Sonos One Wireless Smart Speaker
“Alexa, play Sonos.” by Rob Sabin
PRICE $199
THE FULL IMPACT OF THE home-based voice-actuated assistant, invented first by Amazon in the guise of Alexa, then followed by Google and now Apple with its Siri-driven HomePod, has yet to be felt. The category has loosely evolved into what we are now calling the “smart speaker,” though it is not the speaker, but the microphone (or mic array) in conjunction with a network connection that imbues these devices with their extraordinary power. Sure, the speaker plays music, perhaps the simplest of its voice-controlled functions (and according to a recent study by NPR/ Edison Research, the activity a smart speaker is still most frequently used for). But the opportunity presented by an artificially intelligent device that can respond to human language and trigger any number of events in our environment possesses extraordinary potential for transforming our lives. The fact that the most sophisticated of these voice interfaces to date, Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, are offered in open, licensed platforms and being constantly advanced and promoted by two of the world’s richest tech giants, suggests that we are on the verge of an explosion of innovation. The best is yet to come.
In this context, the release of the Sonos One wireless smart speaker last October was much anticipated. Sonos, the leader by far in the wireless multiroom space, had been promising Alexa control of its popular ecosystem for more than a year and showcased a few parlor tricks for journalists back in February 2017. In that demo, they used a $50 Amazon Dot to tell one of their speakers to play this or that, a small teaser to prove they were working on it and had taken some baby steps. What we didn’t know at the time was that an entirely new voice-interface speaker was in the works.
That speaker, the subject of this review, is essentially a “smart” version of the company’s popular $199 Play:1 entry-level speaker, itself a finesounding incentive to bring Sonos into the home and reduced (as of early January) to $149. The One looks just like it and shares similar dimensions and shape, and Sonos execs at the launch said the intention from the start was to voice it just like the Play:1 and fit it to the same form factor while squeezing in the top-panel six-mic array and required electronics to give the One its smarts. The result, interestingly, is that virtually no parts were directly carried over from the Play:1—short of a few pieces of hardware holding it together, it’s an entirely new speaker.
For those unfamiliar with either model, the One is a stocky, square column with rounded corners, not quite 5 inches wide or deep and just over 6 inches tall. In place of the top-mounted volume rocker and play/pause button found on every other Sonos speaker, the One sports a capacitive touchpanel. At the 12 o’clock position is a little microphone icon, which, when tapped, deactivates (or reactivates) the Alexa assistant. It’s mated with a white LED. Sonos describes this as a security feature: The mics are powered directly by the same circuit as the LED; if the light is off, there is said to be no possibility of anyone surreptitiously listening-in to your space. Below the microphone button at the 9 o’clock and 3 o’clock positions are icons that look like double colons (i.e., ::). You can tap on these to adjust volume down or up, or swipe right or left to advance or back up the track selection in your playlist. In the center is a familiar play/pause icon to engage those functions. So you really get three options to control the speaker: touch controls, voice, or the Sonos app.
The One follows the Play:1 in also using a 3.5-inch aluminum cone woofer and 0.75-inch silk dome tweeter, though both drivers have been redesigned for the One to
better handle the higher internal temperatures wrought by the additional processing required for voice control. Each is driven by a pair of Class D amplifiers, whose power output (unspecified) remains unchanged from the Play: 1. Around back is a reset/setup button and an Ethernet port if a wired network connection is readily available or required for reliable operation (most people with capable Wi-Fi coverage
won’t need it). As with the Play:1, there are no additional inputs of any kind—no analog Aux, no Toslink optical, no Bluetooth for the quick streaming of your friend’s latest playlist from his phone. Fortunately, the Sonos platform offers pretty much any popular music streaming service you’ve heard of, along with the ability to access your iTunes or other hard-drive-based digital music library. Like other Sonos speakers and devices, audio signals are limited to 48-kilohertz/16-bit, essentially CD-equivalent resolution. Like the Play:1, a pair of Ones can be mated as a stereo pair or used as surround speakers for a Sonos Playbar soundbar or Playbase. You can also add a Sonos SUB subwoofer to lend low-end reinforcement to this or any other Sonos speaker system.
Setup
I tested the One in various locations around my home for a couple of months, using it and an ancillary Amazon Echo Dot to voice-direct music and news streams to other Sonos speakers around the house and generally put the Alexa/Sonos combo to the test. Separately, I set up the One in my studio to listen to CD-quality test tracks from Tidal streams and my digital music library in order to compare its audio quality directly with the Play:1.
Truth be told, setting up the One was not the quick and straightforward experience attendant to setting up any old Sonos speaker. It goes something like this:
1. Plug the speaker in, then log into your Sonos account (or set one up if one already doesn’t exist).
2. Add the speaker to your Sonos network via the usual mechanism in the Sonos app. This time, it involves pressing the button on the back of the speaker to confirm that the new speaker the app has automatically recognized is ready to be added, then naming the speaker with whatever room label you’d like to apply.
3. Hit the Alexa button on the just-added “Add Voice Control” page of the Sonos app. (Sometime in 2018, Sonos will add Google Assistant to the system’s voice-control options. Sonos execs say they expect to support all of the popular voice platforms as the market develops.)
4. Connect your Amazon account to Sonos by logging into it from inside the Sonos app.
5. Switch over to the Amazon
Alexa app, which you have already dutifully downloaded and tied into your Amazon account by providing your Amazon login credentials. This assumes you had an Amazon account to start with; if not, you’ll be establishing that first.
6. Use the Alexa app to link your existing music service accounts to Alexa. Alexa currently supports voice control of Amazon Music, Spotify, Pandora, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Sirius XM. This doesn’t mean that you can’t play, say, Apple Music on your Sonos One if you’ve got an account there and have added it to your Sonos network. It just means that you’ll have to use the Sonos app to call it up and navigate it by finger.
Only the Alexa-supported services can be called into action by voice, though once you get any of the 80 or so Sonos music services running via the app, you can use voice to adjust the volume or track transport functions.
7. Use the Alexa app to select your default music service—the service Alexa will automatically go to if you just say “Alexa, play James Taylor” without specifying a service.
If this sounds like a lot of steps, it is—and there are an awful lot of screens to peck your way past to get to the end. Fortunately, the Sonos app takes you step by step, and Sonos has an excellent support page on its website. They’ve done the best they can with a process that, by its nature, involves tying into Amazon’s third-party ecosystem with its own complexities and requirements. Still, for a company whose guiding principle has been unintimidating and intuitive ease-of-use for a mass-market audience, I can only imagine the collective “oy vey!” that must have risen up from the product team when they saw what they were going to have to ask customers to do. Sonos execs say they’ve made removing setup steps and simplifying this process a top priority for the future.
Listening
To compare the Sonos One with the older Play:1, I placed the speakers about 2 feet apart at ear height on speaker stands (specifically, the Sanus WSS21, which is designed to mate with Sonos speakers). Direct A/Bs were easily accomplished just by grouping them together in the app and moving the volume sliders for each speaker up and down; I casually kept an eye on an SPL meter to more or less match volume. After performing the Sonos TruePlay in-room tuning on both and using the app to turn off the Loudness emphasis for each, my listening revealed that the two speakers are indeed voiced very much alike. Super close, in fact. They are best described as essentially neutral, with a nicely extended and never bright high end, a detailed midrange absent of any overemphasized presence that might push voices out front from the rest of the mix, and modest bottom-end support that clearly shows a preference for natural character and roll-off over an artificial and overwrought upper-bass thump.
Despite their similarity, on most tracks I was able to distinguish on the One a slight extra bit of midrange smoothness and warmth versus the Play:1, along with an ever so slightly fuller bottom that suggested a tiny bit of thickening of the upper bass. This generally served the music well. Listening to Mickey Jupp on “Old Rock ‘n’ Roller” from his album Juppanese, I noticed that Jupp’s bluesy, Jerry Lee Lewis–inspired vocal was just a tad more exposed and raw on the Play:1; the One rendered it with its detail intact but was ultimately more palatable, especially when he cranks up the volume toward the end of the track. On Kehlani’s beautiful, syrupy ballad “Honey” (pun intended, but it’s apropos), which features just voices and guitar, the One’s rendering allowed it to play a little louder than the Play:1 without inducing any kind of edge, but the Play:1’s slightly sparser delivery gave the vocal a touch more body and presence.
From a bass standpoint, neither speaker could be called ballsy by any stretch—even by small speaker standards—and for casual listening without any subwoofer support, both benefitted from Sonos’s tasteful Loudness contouring when I got around to reactivating that. Still, while the One seemed a touch more weighty at times, we’re talking about split hairs here. These were all subtle differences that would likely escape inexperienced listeners, and they could easily have been attributable to the small difference in the speakers’ positioning/proximity to room boundaries, or some variance in the TruePlay tuning process. The bottom line is that the Sonos One and Play:1 were nigh on sonically identical. Both are exemplary for their size and price. These are speakers that respect the music.
Voice Control
Sonos launched Alexa control with a basic palette of capabilities; the company expects to find and fix bugs as it goes along and continuously add more capabilities to their Alexa skill set. As of early January, the most notable limitation was the inability to use voice to create groups from speakers in different rooms, or to shift the content you’re listening to from one room to another. This is something the Sonos app easily allows by simply checking or unchecking rooms from a list of available zones. For instance, if you’re playing something in the den and want to switch that same program to the kitchen, you can just call up the Rooms page and hit the Den tile to reveal the list of available rooms. Then, within that list, you uncheck Den, check Kitchen, hit Done, and the changes happen. Similarly, if you want to move the music from Den to a group consisting of the kitchen and dining room, you would uncheck Den, check both Kitchen and Dining Room, and hit Done.
You can’t currently tell Alexa to do any of this. However, speaker groups that you create from inside the app will respond, as a group, to voice commands directing music to just one of them. So, for example, if I start up my Frank Sinatra Pandora station in the app and make a Kitchen/Dining Room group, I’ll hear music in both zones. I can even independently adjust volume by voice in each, as in, “Alexa, volume 3 in Kitchen,” followed by “Alexa, volume 6 in Dining Room.” If I want to turn off Frank and listen to NPR, I can ask Alexa to “play WNYC radio from TuneIn in Kitchen,” and the change will affect both rooms in the pre-established group—which remains a group until I ungroup them in the app.
Along with this one very Sonoscentric limitation, there are other commonly used Alexa skills that are not supported. Alexa calling and messaging, and the relatively new “drop-in” intercom service that lets you communicate among compatible Alexa-enabled devices, are also not available from the Sonos One. You can’t get notifications, keep or update lists, or set reminders. You also cannot, for now, call up your Audible books on the One or use any other Alexa-enabled device in your house to direct these to a Sonos speaker, though Audible playback is commonly supported by Amazon Echo speakers. That said, Sonos is planning to add Audible to its mix of available services this year, so that will at least make playback of ebooks an option through the app, and perhaps through voice control as well.
As anyone who’s brought an Echo device into their home will tell you, using Alexa takes some getting used to, and although it’s instantly more convenient for launching a music service than reaching for your phone and calling up an app, the specificity of language that’s sometimes required leads to frustrating moments. This is not a critique of the One per se, although it was not always clear exactly
whether the gaps in conversational intelligence I encountered were associated specifically with the Sonos skill set or the Alexa platform generally.
For example, using the One or my Dot to boot up a music stream in a different Sonos zone required precise instructions about what I wanted done in which zone, and even then, it didn’t always work if the command wasn’t rendered exactly as Alexa wanted. Here’s a recent exchange with the One, which was located in my listening space adjoining my office, where I had a Sonos Play:3. The plan was to instruct the One via voice command to boot up some relaxing music in the office.
“Alexa play Spa Radio from Pandora in the Office.” Alexa fetches my Spa Radio station from Pandora and starts playing it in the office. Success!
“Alexa, pause Office.” Alexa pauses music in the office. So far, so good.
“Alexa, play.” Alexa, not getting that I was just asking to restart the Pandora music in the office, says (via the One), “Here’s a playlist you might like. Classic Rock Dinner Music from Amazon Music.” And “A Horse With No Name” starts playing on the One out in the studio. Arrgh!
OK, I get it—I didn’t specify the room. So I set up the same scenario and tried “Alexa, play Office.” Same result, only this time, it’s Dinner Music in the office. Finally, I realized that Alexa was looking for “resume,” instead of “play,” as well as the specific remote zone where I wanted this done. So, “Alexa, resume Office” brought the Spa channel back to life after a pause command, without requiring me to respecify what I was listening to and starting a new stream.
I also noticed that controlling Sonos streams via my ancillary Echo Dot had its own odd vagaries. At one point I used the Dot, located in the kitchen, to direct a Sonos music stream to the Playbar soundbar I have in the adjoining den. When it came time to turn off the music, I said “Alexa, turn off the Den,” to which she responded (via the Dot), “Den doesn’t support that.” That language worked just fine in similar situations with the One as the interface. So I tried “Alexa, turn off Den,” this time without the the. Same result. Finally, I tried “Alexa, off in Den.” That worked. Lesson? Although any Alexa-enabled device theoretically works to control Sonos, you can’t necessarily count on them understanding precisely the same language set. But with time, you’ll learn how to execute what you do most frequently without incident.
There’s a New App for That
Concurrent with the launch of Sonos One, Sonos rolled out a significant update to its smartphone user interface. Emphasis here on significant—this one pretty radically changed how you select content and rooms from previous versions with the introduction of a main navigation bar at the bottom of the main screen. The options include Browse (for selecting music) and Rooms (for directing music to various zones). But there’s also a My Sonos button that gives you access to your Sonos Favorites (organized into Songs, Stations, etc.) and a Search button that lets you search your library and all of your registered music services by artist, album, song, playlist, station, genre, or composer.
As a long-time Sonos user, I can say there was more of a re-learning curve adjusting to this update than some others in the past. The hardest part was getting used to swiping down on the Now Playing screen whenever I needed to regain access to the main navigation bar to handle a music or room change. But once I got used to it, I appreciated the new organization and the useful consolidated search function.
Separately, in recent months, Sonos has made its speakers accessible through the native apps of popular music services. If you have Spotify, Tidal, Pandora, or iHeartRadio accounts linked to your Sonos network, you can call up each of those apps on your mobile device as you might while using a pair of headphones, and select your Sonos zones from within the app. The company has announced plans for similar access directly from the Kuke Music and Audible apps for early 2018. Despite what seems to be consumer demand for this feature, accessing Sonos this way is a mixed bag. On one hand, you get to use the most up-to-date app platform being offered by each of these services, and if you often use these outside the home for headphone playback, they’ll likely be familiar to you. On the other hand, the native apps from most services do not permit you to initiate multiple streams from the same service to different Sonos rooms simultaneously. So you can’t, for example, play Oscar Peterson in the den from Spotify and Barbra Streisand in the kitchen from Spotify at the same time. The Sonos app, on the other hand, does usually permit multiple streams from the same service in different rooms.
Conclusion
The explosive growth of the smart speaker category in the last couple of years has been driven largely by products that weren’t, sonically speaking, very high performing. That’s quickly changed in recent months with a range of new entries that make the smart speaker attractive to more experienced listeners. Given the popularity of its ecosystem, Sonos was surely a little late getting into the category. But by offering up the Sonos One at the same $200 entry price they’ve maintained previously for the Play:1, and allowing Alexa voice control to be added to any pre-existing system, they’ve given hesitant buyers with a critical ear a real incentive to explore this brave new world of home automation. Only time will tell what the impact will be, but I’d bet this little speaker will be big. Really big.