There isn’t much to say about the new Sonos One that hasn’t been said about Sonos already. The company has long been the gold standard in wireless whole-home audio and their speakers, while small, are powerful and more than usable for music, home entertainment, and general merriment. So how do you make a good speaker better? Just add Alexa.
The new Sonos One is a $199 fully wireless speaker controlled via your smartphone or desktop. You can put multiple speakers in multiple rooms, pair them together to create a stereo system or even connect four of them to create a surround-sound living room system. This unit works best as a standalone or stereo pair and is great for smaller rooms like kitchens or bedrooms.
Any speaker of this size is going to be a little muted in terms of depth and range but Sonos has traditionally done a good job of balancing the sound without resorting to cheap tricks like boosting the bass at the expense of the high end or adding sound improving “filters.” Instead the One has a tuning system that uses your smartphone to hear a series of signals inside the perimeter of the room. It then tunes the speaker to that room in particular. The result is nicer bass response and a clarity that wasn’t there before tuning.
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There are no buttons on the One so you can’t get tomato sauce or worse stuck in the works when using this speaker outside of the living room. The sparse black or white body is unobtrusive until music starts pouring out of it with a single touch.
I will tend to agree with our cousins at Engadget[1] that the Sonos...