Sonos Amp

The latest iterative advance on the very first Sonos product, the ZonePlayer 100, the Amp contains all the Sonos streaming abilities, plus Bluetooth and AirPlay 2, along with amplification, so that you plug in the speakers of your choice for a complete Sonos zone. There’s voice integration as well; no built-in mike, but you can address it from any Alexa or Google Assistant device.

There’s now an HDMI ARC socket, adding a second major role as a TV/music hub. While there’s no dedicated optical input, an optical-toHDMI converter is provided for TVs which don’t have ARC. One RCA line input allows another source to be added, though we found music via this input to suffer a plain-ness to the presentation which assisted neither dynamics nor detail, we were never once grabbed by the music; it entirely failed to deliver the realities of true hi-fi.

But of course you can enjoy all the Sonos streaming and multiroom abilities as well. And when we persuaded Sonos to read our Mac music library direct, the sound was far superior — the missing musical magic kicked in, and stayed. Suddenly there seemed headroom and dynamics to the amplification, an openness of tone and warmth of expression to the sound, less distortion preventing higher volumes at pleasure from the Amp’s 125W of power (the circuit is described as a direct-digital feedback amplifier, which seems to be Qualcomm’s DDFA, as used in Bluesound’s original Powernode). We wish it had a physical remote control, but otherwise the Amp is a smart choice for a TV and music Sonos zone.