The new Sonos Play 5 speaker, read to stream music to the furthest reaches of your home. The result looks and sounds fabulous.
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The new Play 5 also features two built-in microphones which are now lying idle.
Five years in the making and fifteen months since its last speaker release, all-in-one speaker maker Sonos is ready to unveil its next flagship speaker to the world with the all-new Play:5. There are some 60,000 individually drilled holes across its front, supported by a honeycomb structure that helps spread sound evenly beneath. Tap to the left or right and the volume goes up and down. I’m young and life’s short, so naturally I felt the need to crank up the bass a little more after my own Trueplay testing.
And at $749 this product delivers excellent value for money. Play:5 also sticks to no Bluetooth or AirPlay integration, instead relying on a line-in input on the back for playing audio not on the Sonos platform.
As two Play:5s can be paired for stereo, vertical orientation is a handy option not only to save some space. Play, pause, and track changes are also performed with swipes.
If I have one complaint about the Play:5, it’s stereo separation. Glance at the spec sheet and you may raise an eyebrow when you see the older 802.11n wireless standard on the list – no groovy, high-speed AC networking here. As Kaul explained, “it must be an iOS device because the mic needs to be consistent”.
“At Sonos we realized with our first speakers that by controlling the custom-designed drivers, we could ensure that no matter how high you turn up the volume, the music will never distort”.
Sonos has completely redesigned the driver layout.
SonosThe Sonos family of wifi connected speakers.
We had a couple of demos with Sonos Trueplay and both times, we noticed a big difference after the speaker had been tuned to the room and its surroundings. You should be able to put it wherever you choose and Sonos has made this more possible with Trueplay. Trueplay, at present, will unfortunately only work with iPhones, iPads and iPods. “But it should also be simple to achieve”. “Even though the sound is coming out of one box, you should get the perception that you’re listening to two”.
Using the Sonos app, the microphone on an iPhone or iPad, and a tone emitted by the Sonos speaker, the system analyses how sound reflects off walls, furnishings, glass and other surfaces in any given room, and then adjusts the levels on the speaker to optimise the sound.
It’s a process best done when you’re alone – partly because it works best when there is no external noise and partly because you feel like a goose walking around the room slowly waving your Apple iPhone up and down to the sound of soggy sabres. “Trueplay is a revolutionary system that gives music lovers confidence that they’re hearing what their favorite artists labored to produce, independent of the room’s acoustics and speaker location”, said CEO John MacFarlane. A demonstration showed the feature to be really effective. A Play:1 was placed in a cupboard and when Trueplay was turned on, there was certainly a noticeable improvement in the sound output. Usually speaker calibration is a complex process, but Sonos says its software has the ability to tune speakers with the single press of a button.
Sonos®, the leader in smart sound for the home, today ushers in the next great era of home audio innovation with the introduction of new speaker-tuning software called Trueplaytm and an all-new flagship SONOS PLAY:5® smart speaker. Who knows! The company won’t say. Or maybe its ears.
TruePlay will be available as part of a system update for Play:1, Play:3 and Play:5 owners later this year. “Some people place them on a chair, some people place them in a garage”.
Furthermore, not all mobile devices will support Trueplay at launch.
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The development team quickly realised that being able to assess sound was dependant on consistent hardware (and software) with which to test it with. iOS devices are not only more pervasive in the market, but use a far smaller pool of components and software builds, whilst Android comes in many forms and hardware can vary wildly from device to device. Often we have to stick them in corners, next to heavy furniture, or in other spots that muddy the sound and create interference.
