5 THINGS WE WANT TO SEE IN A FUTURE SONOS ERA 500 SPEAKER

The Sonos Era 300 and Era 100 smart speakers were unveiled this month, and though we only had a very brief hands-on session with the two, we can’t wait to get them into our testing rooms. Highlights include completely reworked speaker designs, which Sonos claims will lead to big audio quality improvements across the board, as well as the addition of Bluetooth and USB-C connectivity to both speakers. The larger, more expensive Sonos Era 300 even has spatial audio support, which makes it a direct rival to the Apple Homepod 2 – one of the best smart speakers we have reviewed.

But while we are excited about testing the new Era speakers, the What Hi-fi? team has already started speculating about what could be next in the pipeline from Sonos. Specifically, whether a new, currently unconfirmed, speaker to succeed Sonos’s most premium offering, the Sonos Five, might be on the cards. If the ‘Era 500’ becomes a thing, here are five things we would like to see added…

UPDATED DESIGN

The Sonos Five isn’t ugly. It’s just a very utilitarianlooking box of a speaker. Our reviewers called it “straightforward in the manner of a brick, not so much been ‘designed’ as ‘hewn’.” This is why we would like to see any successor have a similar design update to the Era 300, with a “cinched hourglass” aesthetic we thought looked rather nice during our hands-on session. Our eyes on the ground were moved to conclude: “The quirky design makes it stand out – in a good way – compared to other traditional single speaker designs on the market.”

BETTER HANDLING OF LOW-END

We didn’t have massive problems with the Sonos Five’s sound quality, but our reviewers did find its low end was a little too flabby for serious listening without Trueplay – a tuning technology that works only if you are streaming from an Apple device. Playing Moodymann’s Taken Away from a non-apple device, we found the Sonos Five’s sound was altogether too bass-forward and lacking in definition, with the lower frequencies dominating the rest of the frequency range. We would like this issue to be fixed on any successor to the Five. While we haven’t tested the Era 300 yet to see if the problem has repeated itself, the good news is that Sonos has done work to improve the newer speakers’ audio delivery. Specifically, Sonos has loaded the Era 300 with six drivers. There are four tweeters (one forward-firing, two side-firing, one upward-firing to deliver spatial audio with Dolby Atmos) and two woofers (angled left and right for stereo playback). Each of the six drivers is also powered by its own class D amplifier. It would make logical sense for Sonos to do a similar redesign on any other new Era speaker, like the hotly rumoured Era 500.

SPATIAL AUDIO WITH DOLBY ATMOS

The Era 300 is the first speaker Sonos is marketing as bespoke designed for spatial audio playback. This is an immersive audio tech we are increasingly seeing in the world of music, which uses Dolby Atmos to create “a sphere of sound” – where you can hear the audio coming from all directions, including above you. The new speaker’s driver arrangement is specifically designed to let the Era 300 deliver tracks in spatial audio with Dolby Atmos, but it can also be paired with a Sonos Arc or Beam Gen 2 soundbar to act as rear Dolby Atmos speakers in a home cinema system (up to a 7.1.4 Atmos configuration with a Sub). We are already excited about the addition after hearing quite how much work Sonos is doing to ensure there’s music, as well as movies, to listen to in spatial audio. As a result, we would really like to see the same multi-channel Atmos surround ability also appear on the Era 500, if it ever appears.

MORE BLUETOOTH PLEASE

The new Era 300 and Era 100 are the first home speakers from Sonos to support the Bluetooth 5.0 standard, which supports the standard SBC and AAC codecs. This is great news for people who place convenience over having the best audio possible, as it means you can stream music to them from pretty much any modern electronic device and streaming service quickly and easily. This is why we would really like to see the connectivity also appear on any subsequent Era or Sonos speaker, including the 500.

WIDER HI-RES AUDIO SUPPORT

Our final request comes from a quibble we have with the new Eras connectivity – as it stands the 300 and 100 support playback of 24-bit/48khz hi-res music only via Qobuz and Amazon Music. Many of the team use other streaming services – Tidal, say – for music streaming, so we would like to see hi-res support over Bluetooth and wi-fi rolled out to more platforms on the Era line in general. Of course, we can’t even begin to speculate on things such as pricing (no prizes for guessing it might be priced higher than the Sonos Five or Era 300), but a more premium speaker from Sonos with better specs and better audio will certainly have our attention.