Sonos One

ARE ALEXA AND SONOS A MATCH MADE IN HEAVEN?

WHEN AMAZON FIRST released the Echo, the speaker that kickstarted the voice assistant revolution in the home, there were criticisms centring around Alexa, the voice assistant powering the device. As an entirely new service, Alexa launched with limited functionality, and people found it more useful as a novelty than a serious addition to their home. The intervening years have seen numerous improvements made on that front with the addition of countless pieces of functionality to the ecosystem. So now Sonos is here with its first Alexa-enabled smart speaker, the Sonos One.

The multi-room audio company’s previous speakers have shown that it knows a thing or two about packing impressive sound into compact speakers, so at the very least, we were expecting the Sonos One to offer a significant boost over the existing Amazon Echo’s sound. (Which it has.) But more surprising was how pleasant the addition of Sonos’ multi-room ecosystem was, which goes some way towards filling the gaps left in Alexa’s ecosystem.

DESIGN

Although the Sonos One’s design is broadly based on the company’s existing Play:1 smart speaker, there have been a number of improvements made.

On the top, you’ll find a touch-sensitive surface that’s a great deal sleeker than the Play:1’s trio of volume and play/pause buttons. Swiping right or left skips forward and backwards through your current playlist, while tapping in the centre of the surface plays and pauses your music. Finally, tapping the left and right halves of the panel raise and lower the volume. It might be a simple series of controls but, as has always been the way with Sonos speakers, you’ll spend most of your time controlling them via the app.

To facilitate this voice control, Sonos has equipped the speaker with six internal microphones to allow it to hear you drunkenly ask to play ‘Hey, Jude’ and these are joined by more or less the same guts as the Play:1; namely its pair of Class-D amplifiers, and a tweeter and mid-woofer driver combo.

On the top of the device, you also have a power-indicating LED alongside a small light to let you know when Alexa is listening, a trait common to Amazon’s own devices.

SETUP

Thanks to the combination of Amazon’s and Sonos’ services, the setup of the Sonos One is a little more complicated than your average Echo device. The process involves installing the Sonos and Alexa apps, and you’ll need to sign in to both your Sonos and Amazon accounts, as well as any other music streaming services that you’ll want to listen to using the speaker.

You’ll also be encouraged to go through a ‘Trueplay Tuning’ process, which requires you to walk around the room with your phone as your speaker plays a set of test sounds. Your phone listens to how the speaker sounds in its environment, then tunes its audio accordingly.

Of course, you can also manually adjust the treble and bass levels of your speaker if you have more specific preferences, although we were content to leave them at their default levels.

You’ll also need to assign the Sonos One a room to allow you to identify it from the Sonos app, and it’s here that you’ll also have the ability to pair the Sonos One with another speaker to have them play music in stereo. Unfortunately you can’t pair it with a Sonos Play:1, despite the similarities in form-factor.

SOUND QUALITY

Given that this is a Sonos speaker, you won’t be surprised to hear that it sounds pretty fantastic. It has real punch and energy to it. It’s an impressive amount of power from such a small speaker.

That said, the speaker doesn’t offer the separation of a pair of stereo speakers with the way the music is squashed into a single channel, but it does a solid job for its size and price point, and naturally its ability to be paired with more Sonos speakers enhances its sound further still.

ALMOST, NEARLY PERFECT

Of course, much of what’s written above could also have been said of the original Play:1 when it was first released back in 2013. The real story

GIVEN THAT THIS IS A SONOS SPEAKER, YOU WON’T BE SURPRISED TO HEAR THAT IT SOUNDS PRETTY FANTASTIC. SOUND HAS REAL PUNCH AND ENERGY TO IT. IT’S AN IMPRESSIVE AMOUNT OF POWER FROM SUCH A SMALL SPEAKER.

here is about how voice control is integrated — it is simply wonderfully executed.

While at launch the functionality seemed a little more limited than we were expecting due to the absence of its integration with Spotify, this has now been rectified via a software update.

It’s great news, as Spotify is one of the more popular streaming services out there. Being able to simply request songs by using your voice is far more convenient than having to dig into an app on your phone.

With Spotify now added, the Sonos One is an impressively featured multi-room speaker. It’s backed by the same great Sonos app that’s seen continuous development over the years, and now folds in all major music streaming services — very convenient.

Otherwise the speaker acts pretty much as you’d expect an Alexa speaker to. It integrates with all the same smart home products, you can ask it about the weather, or just have it tell you stupid facts and jokes.

You can also use voice commands to get music playing on other Sonos speakers throughout your home. The Alexa skill is still in beta and is hence a little buggy (it refused to play the radio on “kitchen speaker”, but was fine with “kitchen”), but when this sees a full launch, it will be another helpful feature.

And that’s not all. Sonos has announced that it’s bringing Google Assistant to the speaker in addition to Alexa. Details on how exactly this will work are currently slim, but this will have a number of advantages, including allowing you to sync the Sonos One with any Chromecast Audio-connected speakers in your home.

It feels as though the Sonos One could eventually end up being the perfect Alexa speaker. Fundamentally, this is because it’s underpinned by audio quality that’s a step above what’s available on Amazon’s current generation of Echo hardware, but it’s a speaker that also integrates fantastically well with the rest of Sonos’s multi-room lineup.

With Google Assistant support expected later this year and many more updates to Alexa sure to come over the years, the Sonos One will only going to get better over time.