Illustration by Cassie Stevens
An in-depth look at the magic behind Sonos.
Since their beginnings 16 years ago, Sonos have been at the forefront of pushing audio technology into the future. Along the way, they’ve honed in on exactly what listeners want. Their latest creation – the Sonos One–is a smart speaker for music lovers, pairing a hands-free, voice-controlled speaker with Sonos’ renowned standard of sound quality. They’ve managed to pack a tonne of features into such a small device, so here’s a rundown of exactly what the Sonos One can do.
Sound
Sonos are known for their cutting-edge technology within the audio industry and the Sonos One is a testament to that. Proving that size doesn’t matter, the speaker boasts an immersive sound courtesy of two D-Class amplifiers and finely crafted acoustic architecture. The speaker’s tweeter ensures that high notes are crisp and clean while the mid-woofer captures those bellowing bass sounds. Plus, there’s an option to adjust bass and treble levels using the Sonos app, so you can fine tune the sound of your speaker specifically to your space.
Sounds good, looks even better
The Sonos One was designed to fit into your music listening rituals and around your life. The speaker is compact and sleek in stature, meaning it will fit almost anywhere you want to put it. You can mount it onto a wall or ceiling or slot it neatly into nooks. Weighing under 2kgs and measuring at approximately 6.4” in height and 4.7” in both width and depth, without lots of messy cords, it is easy to move around the house and transport wherever you need it so you can take your music with you wherever you go. There are two colour options: a stylish black with a matte black grill or a clean white body and grill. Careful consideration has been taken to ensure the speaker looks modern and stylish so that it can sit on your bookshelf without being an eyesore.
A speaker as smart as you
Sonos One is a smart speaker, with Amazon Alexa inbuilt so that playing music is as simple as saying a few words. The speaker contains six microphones to ensure your requests are heard, and has clever voice detection technology which lowers the volume of your music when you’re making a request, as well as being able to decipher between your voice and the music playing, to ensure you never have to shout to be heard. In fact, the speaker has gone through rigorous testing and technological design to not only ensure it can hear you in a crowded room or noisy environment, but that it is able to understand different accents and ways of speaking so you aren’t constantly repeating yourself or reverting to that robotic, frustrated phonetic speech you often find yourself having to adopt when dealing with clunkier voice recognition software.
Technology
Sonos know that there’s a sea of music out there and they’ve made sure to cater to your music listening habits, whatever they may be. The Sonos One connects to over 80 streaming services including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music and internet radio, plus you can download the Sonos app to save all your tunes in one place. And just because it was designed for music lovers, doesn’t mean you can’t do anything else. You can listen to the news, traffic and weather and control other home devices that allow you to adjust things like temperature and lights – just ask Alexa.
Connectivity
Though the Sonos One certainly isn’t lacking in the sound department, Sonos know that sometimes you just want to drown out the world with a big wall of sound, so they’ve allowed for multiple speakers to sync up to create a home sound system. Whether you already have a few different Sonos products at home or you decide to start building your sound system now with a handful of Sonos Ones, as long as they are Sonos they’ll connect wirelessly. You can scatter your speakers throughout the house or build a surround sound effect in one room. And, when you’re not listening to music, you can connect the speakers to the TV to create a cinematic experience.
This article is sponsored by Sonos.
