Smart amplifiers
With voice control, app control, streaming services, external inputs, and built-in power... ...the race is on to provide the easiest just-add-speakers solution for a plugand-play zone of multiroom music.
The concept isn’t new — indeed one of the very first releases from Sonos back in 2006 was a smart zone amplifier designed as a just-add-speakers solution. Every wireless multiroom ecosystem launched since then has had its own version of this easiest of system solutions, the smart amplifier.
The three reviews that follow rise in price order from Amazon’s new smart amplifier to the latest version of the Sonos zone player, and on up to Bluesound’s ‘2i’ edition of its Powernode smart amp, which retails at three times the price of Amazon’s product.
Each of these units connects to your network and the internet to play streaming music. They have internal amplification to drive any pair of speakers. They have additional inputs on the back so you can add other sources, or plug your TV in to enjoy superior sound for TV and movies.
But times are changing, and the three units here all do things differently. One area of change is voice control — everyone wants to offer it, but how well does it work? And which side of the Alexa/Google voice divide does each manufacturer choose — or is it possible to offer both, and Apple’s Siri assistant as well?
Another differentiator comes in the apps that are inevitably used to select and control your choice of music. Some apps are better than others, and some platforms offer a wider choice of online services, and differing support for your own music, both in how they access your files and which types of files they are able to play.
With all this to check up on, it might be easy to forget the most important parameter of all — the quality of their amplification.
After all, it’s not much use accessing all the world’s music if the box then makes it sound flat and boring. In theory, all an amplifier has to do is take the input signal and make it bigger. But how much bigger? And how cleanly do the different amplifiers achieve this?
That’s why we gathered all three together in our listening room, and compared them for quality as well as facility, simplicity, and accessibility.
And for one more solution, see the VAIL Amp on p62...