Yahoo Autos Sonos is betting big on spatial audio with the $450 Era 300 speaker
There's also a new Era 100 speaker, a big upgrade over the existing Sonos One.
For the last few years Sonos has focused most of its efforts on two categories: portable speakers, like the Move and Roam; and home theater products like the affordable Ray and more extravagant, Atmos-capable Arc soundbars. The company’s main pair of music-focused speakers, the One and Five, still sound great but are getting a little long in the tooth.
That changes today with two new options: the Era 100 and Era 300. The $250 Era 100 is a totally redesigned replacement for the One with a number of improvements over its predecessor, while the $450 Era 300 is the first Sonos speaker capable of playing spatial audio. As with most Sonos speakers, you can use a pair of either of them in stereo or as rear surround speakers in a home theater setup. If you have the Sonos Arc or gen-2 Beam and Sub, adding a pair of Era 300s as your rear surrounds gives you a wild 7.1.4 Dolby Atmos experience. (If you’re willing to spend roughly $2,600 for that setup, anyway).
The Era 300 looks unlike any speaker Sonos has released before, though it still has the company’s familiar clean design language. Its somewhat unusual knocked-over hourglass shape is largely functional: it allows for the upward-facing tweeter to fire at a slight but specific angle, which the company says will deliver more room-filling reflections for spatial audio. There are three more tweeters: one dead-center and forward-firing as well as two pointing left and right. Finally, a pair of woofers on either side of the speaker provide plenty of bass.
The Era 100, on the other hand, is more obviously a tweak to the Sonos One, itself acoustically identical to the Sonos Play:1 that was released all the way back in 2013. Put another way, an upgrade was long past due. The Era 100 features a pair of tweeters for left and right stereo channels in a single speaker, as well as a woofer that’s 25 percent larger than the One’s. It may not have the spatial audio capabilities of the Era 300, but it’s still a significant update to its predecessor.
Despite the very different price points and capabilities, both of these speakers have a lot in common. Both feature USB-C ports that let you plug in a turntable or other audio equipment with an optional line-in adapter. More significantly, they both also include Bluetooth, the first time Sonos has put the feature in a non-portable speaker. They also have a redesigned set of touch controls on top – instead of taping on either side of the play / pause button to adjust volume, there’s now a little ridge you can swipe your finger across as well as dedicated forward and back buttons. Sonos also included a physical switch to disconnect the microphones. This actually cuts the connection to the mic for additional security, rather than just muting it via software.
