequencies rather than just trimming excessive ones back. Close to a wall, it sheared off some of the wooliness in its lower frequencies, while in the middle of the floor, it helped whip the overly doughy kick into shape. It’s not quite as sophisticated as Sonos’s algorithm, but it at least gives the sound some much-needed spit and polish.

Honestly, with some of the recent improvements to WiiM’s feature set, this isn’t as big a sweep for Sonos as it was when I tested the Sound. Honestly, if you’re an Apple user or room correction is your biggest priority, the Era 100 is your best bet. But that hi-res playback and parametric EQ means that audiophiles might now find the Sound Lite takes the upper hand.

WiiM Sound Lite vs Sonos Era 100: sound quality

You’re very unlikely to get sound quality that’s utterly unimpeachable. Instead, the WiiM Sound Lite and the Sonos Era 100 each have their individual sonic strengths

When I played Listen by Pola & Bryson & goddard., the Sound Lite made its arpeggiated synth sound utterly gorgeous, and there was more than a hint of bass harmonics. However, switching to the Era 100, it became clear what I was missing – not only did the drop of that D&B bassline sound suitably snarly, but there was something delicious dubby about the way that sub bubbled up every couple of bars.

Unfortunately, like a tragic hero, the Era 100’s strength is also its greatest flaw. While listening to Peace Talk by Maribou State, I found that its bass too often encroached on the mid-range – the heft of the guitar and flabbier low-end sometimes overwhelmed the synth and strings. Conversely, the balance the Sound Lite strikes is far more judicious, allowing these melodic elements more time in the spotlight and giving that gorgeous vocal even more gloss.

Nothing shows up a speaker’s sonic weaknesses faster than poorly controlled treble, so I’m glad that neither of these devices lumbered into that bear trap. Playing Go Your Own Way by Fleetwood Mac, the Sound Lite kept the brightness of its high end carefully in check, with the strumming of the guitars and transient hats and snares never feeling over-exposed. The Sonos Era 100 couldn’t quite strike this balance, though, with the guitar feeling less crisp and the toms focusing on heft rather than bite.

Cumulatively, this sonic profile means the Era 100 seems to offer greater cohesion, but sometimes that comes at the expense of precision. For example, when I tested it on Wasting My Young Years by London Grammar, I noticed some instruments were forced to fight for attention. By contrast, the Sound Lite was a lot more airy – the vocals erupted upward in the mix, with the piano subtly underpinning them. It’s not quite the surgically precise separation of a speaker like the Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin Pro Edition, but it's definitely decent given its price point.

Perhaps one area where the Era 100 is more balanced than the Sound Lite is listening angles. While neither showed any egregious deadspots in their soundstage, the WiiM’s treble fell off much faster as I moved to the sides of the device, whereas the Sonos was pretty consistent up until I strayed into the bassier area at the rear 90 degrees of the device.

I’d also give the Era 100 the slight edge when it comes to stereo field. Playing The Sound of Silence by Simon & Garfunkel, I struggled to identify any panning at all on the Sound Lite, with most of the sound seeming to emerge directly from the speaker’s center. By contrast, the Era 100 doesn’t have the widest soundstage I’ve heard, but I could at least perceive a slight spread to the drum and guitar parts, even though there was hardly a gulf between them.

Honestly, it’s hard to pick a clear winner here because the best option for you is going to depend so much on what you personally want out of a wireless speaker. Want spacious mids and considered expression but aren’t offended by milquetoast bass? Then the Sound Lite is absolutely a solid choice. But if your definition of a speaker is something bassy and brassy with omnidirectional sound, then the Era 100 will definitely be more your vibe.

WiiM Sound Lite vs Sonos Era 100: design

Naturally, when it comes to design, the situation here is not all that different from my WiiM Sound vs Sonos Era 100 piece. Not only is the Era 100 the exact same unit, but the Sound Lite has an almost identical form factor as its more premium stablemate.

The one big departure for the Sound Lite is that it doesn’t have the Sound’s porthole-style display. However, while this was a fun addition that helped the Sound stand out a little more, I wouldn’t say it’s a deal breaker. It’s nice to be able to see album art or photos on your speaker, but the resolution and vibrancy weren’t so eye-wateringly gorgeous that it’s truly unmissable. If your biggest priority is getting the best sonic bang for your buck, the display is probably the easiest thing to let go of.

Elsewhere, the WiiM and the Sonos come from very similar schools of design. Both have a cylindrical build with controls on their top face, and both come in black or white colorways. The Sound Lite has a little more bulk, weighing in at 2.5kg compared to the Era 100’s 2.02kg, and it comes wrapped in fabric rather than the latter’s metal grille. But otherwise, at first glance, they give a similar general impression.

There are some small points of difference in that control scheme, though. Each has the same basic functions laid out on its surface, with touch-capacitive buttons for pausing or playing content, adjusting volume, or skipping back and forth. However, the Sound Lite’s buttons are hidden until it detects your hand nearby, at which point they light up. On top of giving it a slightly classier look when the lights are off, this also means it’s easier to use in darker rooms.

That’s a definite point in the WiiM’s favor. But while its glass top panel gives it a slightly more premium look than the Era 100’s matt black plastic, it also shows up way more marks from your greasy mitts. I only prodded the odd button here and there to test the Sound Lite’s functionality, as I mostly operated it from the connected app, but it quickly resembled a scene from CSI as it got covered in oily fingerprints. Fortunately, it wipes clean pretty easily, but better keep a microfiber cloth handy just in case.

Neither speaker draws the line at physical or app control. The Era 100 comes with built-in voice control via either Sonos Voice Control or Amazon Alexa, which is always an enormous help when you're feeling too lazy to reach for your phone or the device. The Sound Lite doesn’t offer voice control built into the unit itself, but if you buy its separate WiiM Voice Remote 2 Lite, its push-to-talk button lets you control the device via Alexa or Google Assistant.

While I’m a little disappointed the remote isn’t included in the box as it was for the WiiM Sound, I’d argue it’s still a worthy purchase at $39 / £39 / $79. It’s robustly crafted from aluminum and has wonderfully clicky buttons, making it a great choice for anyone who prefers a more tactile way of interacting with their gadgets than yet another phone app.

Personally, when it comes to design, I just about favor the Sound Lite. Light-up controls can help when you’re operating it in darker rooms, and its fabric-and-glass build looks a skosh classier to me. But I recognize that if you prefer to use voice control for your speaker, the Era 100’s on-device mic is far more convenient than having to fork over additional money for a remote.

WiiM Sound Lite VS Sonos Era 100: verdict

When comparing the full WiiM Sound to the Sonos Era 100, I definitely came down in favor of the latter. So it may seem odd that I’ve changed my tune now I’ve swapped in the supposedly ‘Lite’ version. However, I’d argue the Lite is anything but.

It has the same drivers, the same audio quality, and the same features – plus it's had a couple of recent quality-of-life updates. The only thing that’s changed is that the display has disappeared, and, as I pointed out in my intro, the price has dropped from $299 / £299 / AU$499 down to $229 / £229 / AU$399. Getting essentially the same performance for a lower price changes the equation for me and brings both speakers much more in line with each other.

In light of this, I’d say the WiiM Sound Lite and Sonos Era 100 are fairly evenly matched, albeit with different strengths. If you’re an audiophile, you’ll likely find the Sound Lite's hi-res streaming support and more open, expressive sound compelling – not to mention its granular parametric EQ. However, should you be into substantial bass, smarter room correction, or Apple’s ecosystem, I’d say you’ll get a lot more mileage out of the Era 100 instead.

• Wi-Fi music streamer with Auracast broadcasting to multiple speakers
• Stream from a wired turntable and connect an older speaker
• $299 / £179 (about AU$356)

Marshall has announced a dedicated music streaming hub that's ideal for owners of its Acton III, Stanmore III and Woburn III speakers, and can turn them from Bluetooth-only speakers into being some of the best multi-room wireless speakers.

The new Heddon hub streams music via Wi-Fi and then transmits it to your Marshall speakers via Auracast. You can also connect one of the best turntables to it to stream records around the house to all your speakers, and you can connect an older Marshall speaker via an RCA cable.

Marshall Heddon: key features

The Heddon looks rather like an Apple TV 4K if it were made for musicians, with a small, square footprint of just 120.5mm / 4.75 inches square and the familiar black Tolex-style finish and Marshall logo.

It's deliberately simple because it's designed to be controlled via the Marshall smartphone app. It works with Spotify Connect, TIDAL, AirPlay and Google Cast, and in addition to Wi-Fi connectivity there's an Ethernet port round the back for wired networks.

The Heddon enables you to connect older Marshalls via an RCA cable, with compatible models including older Acton, Stanmore and Woburn speakers as well as Kilburn, Stockwell, Tufton and the Acton Voice and Stanmore Voice models.

Once you've connected the older speaker you can then use the Heddon to sync playback between your wired speaker and your wireless speaker(s).

The Heddon is priced very keenly, especially if you're in the market for a speaker too: if you buy an Acton III, Stanmore III or Woburn III you can get it for half price, and if you buy two or more eligible Marshalls you can get the Heddon hub for free.

If you're buying one for your existing speakers, the official price is $299 / £179 (about AU$356).

• Samsung unveils new Music Studio wireless speakers ahead of CES
• Music Studio 5 has a woofer and two tweeters
• Music Studio 7 has a 3.1.1 configuration, and Hi-Res Audio support

Ahead of CES 2026, Samsung has revealed two new wireless speakers, right at the same time as it revealed its next two flagship Dolby Atmos soundbars for 2026.

These speakers are called the Samsung Music Studio 5 and Music Studio 7, respectively, and I was immediately struck by their looks.

They're available in black or white, and their simple form with the concave 'dish' shape and dot at the center looks fantastic to me – they make me think of the classic industrial design work of Dieter Rams (most notably at Braun), which inspired a lot of Apple's design, including the iPod. I think you can see a specific shared DNA in the larger Music Studio 7, especially.

Samsung states: "Each model shares a timeless dot concept by renowned designer Erwan Bouroullec, inspired by a universal symbol in music and art — and grounded in the Samsung signature aesthetic." Bouroullec has worked with Samsung before on the handsome Serif TV.

However, the configurations inside the speakers will be of interest to people looking for a new option among the best wireless speakers, because they quite closely match what Sonos has been doing in its Era speakers.

First is the Music Studio 5 (also known more formally as the LS50H), which features a four-inch woofer and two tweeters. This is the same basic speaker configuration as the Sonos Era 100, and actually is also what you'll find in the Sonos Move 2 and the Wiim Sound.

It's the smaller of the two Samsung speakers, but features plenty of tech, including AI Dynamic Bass Control that "deepens low frequencies without distortion," plus support for streaming to it over Wi-Fi, streaming directly to it from music services, and playing to it via Bluetooth.

Notably absent from the list is Hi-Res Audio support, which the other speaker supports, so let's get into that one.

The Samsung Music Studio 7 (AKA the LS70H) is a beefier option and has what Samsung describes as a 3.1.1 speaker configuration. What this means is that it has left, front, right, and upfiring drivers for "spatial sound", and presumably some kind of woofer system for bass (since that's what one of the '.1' numbers there means, but Samsung didn't specify this).

I don't want to shock you here, but that's more or less the exact same configuration as the Sonos Era 300 – I told you Samsung was really gunning for Sonos with these. However, I think this is much better looking than the Era 300.

Samsung says this model supports Hi-Res Audio (up to 24-bit/96kHz), and again features AI Dynamic Bass Control, plus casting and streaming over Wi-Fi – though Samsung doesn't mention Bluetooth support.

It's also oddly vague about exactly what "spatial audio" support to expect; the Sonos Era 300 works with Dolby Atmos, but that's not mentioned here at all.

However, Samsung mentions that the Music Studio 7 can be used as surround speakers for Samsung soundbars and TVs that support Q-Symphony (most of them). This presumably will support Dolby Atmos, and Samsung says that you can have up to five speakers connected to a TV now (no soundbar needed, if you prefer).

We'll probably have to wait for more details to be revealed at CES, and that includes the price, though I have to assume Samsung will be aiming to keep it close to the price of the Sonos speakers these compete with.

The Sonos Era 100 originally launched at $249 / £249 / AU$399, though it has since come down in price, while the Sonos Era 300 cost $449 / £449 / AU$749 at launch.

TechRadar will be extensively covering this year's CES, and will bring you all of the big announcements as they happen. Head over to our CES 2026 news page for the latest stories and our hands-on verdicts on everything from wireless TVs and foldable displays to new phones, laptops, smart home gadgets, and the latest in AI.

And don’t forget to follow us on TikTok and WhatsApp for the latest from the CES show floor!

• Bluesound Pulse Flex: all-new version with significant redesign
• WiiM Sound: WiiM's first smart speaker with multiroom capability
• Aggressively priced at £279 / €299 and £299 / €349 respectively

It's a big day for the best wireless speakers with not one but two rather exciting product launches. WiiM is launching the WiiM Sound, its first ever smart speaker which had been previous unveiled but lacked a release date or price. And Bluesound has remade its popular all-in-one, the Pulse Flex.

These are both premium smart speakers with multi-room capabilities, and are priced at an interesting level, sitting between the Sonos Era 100 and the Sonos Era 300.

Bluesound Pulse Flex 2025: key features and pricing

The Bluesound Pulse Flex has been around for a while now – it was launched in 2018 – and this new generation gets a significant redesign that makes it look much sleeker. There are three colors – White Tan, Black Charcoal and White Pebble Gray – and the new design is a vast improvement over the rather boxy original: from above, it's teardrop-shaped, while from the front it's become more vertical than before.

Of course, it's what it sounds like that matters most. It's powered by a SmartDSP amplifier and features a four-inch woofer and three-quarter-inch tweeter, putting out 50W of total power. It supports Hi-Res Audio at up to 24-bit/192kHz and features both MQA decoding and DSD256 playback. And as you'd expect from Bluesound, it runs the BluOS streaming platform with more than 20 included streamers including all the big names.

The new Pulse Flex has dual-band Wi-Fi, Gigabit Ethernet and Bluetooth with aptX HD, and it also has multiple wired inputs including USB-C and optical/analog inputs. It can be used standalone, in a stereo pair or as the rear surrounds for a system comprising other Bluesound products. It can also be used as part of a multi-room sound system.

The Pulse Flex will be available from December 16, 2025, with a recommended price of £279 / €299. That's roughly $372 / AU$572.

WiiM Sound: key features and pricing

The WiiM Sound was originally showcased in May 2025, and is launching as planned this month (October 2025). It delivers 100W of power through its 4-inch long-throw woofer and dual tweeters, which are angled slightly left and right (which is the same configuration as the Sonos Era 100, interestingly), and it supports Hi-Res Audio at 24-bit/192kHz.

The WiiM Sound comes in a familiar cylindrical design punctuated by its circular 1.8-inch touchscreen, which enables you to adjust playback, EQ and inputs when you're away from your phone or the included voice remote. And it runs on WiiM's streaming platform which, like BluOS, features all the key streamers.

The WiiM Sound also features automatic room correction, and like the Bluesound Pulse Flex it can be used standalone or in stereo. It can also be used as the center or surround speaker in a Dolby 5.1 setup and in a WiiM multi-room system, which could naturally include WiiM amps and streaming boxes.

Connectivity is impressive and includes Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3 with LE Audio, Ethernet and a 3.5mm Aux input.

The WiiM Sound is available from this month, October 2025, with a price tag of £299 / €349 / $299 (about AU$459).

The Sonos Era 100, by comparison, costs $219 / £199 / AU$319 officially, though at the time of writing has some nice discounts – in the UK, it's just £159, which is fantastic value. The more powerful and detailed Sonos Era 300 costs $479 / £449 / AU$749.

Will these Hi-Res-friendly wireless speakers offer more fidelity to the sound to make them worth the higher price than the Sonos Era 100, but without the bulk and expensive of the Era 300? We have big plans to find out and compare them all soon…

• Pent Audio launches three speakers: Aurora, Chiara and Gulia
• 1.0, 2.0 and 2.1 configurations with extensive streaming support
• From $4,400 / £3,550

Pent claims to make "the most luxurious fitness equipment in the world", and now the brand has moved into the audio business with Pent Audio and three very beautiful new speakers.

All three models in the new range are strikingly designed, made by hand and available in strictly limited editions, and according to Pent Audio they're more than just speakers: they're "handcrafted works of art".

They're also quite expensive. The cheapest model, the Chiara, starts at $4,400 / £3,550, although for a limited period there's a 30% reduction on pre-orders across the range. That promotion ends on 30th October 2025.

PENT. Audio speakers: key features and pricing

Each speaker comes in multiple "ready-to-experience" finishes and there are also extensive customization options. The standard options are Walnut Harmony, Oak Essence, Black Gold and White Aura.

There are three models to choose from: the tall, cylindrical Chiara; the striking floorstanding Aurora; and the sci-fi-esque Gulia.

The speakers have dual-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 5.3, Wireless Power Link connectivity, Ethernet and USB-C. They support AirPlay, Spotify Connect, TIDAL Connect, Deezer, Qplay 2.0 and internet radio, and they're controllable via the Pent. Audio app or the 4STREAM app. All models support multi-room streaming.

The Chiara is a 2.1 system with a 4-inch woofer, twin 2-3-inch mid-range drivers and two tweeters, powered by two 15W Class D amps for the speakers and a 30W Class D amp for the woofer. Frequency range is 80Hz to 20kHz. The Chiara starts at $4,400 / £3,550.

The Aurora is available in a 1.0, 2.0 or 2.1 configuration, and includes three amps: two closed-loop Class D amps with 28W for the speakers, and a 56W Class D for the optional subwoofer. Frequency range is 100Hz to 20kHz, or 45Hz to 20kHz with the subwoofer. The Aurora starts at $6,100 / £4,910.

The Gulia is a 2.1 system with the same amp setup driving a 6.5-inch woofer, 2 x 4-inch mid-range and 2 AMT tweeters. Frequency response is 45Hz to 20kHz. The Gulia starts at $6,800 / £5,439.

At these prices, they'll have a hard time working their way onto our list of the best wireless speakers when it comes to value – but they're certainly memorable.

You might also like

• Best stereo speakers 2025: stereo systems for all budgets
• I heard Magico’s big new M7 speakers and now I cannot save $560k quick enough
• Sonus Faber Concertino G4 review: the bookshelf-speaker dragon I'll be chasing for decades to come

Sonos' speakers are well-designed, but not in that 'striking, stand-out aesthetics' way – they're designed to pretty much blend in with a neutral, rounded, black or white look (with the occasional color option thrown in for certain models).

But that means sometimes you wish they could be a bit more interesting. Maybe you'd prefer a different color to better match your room's look, or maybe you bought a white soundbar, then moved house and changed things up, and now wish you had a black soundbar.

I just discovered a company called Soundskins exists (thanks to the r/Sonos subreddit), and it basically makes cloth covers for the best Sonos speakers that come in a range of tones and colors. It's been around for years, but I hadn't come across it before, and figured there must be lots of people in the same boat as me, so here we are.

The light gray options look a lot like the more Scandi-styled speakers you'll find out there, from the likes of Audio Pro or Dynaudio.

There's a nice copper one I'm tempted by because it's really close to the color of my curtains, which the Sub is next to, so it'll blend into the room more neatly than a big white box does by default.

Soundskins says the cloth is "acoustically transparent certified by the Technical University Eindhoven" – not that this is especially important for my Sub, but obviously would be important on my Sonos Arc Ultra or Sonos Era 300 speakers.

(It's worth nothing here that there currently aren't any options for the Arc Ultra; just for the original Arc.)

I think the cloth coverings look better up close on some speakers than others – on the smaller speakers, the thick seams take away some of the slickness of the speaker design – but I think they're really effective for just helping a speaker to blend in more.

Someone on the Sonos subreddit said they used black covers on white products they wanted to move into a home theater room, and someone else said they used a cover because they had a speaker in the kitchen they wanted to protect from grease.

One person also said they use a Soundskins cover to stop their cat trying to claw the inside of their Sub Mini, which is a noble cause.

Sonos sub mini with a soundskin from r/sonos

They're not especially cheap, but are much cheaper and more sustainable than buying new speakers to fit a change of aesthetic need, so look like a worthwhile investment overall.

I like that there's a good mix of moods in the color range, in a lot of cases. You've got different kinds of gray, different kinds of white, fashionable earthy tones, and electric blue and yellow that I can't see choosing myself, but I still love.

I can definitely see myself giving my Sonos setup a new look in the future, though I do suspect that unlike the Redditor who used a Soundskins cover to defend from his cat, my own cat is only more likely to be attracted to the nice flat top surface of my subwoofer if I cover it in a lovely fabric…

You might also like…

• ‘There’s no way that can fit inside the soundbar’: Sonos tells me how it developed Sound Motion, the groundbreaking new speaker design in the Arc Ultra
• I compared the Sonos Move 2 against a gorgeous new retro-styled competitor, and there was one clear winner
• Is it time to ditch Sonos for WiiM? How the two multi-room ecosystems compare – and whether you should switch

Apple's next big iPhone event is coming up on September 9th, and we're expecting a wave of new products – the iPhone 17 in multiple flavors, Apple Watch Series 11, AirPods Pro 3… but there have also been rumors of a new HomePod mini 2, and perhaps a new larger HomePod model.

I've been a fan of Apple's HomePod line-up since the start, thanks to their surprisingly broad soundstage, impressive level of detail, and relatively compact size. The HomePod mini in particular was my desktop speaker setup for a long time, in a stereo pair – I think a pair of these is the best small setup you can get for the price.

But despite how much I like the current HomePod mini, there's definitely room for improvement – for both it and the larger HomePod 2. Of course, there's no guarantee that what I want to see and we'll actually get will have any crossover, and so I'm splitting this article down the middle.

First is what I'm hoping Apple will change, mixing in thoughts about both the HomePod mini and larger HomePod 2; and the second is what it looks more likely that Apple will change, based on rumors and the general direction of the wind.

I should mention here that I'm personally really not sure that new HomePods will appear at this event – to me, it would make sense to wait until the new AI-powered Siri is ready, and release them with that as their big update. That could be at this event, but I think it's more likely to be closer to Christmas.

What I want to see

1. Rock-solid reliability in music playback

I mentioned above that the HomePod mini was my desktop speaker setup for a long time. It's not any more, and that's because over time, they got glitchier and glitchier when playing music.

Streaming over AirPlay from my phone would stutter and delay, and when streaming directly on the speakers, they'd just drop out for a while, and might get stuck with songs on a loop when they came back, when they're supposed to be playing an on-going mix from an Apple Music station.

I switched to a Sonos Era 100, still mostly used over AirPlay, and that never has any issue – in the same room, on the same wireless network. I found the same happened with HomePod 2 – and neither product started out wobbly. They got worse over time with updates, and would sometimes be better for a while, then slip.

One of the reasons for AirPods' huge success is that their connectivity is as solid as it gets from the best wireless earbuds, and has been since the start. Trustworthy and reliable – HomePods need to be the same.

2. Bluetooth and wired music input

Having these options would help with the reliability element above, actually – as something to fall back on – but I've got them as a separate entry because I want them for their own reasons.

Not every house is 100% Apple, so having Bluetooth for Android and Windows users makes HomePods a lot more attractive overall. We recommend the HomePod mini as the best-sounding small option in our guide to the best wireless speakers, but obviously we have to heavily caveat that since it's only useful for Apple users.

A way for Android users to activate and connect to it would make it just a great speaker overall, fewer caveats required.

And with the on-going popularity of the best turntables, Apple is missing a trick by having no way to use HomePods as speakers for vinyl – it means they'll always be ruled out as the main speakers of anyone who's into, or wants to get back into, the physical media world.

A pair of HomePods – either flavor – could be one of the best-value stereo pairs for anyone with limited space if they were more flexible.

3. A longer cable option

Speaking of flexibility… one of the best quiet changes in the HomePod 2 compared to the original HomePod was the used of a removable standard power cable, so if you needed a longer cord to position it somewhere awkward, you could make that happen.

The HomePod mini uses a USB-C cable for power, but it's a captive cable, meaning its permanently attached to the speaker. That means you can only go any longer if you buy a USB-C extension cable, which do exist – but it's still pretty annoying for a conveniently small speaker.

It's great that you can slip it nearly anywhere in your room in a purely physical sense, but it has to be really close to a USB-C power source. Switch to using a standard USB-C connection where the cable connects to the body too! Give us a cable in the box still, yes – but also make it possible for us to go online and grab a regular 12-foot USB-C for cheap if we want to put the HomePod mini somewhere away from an outlet.

4. Dolby Atmos FlexConnect support

This is a long shot – I definitely don't expect to see this, but I'd love it. FlexConnect is a smart new technology from Dolby that uses the fact that Dolby Atmos doesn't require set speaker placements (because the sound exists in a 3D virtual environment, rather than specific five or seven channels that are supposed to be put in particular positions) to give you freedom over where you place the speakers, while still getting something like good surround sound.

It's perfect for compact homes, or anywhere you just can't fit a serious sound system. The idea is that you can just put speakers wherever you have space, and the system will map their locations using smart audio recognition tech, and then tune their output to create the best version of surround sound it can using those positions.

In conjunction with the Apple TV 4K, this could be a really nice addition, and would make HomePods a more tempting alternative to a soundbar than they are now, for people who don't want to deal with another big box near their TV. Here's our full explainer for Dolby Atmos FlexConnect, and our recent experience with the first commercially available FlexConnect speakers.

What we're actually expecting

1. More smart home hub capabilities

The HomePod always seemed to be a key part of Apple smart home plans, providing a useful way for you to send commands to smart home tech from anywhere, even if the tech didn't connect to the internet, with the HomePod acting as a control point.

It's not really clear how Apple would improve on what the HomePod mini can already do in this regard, but it's been strongly rumored to be a big part of Apple's plans.

There are some technical possibilities – including offering more wireless protocols such as Zigbee – but Apple could also add a more useful small screen on top, that could show useful smart home information, such as the current temperature (the current model has temperature and humidity sensors, but you have to ask for the data or view it on another device).

It could even include motion detection or other useful sensors, potentially.

2. Improved sound

As I alluded to before, I think the HomePod mini sounds great even to this day, for such a small speaker. Its output is amazingly full across all frequencies, and it's pretty damn crisp as well. Personally, I don't even need its sound to improve – but obviously, I'll accept it.

I'm sure Apple will have a new speaker driver and audio processor to give it an extra step of depth and detail. I wouldn't bet on Dolby Atmos support, like the big HomePod, but it's not impossible.

3. A new processor

The HomePod mini is expected to have a new and more powerful chip inside, based on more recent Apple Watch chips – and this could help open up its capabilities for other sensors. better connectivity, or smarter audio processing.

It may also use Apple's own modem technology, first seen on the iPhone 16e. Again, the benefits to us aren't clear yet.

4. More colors

Apple made a smart move introducing funky new colors of the HomePod mini after its launch – it's expected that a new version would come with some new hues.

Again, there's very little information about what those would be.

You might also like…

• How to watch Apple's 'Awe dropping' event on September 9 – get ready for iPhone 17, AirPods 3, and more
• New AirPods Pro 3 leak says they'll have two new sensors – but one useful rumored feature may not arrive at launch
• The best AirPlay speakers – from Apple, Sonos, JBL and more

• Audio Pro launches 10 new speakers with LinkPlay integration
• Redesigned app, better streaming support, multi-room, tweaked sound
• From £220 / €250, US pricing to follow

Update: WiiM and Audio Pro have contacted TechRadar to clarify that contrary to the initial announcement, Audio Pro's new range of speakers should no longer be described as "powered by WiiM" and instead is "powered by LinkPlay", which is the parent company of WiiM. Audio Pro's new speaker range does not integrate with the WiiM ecosystem, and does not have direct WiiM support.

This seems to mean that the new Audio Pro app has still received a big improvement in streaming service support and usability – as we describe in our full Audio Pro C10 Mk II review – but will not offer multi-room connectivity with WiiM devices or other WiiM-specific features.

If you still want to explore how WiiM compares to Sonos as a multi-room option, read this guide to the current state of both platforms.

Original article: Audio Pro has launched a new generation of speakers, and there's a lot of options. The W-generation range comes with an important app update that brings WiiM to the range, delivering expanded streaming support, advanced EQ and room correction, and enhanced multi-room and grouping capabilities.

With speakers covering every conceivable option from small cylinders and stand-alone speakers to massively powerful floorstanders, there's something for everyone – and for every room. That makes the W-Generation a serious rival to Sonos as the best multi-room speakers, and Audio Pro is promising improved sound over previous models, too.

Audio Pro W-Generation speakers: key models and pricing

Although the speakers here will look familiar if you know Audio Pro's range – they've been harmonized, but retain their basic design – they sound different. That's because each model has been optimized for "greater clarity, lower distortion and a huge increase in loudness."

For example, the flagship A48 W delivers a +10-15dB increase in maximum sound pressure and promises improved balanced mode radiator tweeter clarity. And the compact A15 W promises deeper, more compelling bass as well as longer battery life.

Streaming support now includes Spotify, Tidal, Amazon Music, Qobuz, Deezer, iHeartRadio, Napter, TuneIn and more, and there's enhanced Wi-Fi timing synchronization for more harmonious home audio.

All of the W-Generation models are backward compatible with Audio Pro's existing products, so your existing speakers aren't obsolete in a multi-room setup.

The new speakers launching on 5 September, and their UK/US prices, are listed here (US prices ill be announced in October):

• A10 MkII W (A small cylindrical speaker) - £220, €250
• A15 W (A mid-size portable speaker) - £350, €400
• A28 W (Bookshelf stereo speakers) - £500, €600
• A28 walnut - £540, €650
• A38 W (Floorstanding stereo speakers) - £700, €800
• A48 W (Floorstanding stereo speakers) - £950, €1,100
• C5 MkII W (A small wireless speaker) - £250, €300
• C10 MkII W (A mid-size wireless speaker) - £350, €400
• C20 W (A wide wireless speaker) - £450, €550
• Drumfire D-2 W (A powerful mid-size speaker) - £350, €400
• Drumfire W (A large wireless speaker) - £600, €700

You might also like

• This tiny, cheap box upgrades any speakers with Wi-Fi multi-room streaming
• ‘There’s no way that can fit inside the soundbar’: Sonos tells me how it developed Sound Motion, the groundbreaking new speaker design in the Arc Ultra
• The best music streaming services

• A special B&O A9 speaker design, limited to 30 speakers
• A rock legend photographed by a photographic legend
• £3,995 (about $5,300 / AU$8,300)

Bang & Olufsen has just unveiled a very limited-edition version of its premium Beosound A9 speaker, featuring an iconic photo of David Bowie.

The design has been created in collaboration with acclaimed British music photographer Denis O'Regan, and it's going to be limited to just 30 speakers.

Each buyer will also get a 12-inch by 8-inch limited edition print signed and numbered by Regan alongside a printed box "sleeve" and a Certificate of Authenticity.

The go-to guy for photographing rock royalty

Denis O'Regan caught the music photography bug when he sneaked a camera into London's Hammersmith Odeon to capture Paul McCartney, and he became the most prolific photographer of Bowie.

He's shot everyone from AC/DC to ZZ Top, was an official photographer at Live Aid, and has been the official photographer for Bowie, Duran Duran, The Rolling Stones, The Who, Queen, Neil Diamond, Bee Gees, Pink Floyd and Thin Lizzy. He was also the first ever Artist in Residence at the Albert Hall.

Talking about the Bang & Olufsen collaboration, O'Regan said: “Throughout my career I've been privileged to hear fans and collectors describe one of my images as their 'favourite picture of Bowie'. Five years after crouching in the aisle at Newcastle's City Hall to capture this image, I set off on one of two stadium tours accompanying David around the world as his chosen photographer. This favourite of mine is the image I've selected as my chosen moment for the B&O A9 speaker cover.”

While you'll get that lovely signed print as part of the package, the fun here is really having that striking image on display on a large speaker that's already design to showcase its looks. It's bigger and more expensive than most of our picks of the best wireless speakers – but in this limited-edition version, it's especially hard to resist.

The Denis O’Regan Edition A9 Speaker will be available via west-contemporary-editions.com from Friday 25th April 2025 at 12:00 BST, with a price of £3,995 (roughly $5,300 / AU$8,300).

You might also like

• These heavyweight luxury speakers look like Doctor Who villains
• These speakers look like they belong in Elton John's house
• The best speakers for every budget

Whether building a surround sound setup or simply investing in a quality home speaker, Sonos deals are essential to keeping costs low while securing excellent audio. It's easy to get carried away syncing multiple speakers for a full surround sound experience, but such a luxury audio system is well within reach if you play your cards right. After all, we're seeing more and more Sonos sales offering significant discounts across the range, so whether you're after premium or budget models, prices are looking pretty good these days.

Sonos speaker systems offer a wide range of wireless connectivity options to get your music pumping throughout your home. They can tap into your personal collection of MP3s as well as streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music. From soundbars to subwoofers, there are Sonos speakers for all occasions—though if you don't pick them up during sales seasons, be prepared for premium pricing.

We have hot deals for the whole line-up, including the Sonos Era 100, Sonos Roam 2, Sonos Beam (Gen 2), and the Sonos Arc. Don't forget to check for Sonos promo codes, too.

Today's best Sonos sales and deals

The Sonos Era 100 was released in 2023 with a launch price of $249 / £249 / AU$399, which is more expensive than the popular Sonos One speaker. The Sonos Era 100 is an upgrade to the Sonos 100 with the addition of Bluetooth and more connection possibilities, including an adapter that can add a 3.5mm line-in. You're getting room-filling sound with more bass, excellent detail and clarity, and stereo playback, thanks to the two side-firing tweets.

The Sonos Era 100 also features hands-free control with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, a beautiful compact design, and Trueplay technology, which analyzes the acoustics of your space to optimize your speaker's EQ.

The Sonos Roam 2 was released in 2024 and is our pick for the best Sonos portable speaker. The Roam 2 features a rugged design with an IP67 dustproof and waterproof rating and weighs just under a pound, making it highly lightweight if you're in the market for an ultra-portable speaker. You're also getting impressive audio with powerful, rich sound and a balanced experience that Sonos speakers are known for, as well as Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity.

The Sonos Roam 2 retails for $179 / £179 / AU$299 and is available in Black, White, Olive, Sunset, or Wave. While this is pricey for a portable speaker, you can frequently find deals at third-party retailers like Amazon.

Read our full review: Sonos Roam 2

Released in 2021, the 2nd generation Sonos Beam remains one of the best mid-range soundbars from the company. The Sonos Beam Gen 2 features a compact, sleek design, allowing you to easily situate it beneath your TV and seamlessly blend in. Despite its size, the Sonos Beam can still fill your home with sound, delivering impressive audio with Atmost and HDMI eARC compatibility.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 is also a great choice if you're looking for a Sonos soundbar under $500 / £500. It had a starting price of $449 / £449 / $699 at launch, and because it's been on the shelves for a couple of years now, you can find frequent discounts on the soundbar.

Read our full review: Sonos Beam Gen 2

Launched in 2020, the Sonoc Arc is still the company's best soundbar, thanks to the immersive Dolby Atmos experience. Whether listening to music, watching a movie, or playing a video game, you'll feel like you're in the center of the action - no other speakers needed. The Sonos Arc is also easy to set up and features a sleek, discreet design mounted to a wall or beneath a TV.

At launch, the Sonos Arc cost $799 / £799 / AU$1,399, but after a price hike, it now retails for $899 / £899 / AU$1,499. Discounts are few and far between, so if you see the Sonos speaker on sale, you should take advantage.

Read our full review: Sonos Arc

Sonos and Alexa, Amazon's smart personal assistant, are a perfect match for one another - it's almost a wonder it's taken this long for the two of them to meet. Regardless, the Sonos One is here now, and it combines the best of both worlds. The One is able to call upon Alexa to answer basic inquiries, adjust appointments on your calendar, and, for Amazon Prime members, voice access to Amazon's expansive Music Unlimited library.

Read our full review: Sonos One

It was a long time coming, but the Sonos Beam was finally a Sonos soundbar worth waiting for. With a design small enough to match most TVs, it's equipped with smart features, innovation and exquisite sound that impresses. There are a few issues worth pointing out (the lack of Dolby Atmos at the price disappoints), but the way the speaker fits in with the rest of the Sonos eco-system makes it a must-have for those that have invested in other Sonos devices.

Providing you've got a HDMI-ARC compatible TV (which most modern ones are) it's easy to set-up and, if you've got other compatible Sonos speakers, it's a simple way to get wireless surround sound for your movies, too.

Read our review: Sonos Beam

Sonos systems are great. Like seriously great. We want to call them perfect, and yet without some sort of low-end support they just aren't. For that you need the Sonos Sub, the additional audio piece that adds a hefty amount of bass to your favorite music genres. The design here is a bit funky, we'll admit, but hey, if you were looking for a conversation starter (and ender) at your next house party, this is it. That said, it's 15.3 x 15.8 x 6.2 inches (389 x 402 x 158 mm) and weighs 36.3 lbs (16 kg). It's available in two colors – premium white gloss and premium black gloss – that can match either your Playbar or Play:5 speaker. Inside you'll find two Class-D amplifiers, two force-cancelling speaker drivers and dual acoustic ports that help the Sub reach a low frequency of about 25Hz.

Read our hands on review: Sonos Sub

So what’s a good deal for Sonos speakers?

Good deals are subjective, obviously. But if we were in your shoes, we’d wait for at least a $50/£35/AU$75-off sale. These happen around the holidays, mostly, but do happen sporadically throughout the year as well.

If you’re looking for a recommendation, your best bet is to start your Sonos system with a Play:5, the big brother of the bunch, and work your way down. We also have a soft spot in our heart for the Playbar (it’s on our best soundbar list, after all) and a Play One is a great pick for kitchens, bedrooms and studies.

If you want the latest and greatest from Sonos, check out the brand-new Sonos Playbase – it's a speaker and TV stand all in one package. OK, without further ado, here are the best Sonos deals we’ve found today.

• Check out the best soundbars for TV shows, movies and music

After a tumultuous few months for Sonos, specifically with its app for controlling its connected speakers and soundbars, yet another bug-squashing update is rolling out. And if you’ve been exploring rapid battery drain on your iPhone courtesy of the Sonos app for iOS, this should come as good news.

As confirmed by “KeithFromSonos” on the Sonos Reddit, the iOS app is receiving a fresh update. This one focuses on fixing the app's excessive use of the phone battery and the previously promised commitment to improve the stability of adding new products. 

This comes just a few days after CEO Patrick Spence penned a letter apologizing for the app and rollout and promising to add missing features and regain trust with its users. The letter also notes that more updates are planned and lists what is being fixed and when. 

A long list of updates are still incoming

Seemingly, though, with users vocalizing the issues of battery drain, the team at Sonos worked to get this fix out sooner rather than later. And a good chunk of folks were happy to see it, with some noting that they even deleted the app due to the battery drain on their iPhone or iPad. Others are still detailing problems with the app crashing and Sonos systems not being found, so there is clearly more work to do.

The other issue supposedly squashed with this latest update is improving the stability when adding new products, like an Era 100, Roam 2 speaker, or the Ace headphones.

Sonos is still working on future improvements and bug fixes, which are set to arrive next week. Judging from Spence’s note, August will focus on music library fixes, volume responsiveness, general user interface improvements, and error handling through the system. Improvements to alarms, changes to settings, and restoring the edit mode for queue and playlists are set to arrive in September and October.

Version 80.05.05 of the Sonos app is available now on iOS and iPadOS. If you’ve been experiencing issues, it’s time to update, and you can expect to see more of these updates over the coming weeks.

You Might Also Like

• The new Google Maps and Waze updates should make finding ...
• Sonos fans are turning to this alternative app instead of the troubled ...
• Best Sonos speakers: the top soundbars, music speakers and more ...

For several months now, Sonos has been feeling the anger of customers over its controversial app update: what was intended to deliver an improved user experience meant that for some users, they could no longer use their favorite features. It didn't help that the firm's response to those customers wasn't exactly emollient: the firm praised its own "courage" rather than saying "oops. We messed up." 

That's now changed, with Sonos CEO Patrick Spence apologizing to customers for the first time in a newly published letter. And more importantly, he's promising an aggressive program of updates to fix all the issues and hopefully restore customers' trust.

Sonos: we're sorry and we're going to fix it

"I want to begin by personally apologizing for disappointing you," Spence writes. "There isn’t an employee at Sonos who isn’t pained by having let you down, and I assure you that fixing the app for all of our customers and partners has been and continues to be our number one priority."

As he explains, since May there have been app updates roughly every two weeks. Going forward Sonos will commit to a bi-weekly update schedule that will run through October, with the following improvements and fixes.

Sonos updates in July and August 2024

• Improving the stability when adding new products
• Implementing Music Library configuration, browse, search, and play

Sonos updates in August and September 2024

• Improving Volume responsiveness
• User interface improvements based on customer feedback
• Improving overall system stability and error handling

Sonos updates in September 2024

• Improving Alarm consistency and reliability

Sonos updates in September and October 2024

• Restoring edit mode for Playlists and the Queue
• Improving functionality in settings

Signing off, Spence writes: "We know we have work to do to earn back your trust and are working hard to do just that." He also says he's open to feedback, which you can email to him at ceo@sonos.com.

Some people didn't have problems with the new app, but it really turned some people against the best Sonos speakers that they'd invested in, due to the missing features, unreliable operation, or both.

Sonos status as ranking highly among the best wireless speakers relies in no small part on its app making the products as easy to use as possible. Here's hoping the new app will finally live up to that promise by the end of the year.

You might also like

• Sonos updates its privacy policy and seemingly hints they'll begin selling user data
• Sonos Ace review: amazing Dolby Atmos movie headphones, but not such a slam with music
• I tried the Sonos Roam 2, and the extra button really makes all the difference

The latest big update to the Sonos app is now available to download worldwide on iOS or as a new web app, and it's a great-looking upgrade if you've got any of the best Sonos speakers. 

Update: or is it so great-looking? While it's much nicer in appearance, a lot of people are unhappy with some of the missing features, and it's also missing compatibility with screen-reading tech for blind people. Sonos is soliciting feedback – you can read about that, and more about the issues here. So it may be worth holding off on the update if you use some of the features mentioned in that article. The rest of this article remains unedited from its originally published version.

The app should also be available on Android, but at the time of writing, I'm still seeing the previous version in the Google Play Store (I've approached Sonos to confirm Android availability). But I've got the new update running on my iPhone now. 

I wrote in-depth previously about the new Sonos app, and how it's a much slicker piece of software, and a smart hub for all your music services, but here are the key upgrades:

• New Home screen bringing recommendations from different services together in one personalized space
• You can also pin specific elements from different services here, such as a 'New releases' row from a particular service
• New Now Playing screen, and quicker access to speaker groupings
• Universal search from the Home screen, prioritizing your favorite service

The first thing I noted about this update is that it requires a re-scan of your Sonos system, popping up immediately to demand that. So, as with so much tech these days, it's probably best to open this app and check that's all working before you actually want to use it and get into all the options.

I definitely think Sonos users will want to check this out quickly – a brief glance at the reviews of the Sonos app will tell you that the app is the biggest most people have with their Sonos setup, and while it's too early to say how many problems the app will solve, it's a step in a more user-friendly direction – a good thing if Sonos is to stay dominant among the best wireless speakers.

The timing of the new app's release feels auspicious too, with rumors of an upcoming launch of the first Sonos headphones being boosted by a huge leak that claims to include the name and design of Sonos' cans.

You might also like

• The cheapest Sonos sales and deals for May 2024
• This super-cool music player is like an iPad and hi-res music streamer in one – and it works with Sonos and Bluetooth as well as wired speakers
• Focal's new headphones take different approaches to immersive audio

After months of speculation and leaks, Sonos has at last officially taken the wraps off its new multiroom speakers: the Sonos Era 100 and Era 300.

As expected, the audio tech brand today revealed two desktop speakers – the Dolby Atmos-supporting Era 300, and the mid-range Era 100, which is a direct replacement for the venerable Sonos One.

And we've tried them both – read our first impressions of both in our hands-on Sonos Era 100 review, and our hands-on Sonos Era 300 review.

The Era 300 features an unusually-shaped, dual-angled frame which houses six class-D digital amplifiers, six hefty drivers: two force-opposing woofers and four compression drivers, allowing for sound to be fired forward, upwards, left and right.

As well as being able to create spacious stereo, the Era 300’s drivers are able to reflect sound off walls and ceilings, allowing for the device’s calling-card feature of support for immersive Dolby Atmos spatial audio.

For an even bigger soundstage, the Era 300 can be paired up with the Sonos Arc soundbars as rear speakers to create a very powerful, and indeed expensive, 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos home theater setup. We've tried it, and it sounds pretty incredible.

There’s an all-new user interface, with a capacitive volume slider plus dedicated skip and replay controls, and a Bluetooth button for pairing devices to the speaker. Sonos Voice Control and Alexa assistant is once again onboard, although Google Assistant support is noticeably absent, likely thanks to Sonos’ long-running legal dispute with the search engine giant. 

Privacy-conscious users can temporarily deactivate their voice assistants by tapping the new speech bubble control or completely disconnect power to the in-built microphone by sliding a switch on the back of the device.

There’s also one of the widest array connectivity options we’ve seen on a Sonos device, with Bluetooth, Wi-Fi for lossless streaming, Apple AirPlay 2, and USB-C line-in. 

Unlike the Sonos Five (which remains on-sale), there’s no dedicated 3.5mm input, but the Era 300 can be connected to other audio devices such as one of the best turntables via a sold-separately Sonos Line-In Adapter in conjunction with an auxiliary cable.

As ever, there’s Sonos’ TruePlay set-up feature, which measures the room’s acoustics and automatically adjusts EQ to optimize output for the space, while Sonos claim the Era 300’s overall sound has been tuned and tailored by a host of big name audio experts including Coldplay engineer Emily Lazar and mix specialist Manny Marroquin, who has worked with the likes of Alicia Keys, Kanye West and John Legend.

Another new Era

Also finally announced today was the more compact and conventional-looking Era 100.

The cylindrical speaker is slightly deeper and wider than its forbearer the Sonos One, and can now provide a wider stereo-like soundstage thanks to an angled dual-tweeter arrangement inside the larger housing, while a 25 per cent larger mid-woofer provides vastly improved bass.  

While the Era 100 doesn’t support spatial audio, it does feature a similar array of connectivity, with Bluetooth support, Wi-Fi and AirPlay 2 streaming, plus a similar USB-C line-in setup, including support for 3.5mm using the adapter.

The Sonos Era 300 is priced at $449 / £449 / AU$749, while the Era 100 comes in at $249 / £249 / AU$399. Both speakers are available to order from the Sonos website, and launch on March 28, 2023.

For more multi-room audio gear, check out our best wireless speaker and best smart speaker lists.

You've probably heard of the eco-conscious audio manufacturer House of Marley – yes, created in collaboration with Bob Marley's actual family. If not, the company's Rebel and Liberate Air earbuds are a good place to start. 

And although the Liberate Air didn't exactly gain a glowing review from this publication, the audio specialist has just released a project which could well be its redemption song. 

The new Get Together Solo (is it possible to get together solo? And if so, could you be loved?) is the House of Marley signature speaker, reimagined. It is essentially an all-new portable speaker that boasts up to 25 hours of playtime. 

Get Together Solo speaker is a two-way design featuring 3.5-inch and 0.75-inch drivers, but although it may look like one half of a great stereo speaker pair, it likes to go solo, featuring Bluetooth 5.1, plus RCA and AUX connectivity. And in true Marley style, this new addition takes sustainability seriously. It is crafted from bamboo and the company's own REWIND fabric; a balanced blend of 30% reclaimed organic cotton, 30% reclaimed hemp and 40% recycled plastic bottles. 

As one of the world’s fastest growing plants, bamboo makes for an environmentally friendly alternative to most materials – which makes it a far greener option than the Sonos One. 

Opinion: greener doesn't have to mean uglier – House of Marley's Solo proves it

Perhaps, when we imagine recycled plastic bottles and hemp by-products, we imagine a murky brown material akin to sackcloth. This is not what the House of Marley Get Together Solo says to us. Not at all. 

Its glorious bamboo baffle, curved edges, drivers and useful control panel on the top plate suggest aspirational hi-fi, and I personally had to double-check the price given the Bluetooth and connections on the back. 

House of Marley also tells us you can seamlessly pair two Get Together Solo speakers to form stereo sound, and for a simple, wireless, eco-conscious turntable setup, you might also pair the Get Together Solo to House of Marley's Stir It Up Wireless Turntable (currently on sale for just £219.99 from £249.99, which is around $246 or AU$390) for a remarkably affordable system. 

Having recently tried the Victrola Stream Carbon (which hooked up to my Sonos Five a treat with no extra amps or phono stages needed) I'm a wireless turntable convert – and House of Marley's proposition is a tempting one.  

The House of Marley Get Together Solo is available to purchase from House of Marley now, and will be available on Amazon and HMV by the end of the month, priced £99.99 (around $111, AU$175, although we're awaiting official pricing there) – but House of Marley has kindly told us that it will be on promo for Black Friday in the UK, at just £79.99.

At that price, even the best Bluetooth speakers should sit up and take notice, because that saving on an already affordable speaker makes us feel like the sun is shining, and the weather is sweet, yeah… 

Sonos Sub Mini: One-minute review

The Sonos Sub Mini is the long-awaited smaller and cheaper subwoofer from Sonos that's designed to pair with its soundbars, to bring deeper bass and a better home theater experience.

The Sonos Sub Mini offers a crucial alternative to the existing Sonos Sub, which is a big and beefy beast that's only suitable for larger rooms and bigger setups… and if you don't have neighbors in close quarters.

The Sub Mini is smaller and, obviously, less powerful, but we found that when testing it even with the large Sonos Arc it adds an important bass foundation that really elevates the experience. Its sound is composed, precise and rich, though we do recommend using the Sonos app to increase the Sub level to +4 or +5, because it's a bit on the reserved side out of the box.

Paired with the smaller Sonos Beam 2nd Gen, it again much improves the depth and sustain of bass; however it also doubles the cost. If you want the most expansive-feeling system possible in the smallest space, it's a good buy; otherwise, alternative options (such as the Samsung HW-Q930B) offer better value.

It makes the most dramatic improvement to the listening experience when teamed with the cheaper Sonos Ray, but it's just too expensive to truly justify for a budget soundbar, unless you have some very specific setup needs.

Sonos Sub Mini review: Price and release date

• $429 / £429 / AU$699
• Released on October 6, 2022

The price of the Sonos Sub Mini is pleasingly – and, crucially – lower than the $699 / £649 / $1,099 of the full-size Sonos Sub. It's not cheap – and, we'd argue, perhaps still just a little too expensive, in the context of the price of the two soundbars Sonos recommends pairing it with.

Sonos says it's the ideal partner to the Sonos Ray and Sonos Beam 2nd Gen, but is officially gently steering people away from using it with the Sonos Arc, even though (as we'll come to), it works great with that model too.

But the Sonos Ray costs $279 / £279 / AU$399 – I'm struggling to imagine people spending an additional $430 to add some bass extension to a cheap and cheerful soundbar that doesn't even include Dolby Atmos or HDMI support.

As alluded to above, I can see the case more with the Sonos Beam 2nd Gen, which costs $449 / £449 / AU$599. You're still nearly doubling the cost to add the Sub Mini, but if you simply can't have a larger soundbar than this, then it's probably the best option out there.

To be a more tempting pairing with these soundbars it probably needed to cost closer to $300 / £300, but that's not the case. However, there can sometimes be Sonos promo codes to bring the price down a little. 

Sonos Sub Mini review: Features and design

• Frequency range down to 25Hz
• Force-cancelling six-inch drivers
• Tidy cylindrical design

There aren't a lot of features in the Sonos Sub Mini – it's just a subwoofer, after all! As you'd expect, it works wirelessly over Wi-Fi, and uses a fast and low-latency 5GHz connection to ensure it's as synced with your soundbar as possible, but there's also an Ethernet port for wired connectivity.

It works with the Ray, Beam and Arc soundbars, but could also be used with a pair of Sonos One speakers to beef up a stereo system, or even with a pair of Sonos Five speakers, though Sonos says that's less recommended because they have strong bass already. It'll also work with bookshelf speakers connected to a Sonos Amp, but it doesn't work with the Sonos Port, Sonos Move or Sonos Roam.

The main thing to know about the Sub Mini is its driver configuration. It features two six-inch woofers, which offer frequency response reaching down to 25Hz, according to Sonos' figures.

The two drivers face towards each other at the center of the speaker, with the bass they produce then diffusing out of the oval ports on each side of the Sub Mini. This configuration is called a 'force-cancelling' setup, and is often used in more advanced speaker systems where you want a good amount of power in a small space.

The science is this: any loudspeaker driver that uses vibrations to push air in one direction (i.e., the sound you want) will also produce 'waste' vibrations in the opposite direction, because every action has an equal and opposite reaction. Left unchecked, these waste vibrations can cause unwanted sound of their own, or can cause the body of a speaker to vibrate, none of which we want.

Very large speakers will often absorb these waste vibrations through sheer brute force – they'll be made from very thick, very heavy material that can simply take the shake. But a small speaker like the Sonos Sub Mini can't, because it just isn't big (or heavy) enough – and good bass requires especially aggressive movement from a speaker driver.

Force cancellation is an alternative option, and it's what Sonos is using in the Sub Mini. Here, you have two identical speakers facing in precisely opposite directions, and they play the exact same sound in sync. Remember I said that the issue is that a speaker firing forward produces reactionary vibrations backwards? Well, if you also have a speaker firing backwards that products a reactionary vibration going forwards, then you've actually balanced the reactionary vibrations. It's like two people pushing a door from opposite sides at the same time – nothing happens. The unwanted vibrations cancel each other out, and you're only left with the useful air movement that you actually want.

And it's very effective in our experience – it means the Sub Mini leaks minimal vibrations outside of the subwoofer itself. Huge bass won't rattle the walls, or travel through to next door (unless you really crank up the volume) – the subwoofer itself feels basically still even when in use.

The cylindrical design helps here too (circular units absorb vibrations better than squared-off designed), and they give the Sonos Sub Mini a smart-looking design overall. It's a bit prone to finger smudges, but you won't be moving it around as often as I was when doing all my testing, so you probably won't mind.

It comes in black or white to match your other Sonos gear, and one nice touch is that the oval cut-out in the sides is the same proportions as the Sonos Beam when viewed from above, or the Sonos Ray when viewed from the front.

There is one major missing feature that's a shame, though: you can only connect one Sonos Sub Mini to a system. The original Sonos Sub supports two subwoofers in a single system, so you could potentially have a 5.2.2 setup connected to one TV for big-bass lovers.

Low frequencies travel the shortest distance of any sound waves, so having the option of two Sub Minis distributing bass evenly in a larger room where a big subwoofer isn't welcome would have been a nice option – in fact, the new cheaper Sennheiser Ambeo soundbar's subwoofer system is totally designed around this. I hope Sonos changes this with an update in the future.

• Features and design score: 4/5

Sonos Sub Mini review: Sound quality

• Rich, sustained, diffused bass
• Adds more depth to all Sonos soundbars
• Needs a bit of extra kick out of the box

If what you want from the Sonos Sub Mini is a richer, deeper underpinning to the home theater sound from your Sonos soundbars, but without it being in-your-face or extreme, the Sub Mini is a good fit.

Its sound is not big – in fact, out of the box I'd say it's a little too restrained and polite – but it offers a level of bass extension that none of the Sonos soundbars can match on their own, so there's no question it offers a real improvement for them all.

And the Sonos Sub Mini also integrates its frequency range seamlessly with all three soundbars, even though they each have different low-end capabilities – in all cases, you won't be able to hear the Sub Mini click in and out of working. The bar and sub will simply combine into one big soundstage.

In all cases, what it adds is the deeper bass down to 25Hz, so you get those low, powerful frequencies that are simply missing without a sub. This also means it adds resonance to the bass that's simply missing from all three soundbars – in all cases, they roll bass off to nothing very quickly, but the sub can keep the lowest frequencies rumbling in your ears and throat, which adds more realism to scenes ranging from explosions to crashing waves to acoustic instruments being played.

And while doing this, it also releases the bass from the soundbar. Ideally, low frequencies should be directionless, and just act as a foundation for the rest of the sound. The Sonos Ray and Beam in particular feel like the bass is powering from the small bar unit; the Arc is a little better, but still feels constrained. The Sub Mini feels like it's just coating the whole area.

In Top Gun: Maverick, when Tom Cruise flies his Mach 10 plane over Ed Harris near the start, at first there's a roar of engines as he takes off, then there's a shockwave that blasts through the screen. With the soundbars alone, there's just a light punchy boom; with the Sub Mini, the roar of take-off has actual weight and power, and feels like a beast of an engine has fired. And then the shockwave has more thump, but most important it lasts a second longer in the lowest frequencies – it feels more like how it would affect the real world, not just images on a screen.

In Star Wars: The Last Jedi, when Snoke's ship is picking off escape shuttles, the Sub Mini means that lasers strike and explode with depth and menace, rather than just popping the ships. And in Avengers: Endgame, Thanos hitting Cap's shield creates a deep ringing noise that lasts longer and delivers much more of a sense of impact.

But to get all these to a level where I was happiest with the added effect of the bass, I used the Sonos app to dial the Sub's output up to +5. Straight out of the box, it still made a difference, but it's much more subtle.

If you've gone to the trouble of adding a subwoofer to your setup, you're probably hoping for a pretty stand-out effect. For me, +5 added that, but without making the sound feel overly bassy in any way, or making me worry that it would travel through to the neighbors' house.

Now, let's talk about how well it works with individual soundbars. With the Sonos Ray, it not only adds bass, but also helps to relax the sound of the Ray in other parts of the sound. Without the pressure of trying to handle all the bass itself, the Ray's mid-range feels more free and natural, so the Sub Mini makes the biggest difference to this soundbar. But as I've mentioned elsewhere, I still don't think you should spend $449 on achieving this.

Used with the Sonos Beam and Sonos Arc, it doesn't make a big difference to the overall soundstage that I identified, but it does just deliver that deeper, richer rumble that those soundbars simply can't manage on their own.

• Sound quality score: 4/5

Sonos Sub Mini review: Setup and app

• Easy to set up and add to a system
• Slightly fiddly to find adjustment options in the app

Setting up the Sonos Sub Mini is as easy as any other Sonos speaker. Plug it in, fire up the Sonos app, ask to add a new device, and follow the instructions. There's a spot on top with an NFC chip that's used to speed things up further, but the on-screen guide will talk you through this.

It will then ask which Sonos speaker from your home you want to pair the Sub Mini with, and then you're good. It's a couple of minutes in total.

Mercifully for me, testing this with three different soundbars, Sonos also made it easy to switch the Sub between different rooms – you just remove it from one room, and then the app will suggest a different room that has a speaker in it, and then handles the rest.

If you want to make tweaks, this is where the Sonos app gets a little confusing. You go to your devices, then you choose a setup (such as Sonos Beam + Sub). That takes you to another screen, and here you'll have multiple different places where you can make Sub Mini settings changes. Look for Sub Audio – here you can slide the amount of bass up and down (to achieve the +4 or +5 I recommend), or even turn the Sub Mini off temporarily. You can flick it back on later.

• Setup and app score: 4/5

Sonos Sub Mini review: Value

• Great for Sonos Arc
• Good for Sonos Beam if space is limited
• Not worth it for Sonos Ray

As I've discussed, the Sub Mini's value depends partly on what you're thinking of pairing it with. Purely as a high-quality subwoofer, I think its price is perfectly fair for how controlled and high-quality it is.

But it doesn't exist on its own. It's really made for pairing with one of three subwoofers, and it's a very tough sell for one, a fairly tough sell for the second, and solid add-on for the last.

With the Sonos Ray, it's simply too much to pay for the extra bass extension and audio improvements it brings. You should get a different soundbar setup if you're thinking of spending that kind of combined money and want real bass. Look to the Yamaha SR-C30A, for example.

With the Sonos Beam, the combined cost is too high when compared to a package like the Samsung HW-Q930B that offers so much more. However, all of those packages would be much larger soundbars. If you're in super-limited space, the Beam and Sub Mini combo is probably the best-sounding option you can get, so it can justify the price here in some cases.

With the Sonos Arc, I will just straight-up recommend it if you already have the soundbar and would like a better soundstage overall. As a long-time Arc user, it fills exactly the hole I wanted it to, and for a price I think is reasonable.

• Value score: 3/5

Should you buy the Sonos Sub Mini?

Buy it if…

Don't buy it if…

Sonos has confirmed that it's delaying the launch of a new product – which we think is the long-rumored Sub Mini – after a "challenging" quarter in which the company has been hit by the effects of currency fluctuations and inflation.

Sonos spokesperson Erin Pategas confirmed to The Verge that "an anticipated product launch" had been shifted from the fourth quarter of 2022 to the first quarter of 2023, so you've got a little bit longer to save up for the next wireless speaker.

While Sonos hasn't confirmed the existence of the Sub Mini, it's widely thought that this is the product in question. Based on what we think we know so far, it's going to be a cheaper and more affordable version of the existing Sonos Sub.

Huge opportunity

Sonos has only just reported on its earnings for the last quarter, and they're way down on expectations. “We have seen the macroeconomic backdrop become significantly more challenging for us starting in June," CEO Patrick Spence explained in a statement.

However, Spence also struck a confident note for the future. "We expect to weather the current environment while operating from a position of strength: we are profitable, we are debt free, and we have a huge market opportunity," he added.

As yet we don't have any pricing or any other details for the Sonos Sub Mini, but we do know that it passed through the US regulatory approval process in June, which under normal circumstances would mean that it would be arriving any day now.

Analysis: no rush for Sonos

Generally speaking, Sonos has tried to push out two new products every year in recent times. We've already seen the Sonos Ray appear in 2022 – a compact, affordable soundbar that we were pretty impressed by when we tested it.

However, there's no rush for the company to push out new products and product refreshes. Its wireless speakers are designed to last for a long time, and they'll perform well for years and years before they need to be replaced.

At the same time, the company won't want to rest on its laurels, with increasing competition from smart speakers and other products. That's one of the reasons for the Sub Mini's existence: to give buyers even more options for their home speaker system.

As well as its hardware, Sonos also works hard on maintaining and improving its software offerings, which are essential for beaming audio over Wi-Fi networks. If the rumors are to be believed, there are big upgrades on the way in this department as well.

• Samsung's latest soundbar shows how badly Sonos needs a Sub Mini

If you're a Sonos fan who's been hoping the company would launch a small and cheap wireless speaker to rival the likes of the Amazon Echo Dot (4th Gen), it looks like you're set to be disappointed.

Sonos CEO Patrick Spence recently conducted an interview with Time, in which he talked about some of the mistakes he's seen during his career, and he brought up the potential for a budget Sonos speaker… or rather, the lack of potential, we should say.

Spence told Time: “When Amazon and Google jumped in with small $25 speakers, there was a faction inside Sonos that said, ‘We can build a better $25 speaker than those companies.’ I said, ‘That’s exactly what we’re not going to do because I’ve seen this movie before.’”

The movie Spence is referring to is what he saw at RIM, maker of the BlackBerry, which is where he worked during the launch of the iPhone. When asked about the BlackBerry Storm, the company's attempt to create a touchscreen rival to the iPhone, Spence said: "In hindsight, RIM should have built the next best BlackBerry and not a response to the iPhone. With Storm, we threw away a decade of customer loyalty and a lot of our reputation for great products. That did make me paranoid about how Sonos should respond to competitive threats."

Spence points out that Sonos did respond to the launch of smart speakers, but by joining them rather then beating them: "We leveraged services they provide, such as by offering their voice assistants on a very innovative Sonos speaker that can support multiple assistants."

He also says: "we didn’t respond by competing directly with those companies and betraying everything we’re about." So he clearly feels strongly about this point, with language like that.

Opinion: Sonos is right to avoid this race to the bottom

One of the smartest things Spence says here is that he describes the Echo Dot and Google Nest Mini as being $25 speakers, even though their official price in both cases is $50. That's because no fool buys them at full price – they're on discount so often that their real price is $25-$30.

And the reason Amazon and Google sell them so cheap is that the hardware is only part of the equation for these companies. They can make money from the usage data of the smart assistants, and both companies have music streaming services you might pay for if you have their speakers. The hardware is a means to an end.

Sonos doesn't have these other ways of making money from its products – Spence made a point of mentioning privacy in the Time interview: "We’ve upped the game on privacy and speed. Instead of sending all your data to the cloud, we focused on running the Sonos voice assistant locally in your house. This is the way we respect what our customers want."

So if Sonos made a $25 speaker, it has to be profitable and sustainable at $25. That's not the case for Amazon and Google. Sonos would be entering a fight it can't really win if it tried to battle them, because if it really threatened the Dot and the Nest Mini, their price would drop even further.

You can get some of the best Bluetooth speakers for that cheap because they have less complicated tech in than these Wi-Fi connected speakers. But we've already seen, in the case of the Sonos Roam, that Sonos isn't even interested in making simple and cheap Bluetooth speakers, let alone trying to do it with Wi-Fi as well. I think it's good that it's sticking to its guns as a company, and is choosing its own direction, not being blown around in the winds of much bigger, richer and less focused companies.

The legal battle between Sonos and Google has gone up a notch following a new ruling by the US Customs Service.

As reported by Paul Thurott, Google has been found guilty by the Customs Service of having broken an import ban imposed by the International Trade Commission (ITC) after continuing to infringe on five Sonos patents.

“US Customs Service confirmed that Google was flouting the importation ban and continuing to import infringing products in violation of that ban. This finding marks yet another example of Google continuing to misuse our intellectual property and acting in wholesale disregard of the law. We remain committed to defending our IP [intellectual property] and will continue to do so, on behalf of our own technology, as well as the broader innovation landscape," Sonos Chief Legal Officer Eddie Lazarus said.

The legal battle has been running since 2020, when Sonos first sued Google over patent infringements.

Sonos claimed that Google stole key elements of its multi-room technology after a partnership back in 2013, accusing them of using its massive scale to produce competing products that undercut those of Sonos.

The ITC ruling in favor of Sonos back in January this year imposed a crippling import ban on a number of Google's key hardware products including Nest, Pixel, and Chromecast.

In an effort to get around the ban, Google began introducing workarounds via software updates at the start of the year for a wide range of its products. Among the changes was a degrading of its volume adjustment and initial network setup features for their smart home devices and speakers. This meant a less user-friendly experience for owners, with users needing to adjust individual volumes of all units in a Speaker Group separately.

Despite those downgrades, Google has now still been found to infringe on at least two Sonos patents on devices they were still importing following the ban.

Responding to this week’s new ruling, Sonos appeared to throw down the gauntlet to Google with a straight-up order for them to make their products even worse or pay up to use their patents.

Reacting to the result, a Sonos representative told Thurott: “To avoid further importation exclusions, Google must either further degrade its customer experience, or pursue a fair licensing agreement with Sonos.”

When reached for comment, Google spokesperson José Castañeda told TechRadar via email;

"The U.S. Customs Service confirmed that Google audio players are not subject to an importation ban. This decision temporarily impacts a small number of Pixel users who set up a speaker or display for the first time with the Device Utility App. We will work with them to minimize disruption. Our support teams are on hand to fix any issues they have and if needed, we will send replacement devices or offer a Google store credit. Over the years, we have worked hard to make sure that our shared customers would have a positive experience and are disappointed that Sonos continues to use the legal system in a way that deliberately creates issues for these users."

Analysis: A huge win for Sonos… and a potentially big loss for Google smart device users

Sonos will rightfully be celebrating the latest legal salvo in this long-running dispute surrounding its patents, with the result undoubtedly set to be a cause for major headaches among Google’s hardware team. 

While the workarounds rolled out to users so far haven’t necessarily been game-changing in terms of the key features of those affected Google devices, existing users have nevertheless been vocal online about the reduced functionality that some of their gadgets now have.

If this latest episode results in further rollbacks of features, Google smart device users will be hoping the companies can gather around a table and strike what’s now likely to be a costly deal for those pesky patents.

This would at least result in the experience for users getting back to what it was before – but people might fairly ask why a company the size of Google/Alphabet didn't just pay its dues to Sonos early on, rather than making the products people paid for worse to use…

Sonos Five: Two-minute review

The Sonos Five will look very familiar to anyone who knows their way around Sonos' 2015 Play:5 Gen. 2 (or even the 2009 inaugural Sonos Play:5, originally called the S5), but considering the brilliance of its innovative, long-standing and highly popular speaker heritage, it's no bad thing. 

The Five is the biggest and most powerful wireless home speaker in Sonos' range, and it sounds every inch as detailed and musically pleasing as we've come to expect from Sonos. This flagship iteration (released in June 2020) adds increased memory, snappier processing and a new, er, wireless radio feature. Not a huge upgrade then? 

Well, the last Play:5 was mightily good to start with – and the new all-white or all-black styling does look slightly sleeker. More than that, though, the new processor puts to rest any doubts you might have about future compatibility and firmware updates (even though the older Play:5 was already compatible with the company's S2 platform). 

For many, its powerful, regimented bass clout, undeniably classy audio performance  and the Sonos name-plate proudly featured on its grille will be all the reason they need to click 'buy' – and we certainly won't be stopping you. If you want room-filling sound and Sonos' full multi-room streaming tech built-in, the Sonos Five is a top buy.

While so many of the best wireless speakers on the market come boasting decent, powerful audio that doesn't distort even as you crank the volume, the Five actually delivers it. Want to add it to a home theater setup? Of course – few Sonos products are as open to meeting new friends and working together as the Five. See how the Sonos branding is written vertically? That's because it can be placed upright or horizontally, and will deliver sound in stereo on its own (when positioned on its long side) but when synced with another Five, each will deliver half of the sound in a more conventional stereo pair configuration. 

You can also use two of them (in the upright position) as rear surrounds for a home theater set-up with a Sonos Arc – though, to partner the smaller Sonos Ray or Sonos Beam 2nd Gen, we'd suggest a pair Sonos One SL units instead.

If barking at your home speaker isn't important to you (there are no mics here, although you could control it with another mic-ed up Sonos speaker in your network) and superior streaming over Wi-Fi means Bluetooth streaming isn't high on your list either (there's also no Bluetooth) this is the model for you. Sonically, it's impossible to beat this one-box speaker for the money. 

Sonos Five review: Price and release date

• Costs $549 / £499 / AU$799
• Sonos' most powerful home speaker – and it's not cheap
• Released in June 2020

The Sonos Five is available to buy now, costing one pound less than £500 in the UK, just under $550 in the US, or as close as makes no difference to AU$800 if you're in Australia. And if you thought its relative age might mean a few discounts across well-known online retailers, think again – Sonos kit rarely sees a price cut, so expect to pay this much or thereabouts for the foreseeable. Although, you may get lucky with relevant Sonos promo codes to help you out.

The thing is, we don't need to tell you there are plenty of cheaper options out there if you just want a portable Bluetooth speaker (JBL Flip 6 or JBL Charge 5 are the go-to models there) and for home use, the screen-enhanced Bose Home Speaker 500 or Amazon Echo Show 15 smart speakers also undercut the Sonos Five considerably.

However, for similar size, stature and features, the Braun LE01, Bowers & Wilkins Zeppelin or Sonus Faber Omnia are considerably pricier – so depending on your priorities, the Sonos Five does still represent value.

One more consideration and we'll move on, we promise. It's just that if you were looking to buy a second Sonos Five to create a stereo pair, the KEF LSX stereo speaker system (and brand new LSX II) is closely priced and boasts a more comprehensive connectivity spec-sheet and hi-res capabilities out the box. 

Don't get us wrong, the Sonos Five is certainly a strong product, but depending on what you're after, there may an option that better suits…

• See all the latest Sonos promo codes

Sonos Five review: Features

• Wi-Fi, AirPlay 2 plus line-in connection for music sources
• Full Sonos wireless support
• No Bluetooth, mics or Chromecast

Kicking off with connectivity, swizzle the Sonos Five around and you'll find three ports. The first is for power (in case it needs to be mentioned, the Sonos Five must be plugged in to function at all times, so it isn't a great candidate for outdoor listening despite its 'humidity resistant' rating), then Ethernet, and lastly a 3.5mm input to add a source, such as a turntable with a built-in phono stage – the beauty of it being that your vinyl could then be streamed across your network of connected Sonos speakers. 

You don't get any built-in voice assistant here, unlike the Sonos Beam or Sonos Arc. No Alexa, no Google Assistant, and no Sonos Voice Control. That is because there's no mic at all, which seems a little bizarre given Sonos' recent focus on its proprietary Sonos Voice rollout, but there we are.

While this will excite little more than a shrug if you don't like talking to your speakers anyway, the lack of Bluetooth streaming support may be more of an issue – although this is nothing new for Sonos. As usual, (only the Sonos Move and Sonos Roam buck this trend) the Sonos app asks you to enable Bluetooth on your device in order to recognize the Five, but it's for setup only – after that, Bluetooth is never mentioned again. 

From within the intuitive and slick Sonos app, you can tweak the Five's EQ (to add/remove bass and treble) the stereo balance, and set up Sonos' TruePlay tuning if you're using an iPhone, which requires you to walk around your room wafting your iPhone to a selection of intergalactic battle-type noises, to measure how sound bounces around your room's physical dimensions. Then, TruePlay tweaks the Five's sound profile to compensate for these sonic imperfections, boosting the accuracy and clarity. Sadly, this only works on iPhone, but if you can, we'd certainly recommend using it – and you could always borrow someone else's iOS device to TruePlay your Sonos Five, since you only do it the once in a room. 

One sticking point here is that although the Five features AirPlay 2 support over Wi-Fi, there's no Google Cast baked in, which could be a stumbling block for Android households, particularly since Bluetooth isn't onboard either. But you can play music through the Sonos app, of course.

• Features score: 4/5

Sonos Five review: Sound quality

• Expressive, detailed sound
• Textured vocals
• Full and snappy bass floor

In traditional Sonos style, the Five is not interested in a shy, retiring sound – it's here to bring the bass and make you feel it, and we're not complaining. However (and we've said this before) it's important to note that we like it more if you can use TruePlay tuning, and not everyone is granted that privilege.

Take the time to weave your iPhone through the air around your room (do it with purpose though, because the app will tell you if you're not moving quick enough) and the low-end resonates in a way other speakers, even those of similar proportions, could never reach. Even without TruePlay you'll get a good dollop of bass clout, but the leading edges of notes and horns in hip-hop tracks such as Lethal Bizzle's Fester Skank are just a little more impactful with it, as you'd expect, and there's a marginal improvement to be had through the dynamic rise and fall of each sonic article. 

That's not to say it's bass-heavy overall though. Listen to Fontaines D.C.'s Skinty Fia and you'll hear a low-end that, while impactful and unwavering, never bloats or muddies other musical passages such as accordions, drum riffs, angered vocals and keys. 

Stream Rachmaninov's Piano Concerto No. 2 in C Minor, performed by Andre Previn, the London Symphony Orchestra and Vladimir Ashkenazy, and the flute is never harsh through the sparkling and untethered treble. Piano notes are distinct, three dimensional and lilting with enough space around them to shine in a cohesive mix. 

There's an openness to the sound too. Close your eyes and, unlike so many one-box solutions, the Five could quite easily trick you into thinking you've got a set of very good bookshelf speakers on the go. 

• Sound quality score: 5/5

Sonos Five review: Design

• Available in all-white or all-black
• Configuration unchanged since the Play:5
• An unfussy but rock-solid design

Like so much of Sonos' range, the Five's design is simple, almost to a fault here given its larger dimensions. The Five is available in black or white, with an easy-to-dust metal grille and small icons to denote play/pause on the top plate, flanked by two other 'buttons' which can be covered to increase or lower the volume. You can also swipe across these for track skips, which is quite fun, although in low-light situations there's only a solo light above the play/pause icon which can make things hard to locate. 

Although it's about the size of a large shoe-box (and heavier than it looks, at 6.36kg) the Sonos Five isn't quite a cuboid since its grille portion is slightly bigger than its rear end and the baffle is slightly bowed out and angled upwards too, to aid with sound dispersal.  

Under the hood, the speaker array remains exactly the same as its Play:5 predecessor – and Sonos actually makes no bones about this. You're getting the same six custom-designed drivers driven by six class D amplifiers for a combined power output of 120W: three high excursion 10cm mid-woofers across the bottom of the unit and three tweeters above them, two of which are angled outwards. 

So why did it even refresh the product? Well, you're also getting an upgraded processor here, which is key – it signifies that Sonos is likely future-proofing this speaker for potential firmware upgrades, ie. the oft-rumored addition of hi-res music support. So, there's that. 

• Design score: 4/5

Sonos Five review: Value

• No voice assistance or Bluetooth or when competitors do have
• Lack of Google Cast support could be an issue despite Sonos multi-room
• But for sound, it's a class-leader

For sound quality, the Sonos Five actually isn't just good value, it's absolutely great value. But it's a case of different strokes for different folks; if Bluetooth streaming is important to you and you own an Android phone, you should look elsewhere.  

In terms of counting features, the Sonos Five has got plenty going for it (AirPlay 2, Sonos' class-leading multi-room platform, plenty of scope for adding to it at a later date, a friendly and rock-solid app) but there are a few holes on the spec sheet too; Google Cast, voice assistance, Bluetooth, we're looking at you. 

Ultimately, we come back to how good it sounds – and it really does sound as good as this money can buy for a one-box speaker design. But that's no good if you want waterproofing (there is none here) interesting colorways or Bluetooth streaming. 

If exhilarating Sonos sound quality is paramount though, look no further. 

• Value score: 4/5

Sonos Five review: Should I buy it?

Buy it if…

Don't buy it if…

Also consider…

• First reviewed: June 2022
• How we test: explore TechRadar's review guarantee

Klipsch has just announced not one, not two, but 11 new speaker models – aka the Klipsch Reference Premiere series speakers. The all-new lineup is an enhanced version of the company’s outgoing (and award-winning) Reference Premiere series, now into its third generation. Klipsch assures us that this latest iteration features the most impactful upgrades in the series’ history, including the latest technological audio advancements, premium materials, and dramatic cosmetic details – all of which is a roundabout way of saying that according to Klipsch, your Dolby Atmos-enabled home theater system never looked (or sounded) so good. 

The series uses new, larger proprietary Tractrix horn technology to improve high-frequency response and extension as well as enhancing stereo imaging and dynamics. Klipsch's signature and proprietary copper Cerametallic woofers with aluminium Faraday rings and Tractrix ports handle the low frequencies while an exclusive Linear Travel Suspension (LTS) titanium tweeter should maximise dynamics and detail through the treble.

You're also getting new premium materials and dramatic design features. The speakers are available in two furniture-grade wood finishes – ebony and walnut – with enhanced cabinet bracing, aluminium binding posts, cast aluminium feet, and discrete Dolby Atmos connections that should allow for easy and refined integration. Signature Klipsch copper trim rings accentuate the tweeter and woofer, which can also be concealed by sturdy yet flexible magnetic grilles.

A big upgrade on your Dolby Atmos soundbar (big. Huge!)

Time for a quick rundown of the series? Good, there's plenty to get through. The 11-strong new Klipsch Reference Premiere series comprises four floorstanding tower stereo speakers (RP-8060FA II which is Dolby Atmos enabled, RP-8000F II, RP-6000F II and RP-5000F II); two bookshelf stereo speakers (RP-600M II and RP-500M II); three center channel speakers (RP-504C II, RP-404C II and RP-500C II) and two surround speakers (RP-502S II and the innovative, dual-purpose RP-500SA II that functions as a Dolby Atmos elevation speaker or a rear/side wall-mountable surround).

That last surround-speaker is perhaps the most exciting of the bunch, since it can actually bring Dolby Atmos to your current speakers. Correct – no need to invest in an entirely new system if you want to bring immersive sound to your setup! Just put them on top of your existing speakers and let those upward-firing drivers add in the vertical height needed for Dolby Atmos, bouncing audio up to your ceiling and back down to your shell-likes.  

Don't have any speakers to add to? That's fine, the RP-500SA (much like the relatively new Klipsch R-40SA) can be used on their own as side or rear surround channels and will certainly represent a solid step up from your soundbar – or of course, your TV's built-in speakers. 

How much? Of course. In the order in which we've just grouped the Klipsch Reference Premiere series (because why not?) the recommended retail prices are as follows:

RP-8060FA II floorstanding speakers – $1,499 / £2,999 / €3198
RP-8000F II floorstanding speakers – $899 /£1,699 / €1898
RP-6000F II floorstanding speakers – $749 / £1,449 / €1598
RP-5000F II floorstanding speakers – $599 / £1,249 / €1398
RP-600M II bookshelf speakers – $749 / £729 / €799
RP-500M II bookshelf speakers – $599 / £599 / €649
RP-504C II center channel speaker – $799 / £729 / €799
RP-404C II center channel speaker – $599 / £549 / €599
RP-500C II center channel speaker – $499/ £459 / €499
RP-502S II surround speaker – $899 / £899 / €999
RP-500SA II surround speaker  – $699 / £689 / €749 (around $867) 

Our advice? If you're still searching for the ultimate home theater setup, the new Klipsch Reference series is definitely a name to add to your shortlist. 

• Here's how to create the home theater system of your dreams 

Update: Sonos has officially unveiled three new colors for the Sonos Roam portable speaker, confirming the initial leak. The different color options won't cost any more than the black or white speaker, meaning it'll be $179 / £179 / AU$299. Original story continues below.

We've had a slew of leaks from Sonos of late, from the impending launch of a new affordable Sonos Ray soundbar to the connected audio brand's very own voice assistant, and now we can add another to the pile – new colors for the Sonos Roam.

As discovered in this Reddit threat, subscribers to Sonos' mailing list were sent a mysterious email featuring a countdown and a not-so-subtle URL address containing "roamcolors", as well as an image with the filename "Roam_Colors_Launch.png". What could it be?

The colors themselves have been leaked by Chilean retailer MusicWorld, where all three options were visible on-site at the time of writing but have since been taken down. While we don't have the official names of the shades, the colors include an olive, a blue-grey and a red-orange option.

Life in Technicolor

As those familiar with the company would know, the vast majority of Sonos products are launched in the super exciting black or white color options, with any additions to the palette arriving later as a special release. 

This happened with the Sonos One when it received red, green, yellow, pink and grey options, all arriving with a $30 / £30 (about AU$50) premium over their monochromatic siblings. We suspect this is how it will go down with the Sonos Roam, although we're very much hoping there won't be a price difference, or at least not one so severe.

With the audio brand's products initially being designed exclusively for the home, a monochromatic color scheme was a sensible and safe choice – generally speaking, it's much easier to pair black or white products with interior decor. But when expanding into the portable Bluetooth speaker market, character becomes more important than ubiquity.

This is something Ultimate Ears is more than familiar with, with the ever-popular UE Boom 3 arriving in a wide array of colors, with more landing throughout the product's lifespan. In fact, the company took this to its natural conclusion, allowing customers to fully customize their UE Boom 3 speaker.

In the Sonos Roam vs UE Boom 3 debate, there are compelling cases for either product (price being chief among them), but with Sonos introducing a hint of personality to its Roam range, the gap may be closing.

As mentioned, we suspect these new colors will arrive at around the same price as the existing Sonos Roam at $179 / £179 / AU$299, but with no official word on pricing or regional availability, we'll have to wait until Wednesday, May 11 for the official reveal.

• See why Sonos and Ultimate Ears top our list of the best Bluetooth speakers

Sonos has finally unveiled Voice Control, a voice assistant that will allow you to control your Sonos speakers with (you guessed it) your voice.

Voice controls are nothing new on Sonos speakers  – the Sonos One has inbuilt Google Assistant and Alexa controls and your sound system can be paired with external smart speakers to issue them commands. But now Sonos is billing its own Voice Controls the best way to control your sound system with verbal instructions.

Ahead of the announcement TechRadar’s own Matt Bolton had the chance to speak with Sonos’ Product Creation Leader Brandon Holley and learned some details about the new feature.

Sonos is focusing on privacy above all else

One of the first things that Holley admitted to us about the subject is that the new system “is not an Alexa competitor”. Voice Control is instead about give Sonos speaker users a simple and speedy way to control their setup.

That being said, it will feature one major improvement: better privacy. Voice Control won’t pose as much of a privacy risk to users as Holley explains “we’re not sending transcripts of audio to the cloud – it’s all being done locally”.

Holley added that the team’s hope is that this will make Sonos speaker owners more comfortable to use Voice Control. Not only because it’s simple to use but because it’s not sending your recordings off to external Sonos servers.

This follows previous Sonos speakers' footsteps in its concern for your privacy – the Sonos One SL dropped the microphone entirely and shaved $50 off the price for folks who were leery about the potential intrusion on their privacy. 

How does it work?

According to Sonos, all microphone-equipped products dating back to the Sonos One should have the ability to use the assistant after an update.

To get the assistant's attention, all you need to say is 'Hey Sonos' and then ask it to play music from Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer or Pandora. Unfortunately Spotify isn't currently on the list of supported services, but that could change at a later date.

While other smart speakers offer a way to tap into the smart home or an ever-expanding knowledge graph, Sonos wants its voice assistant to primarily focus on getting you to your music as fast as it can and allowing you to control that music. One example of a command that the Sonos voice assistant has that other smart speakers lack is that it can move music from one speaker to another or play the song on every speaker in the house with a simple voice command.

We'll need to spend some more time with the platform before we can draw any conclusions, but in a market absolutely bursting with similar-performing Alexa and Google Assistant devices, Sonos will soon have something that no one else has.

• Interested in picking up a new soundbar? Here are our favorites in 2022

Everybody is talking at me, and not a single one of them can look me in the face.

There's Alexa, Amazon's friendly voice assistant that lives on my Echo devices and Portal from Meta. There's Apple's Siri, ready to set a timer on my Apple Watch or pipe up unexpectedly from my HomePod in the middle of my favorite Netflix show. There's Google Assistant that can tell me the weather when I squeeze my Pixel 3 XL. Or how about Bixby, the Samsung voice assistant that jumps to attention whenever I accidentally hit its dedicated button on the Samsung Galaxy S22 Ultra?

That is a lot of digital assistants and voices competing for attention. What's one to do? I know, how about we add another voice assistant to the mix?

If the rumors are correct Sonos, maker of the truly excellent wireless Sonos sound system, is prepping something called Sonos Voice for a launch in June. You'll summon it on a variety of Sonos devices (anything with a microphone, I assume) by saying, naturally, "Hey Sonos." It will reportedly have access to most of your various song libraries across Apple Music, Pandora, Amazon Music, and Sonos Radio. Others, like Spotify, may or may not join the party.

(It'll likely run on the new Sonos Ray as well, a new gizmo from the audio company that's coming out in a few weeks.)

Wonderful. Another AI-based digital agent listening for a watchword that will likely sound a little too much like the word "Sound" or name "Sonny." Okay, sure, I don't know anyone named Sonny, but you get the idea.

No need

I've had a pair of Sono Play:1 speakers in my house for years and I already control them with a digital assistant, namely Amazon Alexa. The speakers don't have a mic, but thanks to the Alexa integration, I can talk to any of my Echos or Alexa-enabled devices to control my Sonos music (which already includes connections to all my favorite music services).

To be clear. I do not need Sonos Voice.

Really, does anyone?

Samsung is still learning the hard lesson of how little people care about Bixby. It remains unused by virtually anyone I talk to. I bet most Samsung Galaxy S21 or S22 owners have no idea Bixby even exists.

Microsoft has all but given up on Cortana. You can still talk to your Windows 11 PC but Microsoft killed the Cortana App more than a year ago.

Now shut up

The voice assistant race now boils down to three: Google, Amazon, and Apple. That's two too many by my count but at least each of them has a robust ecosystem that justifies their existence.

I do have a dream of one digital voice assistant to rule them all. Perhaps something like the AI in the movie Her. She controlled every aspect of Joaquin Phoenix's digital life and made it all feel seamless. Sure, things got a little out of control and maybe Phoenix fell in love with Her. On the other hand, if Siri, Alexa, Google Assistant, or even Sonos Voice did all that, I might fall in love, too.

That's unlikely and, for now, I don't want or need the rumored Sonos Voice.

If you hate clutter around your home but you crave the immersive sound of a hi-fi setup, Q Acoustics may have the answer with its new installed audio system - and it's cheaper than buying a similar setup from Sonos. 

The Q Acoustics E120 can be wall-mounted, and brings a display and control center to your existing speakers - or, if you want to complete hide your hi-fi system, it can be paired with the company's in-ceiling or in-wall speakers. 

Once you've installed the E120 into your wall, you'll be able to wirelessly stream music via Bluetooth from your smartphone, tablet, or laptop. It also comes with DAB+ or FM radio, with five preset buttons allowing you to play your favorite station with a single tap.

Inside the E120 is a class D stereo amplifier, which has been optimized for Q Acoustics' in-ceiling and in-wall speakers, with the ability to pair with two or four devices. However, you could use the system with any pair of passive speakers, whether you want stereo or mono sound. The speakers themselves will need to be physically wired to the control system, but all the cables can run inside your walls for minimal mess.

You can also hook the E120 up to your TV, for what Q Acoustics describes as a "more immersive and dynamic" movie watching experience. A rear analogue audio output means you can plug it into a subwoofer for rumbling bass, an external power amplifier, or even another E120 system.

The E120's wall panel comes in black and white, so you should be able to find a design that fits in with your decor. Touch sensitive controls and a 3.2-inch color display show the track, artist, and album name when you're playing music, and an internal light sensor allows the screen to automatically adjust the brightness based on ambient light levels. 

If you want to place the E120 in your bedroom, you can manually set the display to dim when you sleep, and an alarm function means it can double up as a bedside clock. And, thanks to an IP54 water resistance rating, you'll be able to place the E120 in your kitchen or bathroom without needing to worry about humidity or a splash of water breaking it. A splashproof remote control is also supplied, so you won't need to drag yourself out of the bath to adjust the volume.

A cheaper alternative to Sonos

A custom install can be an expensive prospect for audiophiles that want to hide their hi-fi system, but the E120 is an affordable option compared to the competition. 

If you already have passive stereo speakers at home, you can buy the E120 for £429 when it launches at the end of April (US and Australian pricing is still TBC, but that works out at around $560 / AU$750). 

However, Q Acoustics is offering some neat bundles to kick-start your hi-fi system. The E120 and a stereo pair of Qi65CB in-ceiling speakers for most indoor applications will set you back £499 (about $650 / AU$870), while the E120 and a stereo pair of Qi65CW Weatherproof 6.5-inch in-ceiling speakers for showers, bathrooms and verandas will cost £649 (about $850 / AU$1,130). 

For comparison, a pair of in-ceiling Sonos speakers cost $659 / £599 / AU$999 alone, and you don't get a slick control hub to go with them. 

• Read our complete guide to the best wireless speakers you can buy today

One-minute review  

The latest collaboration between Sonos and IKEA sees the pair update a previously released Symfonisk speaker, with the Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker with WiFi (Gen 2) improving over the original in every way.

This lamp’s design is much more sophisticated than what we were previously treated to, and its modular design allows you to opt for different lampshade designs and colors - so you’re sure to find a combination that better suits your home decor.

You’ll also find that the audio has been amped up too. The new Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker delivers a great-sounding performance that's closer to what regular Sonos speakers are capable of - however, bass lovers may find this speaker’s abilities are still a little lacking.

Considering that this new Lamp Speaker costs about as much as audiophile-focused Sonos One - or the Symfonisk Picture Frame speaker - it’s shame that you aren’t getting the same quality of performance from this device.

If you’re content with trading some of this high-end functionality for a piece of furniture that looks beautiful, then you won’t be disappointed with the Symfonisk Table Lamp. However, audiophiles may be better off with a different device from Sonos’ suite of gadgets.

Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker (Gen 2) price and availability 

• Available at IKEA
• Lamp with fabric shade: $170 / £180
• Lamp with glass shade: $190 / £199

You can pick up the Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker (Gen 2) from IKEA and have several different options to choose between - which are spread across two price points.

No matter whether you opt for the black or white version of each the Lamp Speaker with a textile shade will set you back $170 / £179 (around AU$340) and the Lamp Speaker with a glass shade costs $190 / £199 (around AU$380).

Alternatively, you could buy each component separately - which would give you the option to swap designs in and out should you want to. The Speaker Lamp base (without a shade) costs $141 / £159 (around AU$300) and then you can grab the textile shade for $29 / £20 (around AU$35), or you could opt for the glass shade at $49 / £40 (around AU$75).

Design 

• Choice of shades in black or white
• Lantern-like shape with glass shade
• Traditional lamp design with fabric shade

Much like its predecessor, the new Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker combines the utility of a lamp and a wireless speaker into a single item. This follow-up gadget borrows several design cues from the original, but looks more sleek overall.

The differences between the new model and the original Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker are most noticeable if you opt for the glass shade option - the model we were sent to test. The glass shade combines elements of the original’s mushroom-shaped design with a lantern-style look to create a chic table lamp that you would be proud to have on display in your home.

While we didn’t have the chance to see it in person, the textile shade looks pretty stylish, too. It incorporates a thin fabric ring that circles around an inner cylinder that surrounds the lightbulb to create a blend of modern and more traditional aesthetics.

Both the textile and glass shades come in either white or black. 

Your shade choice shouldn’t have any impact on the speaker’s sound quality so this is very much down to personal taste. The fabric shade is more budget-friendly so is worth considering if you’re looking to shave a little off this speaker’s price - but the glass shade offers a more premium look. 

If you’re considering picking one of these speakers up for yourself but are on the fence as to which design option you should choose, we recommend heading to an IKEA store in-person to help you weigh up your options.

Regardless of which shade you pick, the speaker base is the same and comes in either white or black. The fabric covering is reminiscent of what you’ll find wrapped around one of the best smart speakers, such as the Google Nest Audio.

On the front of the Lamp Speaker’s base, you’ll find a simple on/off button for the lightbulb, while on the back you’ll find the audio controls. These three buttons allow you to adjust the volume up or down and play/pause the music - with more sophisticated controls available through the Sonos mobile app.

While these simplistic controls get the job done, we’d have preferred if the light switch was a dial instead. The lamp is a decent brightness when paired with a standard bulb - the perfect level for a bedroom or more intimate living room space - but we would have liked the option to be able to dim and brighten the bulb.

Speaking of, the lamp supports any E27 LED bulb, giving you plenty of options to choose between.

Size-wise, the new Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker is about the same size as a typical lamp. The base on its own has a 16cm diameter and is 20cm tall. On top of that, you’ll have to consider the size of the lampshade; the textile shade has a 25cm diameter and height of 20cm, and the glass shade has a 22cm diameter and is 25cm tall.

If you manage to find the perfect spot for your new speaker its 2m-long power cord will almost certainly reach the nearest plug socket.

Setup 

• Sonos app-compatible
• Multi-room audio support
• TruePlay set up for iOS users

Like every other Sonos and Symfonisk speaker, to set up and use the Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker (Gen 2) you’ll first need to download the Sonos app to your smartphone. This easy-to-use tool will guide you through the process of creating a Sonos sound system as well as serve as the main controller for all your devices at once.

In typical IKEA fashion, the instruction manual will guide you to the app, and the setup process is simple - taking only a few minutes.

Once your speaker is ready to go you’ll then need to login to the music streaming and podcast services of your choice to start enjoying your favorite tracks and shows. This can be a little tedious but the end result is a simple, one-stop-shop remote controller that can be easily shared with members of your household.

The only negative this system has is that, while it controls the audio it doesn’t let you turn the lightbulb on/off remotely, which feels like a missed trick on Sonos and IKEA’s part.

If you already have a suite of Sonos and Symfonisk speakers set up then you can easily add this new Table Lamp Speaker to work in tandem with the rest of your home’s devices. You can play music and podcasts back through any selection of speakers at once, letting you fill individual rooms or your whole house with noise.

Additionally, if you have picked up two Symfonisk Lamp Speakers you can set them up as a stereo pair to create and experience a more dynamic soundstage from your new devices. Unfortunately, different models of Sonos / Symfonisk speakers can’t pair up in stereo - they have to be identical models and versions.

While there is no support for Bluetooth, Apple device owners will be able to take advantage of AirPlay 2 to play audio through this Symfonisk speaker. 

On top of that those with an iPhone or iPad running the latest version of iOS (except those listed on the official Sonos website) can take advantage of Trueplay, a system that automatically tunes your speaker to make it sound as good as possible in your home.

If you’re on Android you’ll instead be stuck with modulating the audio using the manual EQ control in the Sonos app. We didn’t spend too long adjusting the settings to our liking though so you should find yourself inconvenienced heavily by this.

Android users will find they’re losing out on some of the speaker’s features, but given how complete the Sonos app is, you’ll likely quickly forget.

Audio performance

• Clear, detailed sound for trebles and mid-range tones
• Bass can get a tad muddy at highest volumes
• Offers nearly 360-degree audio

While this gadget may double as a lamp, it's still a speaker - and as with all speakers, the most important factor is audio performance. In this instance, the Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker performs admirably, but may not be to everyone’s taste.

To test out this speaker we put it through its paces by playing to a variety of tracks ranging from orchestral classics to fast-paced hip-hop, as well as a few podcast episodes for good measure.

We found that it handled mid to high-range tones excellently, ensuring they were crisp and free from distortion as we turned the volume up. The Table Lamp was also able to create soundscapes that featured a solid amount of clarity and offered near-360-degree audio, so you can listen to music from all angles (though when we were positioned behind the speaker some audio became a little muffled).

Unfortunately, this dinky device doesn’t bring quite enough oomph to its bass for our liking. Tweaking the equalizer settings and pumping up the volume can help, but if you try to go above 75% of the maximum loudness the deeper tones start to distort and become slightly muddy.

This certainly won’t be the end of the world for everyone, especially because we can't see you wanting to pump up the volume this high very often. Even at around 50% of the max volume, you could run the risk of annoying your neighbors.

However, if you’re after a speaker that offers better audio performance and sits in a similar price range you might want to opt for the Symfonisk Picture Frame - a device that finds a better balance between fashion and function. You could also check out the Sonos One if you’re content with using a speaker with a more traditional design.

Should I buy the Symfonisk Table Lamp Speaker (Gen 2)?

Buy it if… 

Don’t buy it if… 

• Looking for more? Check out the best wireless speakers you can buy today

Philips has taken the wraps off a new multi-room speaker platform called Fidelio Wireless AV that can act as a control center for your Philips speakers and TVs.

According to Philips, the Fidelio Wireless AV is based on DTS’ popular Play-Fi system and says that once you’re set up with it, it’ll be easy to control playback between compatible TVs, mobile devices, soundbars, and speakers located throughout the home

The first speakers to be included in the platform are the Fidelio FB1 wireless soundbar, the Fidelio FW1 wireless subwoofer, and the Fidelio FS1 bookshelf wireless speaker, all of which should be available in the second half of 2022.

Of course, you won’t need every product in the series to create a system - you can start with one or two of the speakers, and work your way up from there, building your home theater setup bit by bit.

Analysis: This sounds an awful lot like Sonos… 

When any company introduces a new multi-room audio product, it’s hard not to immediately draw some parallels to Sonos - a company that built its entire reputation on wireless multi-room, multi-channel setups that could be built one piece at a time.

The big differentiating factor between Sonos and Fidelio Wireless AV is that the latter will likely include TVs from Philips - an area that Sonos has never expanded into. 

Like Sonos, the Fidelio Wireless AV system won't require a separate bridge for connectivity, as the entire setup sounds like it can be completed using an app on your smartphone.

What Sonos has as its advantage, however, is several decades’ worth of experience and products in this space. It’s been making wireless speakers for years and its soundbars have been lauded with several awards. If Philips wants a piece of that multi-room pie, it must prove it has usability and performance at least equal to Sonos.

We'll save our judgments for the full reviews of the speakers and the Fidelio Wireless AV system when we get it in our own homes, but it'll be an interesting product to keep tabs on in the coming year. 

• Looking to up your audio game? Check out our guide to the best Bluetooth speakers

Black Friday is finally here, and there are tons of amazing Black Friday Sonos deals to take advantage of. Across the entire range we're seeing record-low prices and fantastic savings so this is a sale you won't want to miss.

Of all the Black Friday deals out there Amazon easily has the best discounts, but we're also seeing excellent deals from Best Buy in the US and John Lewis in the UK so it's worth looking elsewhere if you prefer a different store to where we recommend, or if you want to take advantage of any bonus promotions a specific retailer is offering.

Sonos' products are among the best speakers and best soundbars. That's because their dynamic sound is perfect both movies and music and most of the range can connected together to create larger systems.

With the launch of the Sonos Arc Ultra, the successor to the popular Sonos Arc,the latter has hit a lowest ever price of $699 at Amazon US and a record-low of £598.99 at Amazon UK.

Today's best Sonos deals in the US

• Amazon: Record-lows on Sonos products
• Best Buy: Save over $100 on Sonos speakers
• Target: Wide range of Sonos speakers available
• Walmart: savings across the Sonos range
• Sonos: Sonos home cinema bundles available

Today's best Sonos deals in the UK

• Amazon: Sonos Arc down to £694.99
• Argos: up to 20% off Sonos speakers
• Currys: save up to £180 on Sonos
• John Lewis: Sonos Ace headphones down to £369
• Sevenoaks: save up to £100's on entire Sonos range
• Sonos: save up to £270 with Sonos bundles

Sonos Black Friday deals: FAQs

Why trust TechRadar this Black Friday

Here at TechRadar, we've been covering Black Friday deals for over a decade so we know what makes the best deals, when they start and where you're going to find them -- and we'll be keeping this guide updated from now to Black Friday and beyond. And it won't just be our expert deals team searching for the best deals either, as we'll be drafting in the help of our AV team who know Sonos inside and out.

We've tested and reviewed pretty much every Sonos product going at TechRadar, so we know when a deal is an absolute steal or a dud, and don't worry we'll only be including the best Sonos Black Friday deals in this guide.

Sonos makes some of the best wireless speakers, soundbars, subwoofers, and amplifiers you can buy today. Aside from their great sound, that assessment is largely based on how well connected they can be. 

Sonos speakers all work together within a wider ecosystem, and each device is controllable via the brand’s S2 app. The app lets you add and remove Sonos devices from your setup as you please, while making it easy to adjust your music playback and stream content from your phone.

This means you can make your Sonos setup as big or as small as you want. Pretty much any configuration you can think of is possible, from multiroom audio systems with speakers built into your ceilings to modest home cinema solutions with soundbars and rear stereo speakers. 

If you've purchased or been gifted a Sonos speaker, or if you're interested in boosting your existing setup, you might be wondering where to start. That’s why we’ve put together this handy guide to setting up a Sonos speaker, including everything you need to know about how the clever wireless ecosystem works. 

How do Sonos speakers work? 

Sonos makes a range of wireless speakers, soundbars, Bluetooth speakers, and other audio devices that connect to your home Wi-Fi network. You can use as many or as few of these devices as you like in a Sonos sound system, grouping together different speakers to play in sync. 

These groups can be assigned to specific rooms in your home, so you can essentially have music following you from room to room as you go about your day. 

Adding speakers, assigning them to groups, and adjusting your music playback is all done through the Sonos S2 app (unless you have an older legacy device that doesn’t work with the latest app). This is also where you can browse music from your favorite streaming services, play radio, audiobooks, and podcasts, and set alarms. 

Most newer Sonos speakers and devices come with support for Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. This means you can give these speakers commands like changing the volume or your music, ask questions, and control your other smart home devices with your voice alone. 

The Sonos ecosystem might not appeal to hardcore audiophiles that want to tinker with cables and amplifiers all day long, but it’s the easiest way to create a multiroom audio experience right now - no wires necessary. 

Which Sonos speaker is best for me?

If you’re thinking of buying a Sonos speaker and you’re not sure where to start, you should have a clear idea of what you would want to use it for. 

If boosting your home cinema setup is a priority, you should start with one of the brand’s soundbars; both the Sonos Arc and the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) will sound far more powerful than your TV’s built-in speakers. From there, you could expand your system to include a couple of Sonos One SLs as rear speakers, and a Sonos Sub to emphasize the bass frequencies. 

Is music more your thing? You can go as big or as small as you want - a Sonos One wireless speaker will do your music justice in smaller rooms. For those with more ambitious tastes, a Sonos Amp will double up as a great music streamer, and can be combined with two stereo speakers (Sonos or otherwise) - add in an extra Amp and two more speakers, and you’ve got yourself a neat surround sound system. 

Not everyone wants a big ol’ sound system in their living room. For many, portability is key - if that’s you, check out the Sonos Roam and Sonos Move speakers, both of which can connect to your phone via Bluetooth while working with the wider ecosystem via your home’s Wi-Fi network.

How to set up a new Sonos system 

Setting up a new Sonos system is easy. You’ll need a power source to plug in your new speaker, a Wi-Fi connection, and the Sonos app on your mobile device. You won’t be able to set up a new system using your laptop or computer. 

Tap 'Set up a new system,' and then create or sign into your Sonos account. Then, your Sonos product should pop up on your screen; tap 'Add,' and the app will guide you through the setup process. You’ll be able to add your preferred music streaming platforms and, if supported, your voice assistant service of choice. 

Adding a speaker to an existing Sonos system

To add a new speaker or device to your Sonos system, you just need to open the S2 app and then open the Settings tab. 

From there, tap System > Add Product, and follow the steps in the app. 

What about TruePlay?

TruePlay is one of Sonos’ best features. It measures how sound bounces off your walls and ceilings in order to fine tune your speakers, ensuring that they sound as good as possible in your space. 

Most Sonos speakers support TruePlay. Currently, the feature only works with iOS, though the brand’s Bluetooth speakers are capable of tuning themselves using their own microphones. 

If you do have an iOS device and want to tune your speakers using TruePlay, just open the S2 app and head to Settings. From there, tap TruePlay > TruePlay Tuning and follow the instructions in the app. You’ll need to walk around your room as your speakers play a series of tones. The microphone built into your iOS device will analyze these tones.

You will need to grant Sonos permission to use your device’s microphones during this process.

For the best results, Sonos says you should minimize any ambient noise in your room, such as loud appliances, talking, or footsteps. You should also cover as wide an area as possible in your room during the TruePlay process; the app will show you how to do this, but essentially you will be waving your phone up and down in smooth movements as you walk around your room. 

You should also avoid adjusting the volume of your speaker during the TruePlay process.

Are there any downsides to Sonos?

We rate Sonos speakers pretty highly, but there are a few downsides to the multiroom audio ecosystem. For starters, they’re very expensive - and prices have recently risen, so discounts are very thin on the ground at the moment.

As wireless speakers, Sonos devices won’t offer the same audio fidelity as a traditional hi-fi setup. There’s also a degree of compression when it comes to streaming music over Wi-Fi, even if many Sonos speakers support hi-res audio. 

Finally, wireless speakers tend to have a shorter ‘shelf-life’ than traditional stereo speakers that can last for decades.

In 2020, Sonos came under fire after announcing that it would no longer provide software updates and ongoing support for a number of its legacy products, including the original Sonos Play:5. 

On top of the 2010 Play:5, Sonos will cease updates in May 2022 for the Connect and Connect Amp, the original Zone Players, the CR200, and Bridge. It's important to note that this doesn't mean your old Sonos speaker will stop working – it just won't receive any new features. 

This could be problematic for anyone who uses one of these speakers as part of a multi-room setup because each speaker needs to be using the same firmware.

While Sonos confirmed that it will "monitor and deal with bugs in the future, should they arise" in these older speakers, many customers bought these speakers with the expectation that they would work for decades, like traditional Hi-Fi systems. 

• Best Sonos speakers: the top soundbars, subwoofers, streamers and more

Sonos is one of the most popular wireless speaker brands in the world, and for good reason - its range of portable Bluetooth speakers, soundbars, and home audio systems are among the best you can buy. 

These speakers all play nicely within the wider Sonos ecosystem, which makes it an easy choice for anyone looking for a no-fuss multi room audio setup that minimizes annoying cables.

However, Sonos speakers can be pricey, which means they're incredibly popular during Black Friday and Cyber Monday, when the brand and third-party retailers tend to offer the best Sonos deals of the year. 

There are lots of different Sonos speakers to choose from, which can make it difficult to know which models you should be looking out for in the sales. 

So, if you're hoping to bag a Black Friday Sonos deal this year, read on for our run down on the top Sonos speakers you should be looking out for in the run up to November 26. 

• US: See all speakers and sound systems at Sonos
• UK: All the speakers available at Sonos

Which Sonos speaker is right for me?

We've tested a lot of Sonos speakers over the years, and they regular top our round ups of the best wireless speakers and best soundbars you can buy. Here are our top picks for every budget and situation. 

The best Sonos soundbar you can buy is the Sonos Arc, and we'll be keeping a keen eye for any discounts this Black Friday. 

If you're looking for a soundbar that can do it all this Black Friday, the Sonos Arc is the one to look out for. 

It comes with support for the Dolby True HD and Dolby Digital Plus sound codes to deliver the best quality lossless audio from your Blu-ray discs and streaming services. It then enhances the 3D soundscape using Dolby Atmos object tracks to bounce certain sounds off the walls around you so they feel like they’re coming at you from all angles.

While all this might sound complicated, the Sonos Arc setup couldn’t be simpler, involving just a couple of steps on the smartphone app. The minimalist cable connections and all-in-one system construction add to this no-fuss feeling and streamlined aesthetic – making it the best soundbar you can buy in 2021.

It's also great for listening to music, so if you want an all-in-one home audio solution, the Sonos Arc is well worth considering.

Read more: Sonos Arc review

If you're in the market for a cleanly designed, exceptional sounding connected speaker, you'll find none better than the Sonos One - and it's sure to be discounted this Black Friday, as it's been out for a few years now.

Offering the best of both Sonos' multi-room speaker platform and both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant's smart home prowess, the Sonos One is the pinnacle of connectivity. 

Want to hear your favorite song from Spotify? All you need to do is ask! Want every speaker in the upstairs to play the same song? Group them together via the Sonos app and you'll have a house party in minutes. 

While there are more powerful speakers on the market, the Sonos One is more than capable of filling your room with sound - and like all Sonos speakers, you can easily hook it up to a wider multi room audio system. 

Read more: Sonos One review

The Sonos Roam is our pick for the best Bluetooth speaker on the planet, with a powerful sound, rugged design, excellent connectivity features, and smart home control. 

Not only that, but it's also priced quite competitively at $179 / £179 / AU$299, and it's the cheapest way to buy into the Sonos ecosystem. Of course, that's not cheap for a regular Bluetooth speaker, but the Sonos Roam comes with a few extra tricks up its sleeves.

With both Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, the Sonos Roam works as a portable speaker as well as part of your wider multi-room Sonos system – and with Google Assistant and Alexa onboard, it doubles up a smart speaker too. 

In spite of its (relatively) low price you’re getting a lot for your money here - and if it's discounted over Black Friday, it'll be a real bargain.

Read more: Sonos Roam review

If you're tight on space, the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) is the best soundbar you can buy from the audio company. 

It's compact size means it will easily slot beneath your TV, whether you pop it on a TV stand or mount it to your wall, and it's sleek design means it won't look out of place with your decor. 

It improves on the company’s original Sonos Beam soundbar with virtual Dolby Atmos, HDMI eARC compatibility, and a refreshed design. 

While it doesn't have the upfiring tweeters necessary for 'true' Dolby Atmos (and as a result, the sonic height isn't as impressive as the Sonos Arc), the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) boasts a wide soundstage and an immersive audio performance. 

HDMI eARC compatibility allows for hi-res audio streaming, making it ideal for listening to music, too. 

As the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) was released quite recently, we don't expect to see any huge discounts this Black Friday, but it' worth keeping an eye out for it all the same. And, if you don't care about virtual Atmos, the first-gen Beam is likely to be heavily discounted now that it's been discontinued. 

Read more: Sonos Beam (Gen 2) review

If you're looking for pure audio fidelity and a room-filling sound, the Sonos Play:5 is the best Sonos speaker you can buy on Black Friday.

Like other Sonos speakers, the Play:5 is controlled directly from its own app, which has built in integration for a number of streaming services, including Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Deezer, TuneIn, and a  whole range of smaller services.

Since the Play:5 comes with multi-room support, you can also add additional speakers such as the Sonos Play:3 and Sonos Play:1 to built up a complete surround sound system, but if you want to keep it simple, then you should find the Play:5 to offer more than enough volume. 

Read more: Sonos Play:5 review

Where the Sonos Roam is optimized for using on the go, the Sonos Move is a great Bluetooth speaker to use around the home and in your garden. And now that it's a little older, we're expecting it to be discounted over Black Friday and Cyber Monday.

With two quality drivers, a solid app that unlocks playback from hundreds of wireless sources, multi-room capabilities and smart audio-tuning tech which tweaks the output based on the speaker's immediate surroundings, the Sonos Move is engineered well beyond your average Bluetooth speaker. It's a versatile speaker, one that stands solidly alongside the built-for-home Sonos speakers that the company made its name on.

It’s not perfect – it’s heavy as a byproduct of its incredible sound, it’s expensive due to its rich feature set, and it sadly can’t be used as rear channels for a home cinema set-up. But if you’ve got the money, it’s hard to fault the Sonos Move when it comes to hunting down the very best Bluetooth speaker in the world.

Read the full review: Sonos Move review

Other Sonos speakers and devices to look out for

Sonos isn't limited to connected speakers, and there are some other devices we'd recommend buying over Black Friday. 

If you want a pair of rear speakers to pair with a Sonos soundbar, you should look out for deals on the Sonos One SL - it takes all the specs of the Sonos One, but it doesn't have an inbuilt voice assistant, so you don't have to worry about Alexa or Google Assistant listening in on your conversations. It's also cheaper than the Sonos One. 

Another great addition to a Sonos home cinema setup is the Sonos Sub, a wireless subwoofer that will boost the bass of the rest of your setup. Inside the glossy cabinet are two force-cancelling speakers positioned face to face to avoid cabinet buzz, dual acoustic ports and two Class-D digital amplifiers specially tuned for the hardware.

Want to create a proper surround sound system? Look out for Black Friday deals on the Sonos Amp. You can either, as you can with Sonos’s soundbars, add two of the company’s speakers or you can add a second Amp and two standard, passive speakers of your choosing. 

The latter is actually the better choice, sonically speaking, as it enables you to create a system using four identical speakers, or at least four from the same range. That will make for a far more consistent surround sound presentation than mixing traditional hi-fi speakers and Sonos’s wireless speakers.

And yes, we really are talking four-speaker systems here: the Amp is designed to work without a dedicated centre channel. Instead, it creates a so-called ‘phantom’ centre through clever processing. 

• Read our guide to the best stereo speakers you can buy today

A smart speaker without voice control? The horror … or … rejoice! There are those that love Alexa, and have Amazon’s voice assistant, Siri or the Google Assistant control their home’s music, lights and much more. However, there are people for whom the very idea of a voice assistant on the latest and greatest Sonos speaker is a deal-breaker.

Cue the Sonos One SL, a Sonos One (Gen 2) without an always-on microphone, and so without Alexa, or any other voice-activated helper. In effect, it’s a direct replacement for the Sonos Play:1. 

If you think that makes the Sonos One SL a retro device, understand that there are three big reasons why the Sonos One SL exists and will do well. The first is privacy. If we’d been told a decade ago that by now we would all be actively purchasing gadgets with always-on, networked microphones to sprinkle around our homes, no-one would have believed it. For those who don’t want voice assistants anywhere near them, the Sonos One SL is a welcome product. 

(If you need to take your music on the go, check out Sonos' portable speakers, including the Sonos Move and the Sonos Roam.)

The second reason is for a people who think voice assistants are dumb and unnecessary. They’re not troubled by light switches and are happy using apps to check the weather and, yes, to ‘manually’ send tunes to a wireless speaker. 

The third reason is, of course, replication. If you’ve already got plenty of voice-activated speakers and suchlike, the arrival of yet another is needlessly confusing. That goes double if you already have a Sonos One in your home.

[Update: The Sonos One SL has been given an eco-friendly update. The upgraded model comes with a a redesigned base that eschews unnecessary plastics, and comes in packaging that Sonos says is kinder to the planet. 

There have been no changes to the features or functionality of the Sonos One SL, though the new model will only work with the S2 Sonos app.]

Price and availability

As a bonus, the Sonos One SL ($199/ £179/ AU$289) also represents a small saving on the voice assistant endowed Sonos One (Gen.2) ($219 / £199 / AU$319) - both speakers have been subject to recent price increases, however.

Still, that leaves the Sonos One SL looking like a thoroughly sensible, if slightly unexpected, product that ought to do very well since it should appeal to a wide cross-section of people. 

However, it’s not what the Sonos One SL lacks that makes it a must-have product, but what it possesses inside its sleek, thoroughly modern chassis.

Design

With the same monochromatic color finish as One, One SL is also a clear stylistic step-up from the Play:1. The top of the unit, which is available in either black or white, has a fingerprint-proof soft matte finish that holds some capacitive touch controls. This is where there’s a big difference between the One and the One SL. Since voice control has been dumped there are no microphones or a dedicated microphone ‘button’, just the play/pause, volume up and volume down ‘buttons’, which also work as skip track controls if you swipe across the entire area. There’s also a small LED status light to show when the One SL is connected to the network.

A matte white or black grille of tiny oval holes sits over the speakers, which wraps around almost through 360°, though leaving a small gap at the back for a pairing button and an Ethernet port. As with the One, the power cable attaches to the bottom of the unit, which is a neat idea in every sense.

There’s a subtle, light grey Sonos logo on the front. It’s small, it’s hidden and it’s virtually impossible to see. That’s exactly the way we like our logos.

Setup

Like the One, the One SL has no Bluetooth connectivity. That’s not strictly true. Like the One it does have Bluetooth Low Energy, but only for set-up. That initial setup is painless, though there’s also a choice to be made between attaching the One SL to your home network via that wired Ethernet port or via Wi-Fi. The concept of a network-only smart speaker isn’t without a potential drawback; what if the home network goes down? That would leave the Sonos One SL utterly without function.

Unless a network armageddon ensues, the next steps – though only if you’re using an iPhone and download the Sonos app – is to go through a simple process to get the One SL on your home network, choose where you want to place the One SL, and engage Trueplay, Sonos’ tuning software. The latter is a cinch to use. Prompted by the Sonos app, the wizard begins when the One SL emits various weird-sounding pulses. They’re received by the microphone on your smartphone, and the app calculates how sound waves echo off furniture, walls etc. and calibrates an acoustic profile for a One SL in a specific room. The tiny drawback is that you have to gradually walk around the room moving your iPhone up and down. The One SL then tunes itself. It all works well and it only takes a few minutes.

However, it’s one of the lesser-known features of Sonos speakers that perfectly justifies the existence of the One SL; stereo pairing. As with a lot of wireless speakers, the One SL can be daisy-chained to the One, with each acting as either left or right channel in a stereo soundstage. It’s simple, it’s brilliant, and if that’s what you intend to do with the Sonos One SL then you’ll understand why there’s no reason for it to have Alexa built-in. The One and One SL can also be hooked-up to a Playbar, Playbase or Beam and act as rear speakers in a home cinema set-up. 

Sound quality

Although it has Bluetooth Low Energy, the One SL does not support Bluetooth streaming. Do we miss it? No, no we do not. The One SL is all about Apple Airplay 2, which means you can stream anything – music physically on your phone, Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music, Deezer, Netflix (and 100 streaming services in total) – from an iPhone.

The sound and acoustic properties of One and One SL are identical. Inside are two Class-D digital amplifiers, one mid-woofer and one tweeter, and together they create a likeable soundstage that is best described as both warm and precise. There’s bass, but not too much, and there’s enough power for high volume, high octane music, but always without distortion. It also treats spoken word very well; the One SL is a great all-rounder.

Although we don’t doubt the value of Trueplay, it’s not making any drastic changes to the sound quality of the One SL. We know that because we went through the tuning process in one room, then unplugged the One SL and used it somewhere else. Was there a drop-off in performance? Perhaps very slightly, but in practice, it didn’t make much difference.

Final verdict

The popularity of Amazon Alexa is allowing brands like Sonos to flourish, but there’s a privacy schism at the heart of the smart speaker market that the Sonos One SL is intent on addressing. 

Although it assuages those that hate voice control, this microphone-less smart speaker can actually receive music from an iPhone that itself is being controlled via Siri. It’s really about avoiding replication. Able to be stereo-paired with a One and also used as home cinema rears if you’ve got a Sonos Playbar, Playbase or Beam, the One SL avoids you having to pay for features you just don’t need. 

However, we do have one question that no-one seems to be able to answer; what does the SL stand for?

• Best connected speaker: which should you use to beam tunes around your home?

Sonos has been focused on all-in-one streaming speakers for so long, it’s easy to forget that it started out building devices designed to work with other hi-fi kit. 

In fact, so long has it been since the company’s Connect products (the Connect and Connect:Amp) were lavished with any attention, we were fairly sure that chapter in the company’s history was destined to stay in the past, with the present and future dedicated to super-simple and convenient one-box solutions.

Well, more fool us, because not only has Sonos finally seen fit to revisit its roots, it’s done so with the most hi-fi-like product it’s ever produced – and one that even embraces the custom install market that Sonos itself was originally conceived to circumvent.

So, does that make the just-add-speakers Sonos Amp a return to the company’s roots or an about-turn in approach? Honestly, it doesn’t really matter. What matters is that it’s the best-sounding, most serious and yet most flexible Sonos product yet.

Price and availability

The Sonos Amp is available to buy right now for $699 / £699 / AU$1099 - and yes, that price has increased since it launched in 2019, when it cost $699 / £599 /AU$999. Of course, if you don’t already have a pair of capable speakers to connect to it, you’re  also going to have to budget for those. 

We’d recommend setting aside at least $200 / £200 / AU$250 for speakers, but the best stereo speakers can vary wildly in price, ranging from around $100 / £100 / AU$150  to well over $1,000 / £1,000 / AU$1,350.

Design

The Amp’s appearance is at once more serious and more svelte than that of the Connect:Amp. In terms of volume it’s very marginally the smaller of the two, but its proportions are markedly different, with its shorter, deeper and slightly wider design making it better suited to placement on a hi-fi rack or being hidden out of sight. 

The new dimensions are apparently borne of conversations that Sonos has been having with custom installers, who’ve long used the Connect:Amp in customer setups, despite that never really having been its intended use.

These same conversations have lead to the Amp being stackable, so that a tower of them can be created and hidden in a central location, with speaker cables snaking into various rooms of the house.

We can’t imagine many non-audiophile buyers finding themselves with the need or desire to stack Amps, but it’s an option all the same.

Sonos products have always been intentionally inconspicuous in design, but the Amp is the stealthiest yet. 

Only available in matte black and with just three, touch-sensitive ‘buttons’ on the front (play/pause and two that are context-sensitive, but usually used for changing volume), it blends in incredibly well. 

You won’t hear it in action, either, thanks to a chimney-like design that passively keeps the densely-packed innards cool and quiet.

Features 

Predictably, the rear of the Amp is where you’ll find its connections, which are almost identical to those of the Connect:Amp. You get a pair of speaker terminals, of course, two ethernet sockets (the amp can act as an ethernet bridge for other devices, should you require), a stereo analogue input, and a subwoofer output. 

It’s perhaps the latter that’s most interesting, because it means you can add a sub to an Amp-based system without the need to fork out for Sonos’s own, expensive, wireless Sub.

But yet more interesting and useful is the addition of an HDMI socket that gives the Amp all of the TV-partnering features of the dinky Sonos Beam soundbar.

Plug the Amp into your TV and HDMI-CEC will be used so that the two become interoperable: the Amp will automatically switch to TV sound whenever you turn on your TV, and your telly’s remote will change the Amp’s volume, for example. There’s almost no setup required, and the result is a seamlessly integrated AV system.

Like the Beam, the Amp is intended for quite simple systems with only a couple of sources that are connected directly to the TV, with the audio then being stripped out and sent to the Amp via HDMI ARC. 

That will make it too limiting for power users with umpteen sources, but that’s sort of the point.

That said, ‘proper’ surround sound is an option, should you want it. You can either, as you can with Sonos’s soundbars, add two of the company’s speakers (Play:1s make the most sense), or you can add a second Amp and two standard, passive speakers of your choosing. 

The latter is actually the better choice, sonically speaking, as it enables you to create a system using four identical speakers, or at least four from the same range. That will make for a far more consistent surround sound presentation than mixing traditional hi-fi speakers and Sonos’s wireless speakers.

And yes, we really are talking four-speaker systems here: the Amp is designed to work without a dedicated centre channel. Instead, it creates a so-called ‘phantom’ centre through clever processing. 

Surround-rear and Dolby Atmos setups are predictably unsupported, too. 4.0 or 4.1 (with a subwoofer) is the maximum system possible, and we think that will suit the intended audience just fine.

At the other end of the audio spectrum, the Amp can also be set to output in dual mono, so each of the two speakers connected to it receive the full, stereo signal. This can be useful if you’re using the Amp to power ceiling or outdoor speakers from which you’re not intending to create a proper stereo image.

On the subject of ceiling and outdoor speakers, Sonos has partnered with Sonance to create a range of speakers under the Sonos Architectural by Sonance banner. 

It’s important to note that these are not typical Sonos speakers - they’re simply passive speakers designed to work well with Sonos components from aesthetic and audio perspectives.

If you connect the Amp to a pair of Sonance speakers, you can use the Trueplay feature to tune the sound to your room. With other speakers this isn’t possible.

Generally speaking, though, the Amp is designed to be very flexible when it comes to partnering speakers. The biggest improvement in this regard over the Connect:Amp is an increase in power from a very respectable 55W to a genuinely substantial 125W. That makes it far more capable of powering bigger, more demanding speakers.

It’s got some proper hi-fi credentials, then, but the Amp also has all of the music streaming skills of its siblings in the Sonos family. 

That means it can play practically all of the music under the sun, from more or less every music streaming service you’ve ever heard of (and a load you haven’t), and can work in concert with other Sonos devices to fill your entire house with tunes.

The Sonos app is as fluid and intuitive as ever, and still leagues ahead of the oceans of imitators, but the company is moving more and more towards a hands-free future. 

The Amp doesn’t have microphones built-in, but it will respond to commands issued via Alexa- or Siri-powered devices. Spotify Connect and AirPlay 2 are on board, too, so you need never open Sonos’s own app should that be your choice.

Overall, Sonos is simply the best at multi-room music streaming, and the Amp doesn’t change that.

The one potential oversight in the eyes of the serious hi-fi crowd will be the continuing lack of hi-res music support, but we don’t imagine many people in Sonos’s target market being overly put off.

Performance

Having done the legwork so you don’t have to, we can confirm that the Sonos Amp is capable if driving a wide variety of speakers. Even a pair of fairly huge, $9,00 ATC SCM50s don’t sound under-driven. 

That said, the Amp doesn’t really have the subtlety or nuance to do real justice to a speaker such as that, and a pair of quality speakers in the $200-$400 range makes the most sonic sense. 

The $200 (£199 / around AU$370) Elac B5.2s are a good choice, or, if you can stretch the budget a bit, the diminutive B&W 607 standmounters ($600 / £400 / around AU$750) or the similarly priced Fyne Audio F302 floorstanders work wonderfully.

Once you’ve connected your chosen speakers, it’s worth experimenting with the Loudness feature, which you’ll find in the Room Settings section of the app and which is switched on by default. 

In our experience, turning it off results in a slightly subtler, more nuanced delivery, but with your specific speakers in your specific room, the Amp may sound better with Loudness left on.

Once that’s settled, you can get into the real business of enjoying your music – and enjoy it you will. The Sonos Amp majors on entertainment, delivering everything you send it with thrilling punch and attack. 

Not that the presentation is all bark and no bite: there’s detail behind the initial hit of each note and an overall tonal balance, from deep, textured bass to sparkly, never bright treble, that makes the Amp a fun and faithful friend to all genres of music.

It’s an impressive movie machine, too. That phantom centre speaker works well, delivering more focus than typical two-channel systems can manage, particularly when it comes to dialogue.

 But the overall soundstage is also fabulously broad and spacious, delivering atmosphere in spades, yet with individual effects that are precisely placed in three-dimensional space.

All of that said, the Amp isn’t perfect, and compared to the best-sounding streaming components (the Bluesound Powernode 2i, for example), it’s just a touch unsubtle. That low-level dynamic nuance that really conveys the emotion of a track is missing, and the result is a presentation that doesn’t satisfyingly reward repeated, analytical listening. 

It can get a bit flustered by the most built-up sections of a track, too, such as the chorus to Alt-J’s 'Every Other Freckle', which sounds messy and disorganized, rather than precisely arranged.

Perhaps that level of hi-fi sophistication isn’t what you’re looking for, and that’s fine, but the Amp’s premium price and premium ambitions warrant premium comparisons, and the truth is that there are alternatives out there that can better organize a track and transport you to the emotional core more effectively.

Final verdict

Let there be no doubt; paired with a good pair of speakers, the Amp is the best-sounding, most hi-fi like component Sonos has ever produced. But it’s also typically Sonos in the way it’s a joy to use and live with.

What’s surprising is how excellent it is when used in conjunction with a TV. Certainly, if you’re already eyeing up a Playbar or Playbase, we urge you to consider the Amp and a pair of speakers instead. 

The outlay will be a bit higher, but you’ll end up with a system that sounds substantially better and also integrates with your telly way more effectively.

But for all it’s strengths, we can’t help but criticize the Amp for a slight lack of subtlety when compared to the best streaming components of a similar price and good hi-fi components that cost much less.

The Sonos Amp is oodles of fun, but it doesn’t quite deliver the subtlety and sophistication that you’re entitled to expect when spending this sort of money on hi-fi kit.

All that being said, there are lots of reasons you might choose Sonos over a rival such as Bluesound as a whole-house system, and if you’re firmly in the Sonos camp but looking for something a bit more serious, the Amp will likely demand your attention.

• Best stereo speakers: the best bookshelf, floor, and Hi-Fi speakers