Sonos Port
The Port recently replaced the outgoing Sonos Connect as this ecosystem’s streaming preamp, although given the very limited physical inputs (one analogue RCA pair is your lot), perhaps ‘streamer’ is more descriptive than ‘preamp’. But the idea is the same — you connect the Port to a spare input of any audio system, so updating it with Sonos abilities, rather than (shudder) junking a good system and replacing it with a wireless speaker. It offers either analogue RCA or coaxial digital output, so you could connect the latter to a superior external DAC or to a coaxial digital input on your amplifier.
Given that this is little more than a Sonos streaming module in a box, the price of $599 is a bit mystifying — pretty much the same technology must be inside the Sonos One and One SL, which have their additional speakers, yet those are both under $300. And the Sonos Beam is the same price as the Port, yet is clearly, on the face of it, more the value proposition. The money doesn’t seem to have gone into the build quality — it’s a smaller, sleeker black box than the Connect, ornamented by a strip of light and highlighted Sonos logo on its crown, but it’s not as robust as we’d expect from a streamer costing this much. We’re pleased, however, that Sonos has retained the two Ethernet ports on its components, which can work either in or out, a great way of passing Ethernet to another component having trouble with its own Wi-Fi. Nobody else offers this.
Perhaps Sonos has spent big on the quality of the componentry within? Not judging from what emerges from its outputs, which was clean and lean but lacklustre and lacking dynamics, not much improved even with a decent external DAC in chain. As this is the raw sound of Sonos revealed, one might hope ‘S2’ will clean it up.
The one great use of the Port is that it can share with the rest of your Sonos network whatever is plugged into that input. That’s no miracle (Bluesound and MusicCast have long done this), but if you plug a real preamp into that input, you could share a whole set of sources. Otherwise, not a winning product.