Whilst you feel a little like a ghostbuster scanning for spectral beings, you’re actually helping your Sonos judge the acoustic properties of the room it (or they) has/have been placed in.
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But on to the things that Sonos is announcing: the new Sonos Play:5 speaker and a software tool called Trueplay that we might call Room EQ for Dummies. Built with six synchronised, custom-designed drivers with three mid-woofers that offer smooth mids and powerful lows, matched with three tweeters to deliver distinct highs no matter what the volume. “The array produces a soundstage that is much wider than expected in a single speaker, creating room-filling sound with precise separation of vocals and instruments”.
Sonos’ brand name has become synonymous with expensive streaming speakers, and the company is still riding its success in making this vision of connected audio equipment mainstream. This is speaker-tuning software to help optimise their existing Sonos speakers to provide improved audio performance regardless of their speaker positioning or room layout. Your Sonos speaker will emit a test tone and the app will analyse the results before adjusting your speaker’s sound accordingly. The app then analyzes how that sound reflects off of the walls, furniture, and any other surfaces in the room. And what’s cool is that smart sensors in the speaker make the touch controls responsive to all orientations, so the volume-up is always facing up.
The Play:5 will be available for £430 (RM2910) in black and white “later this year”, and we’ll update this story with a more solid release date, as and when we get it.
Trueplay will be able to tune the Sonos Play:5, Play:3, and Play:1 speakers at first.
Launching with but not exclusive to Play:5 is Trueplay, a new software enhancement that lets Sonos speaker owners calibrate their speakers in their own homes with speaker placement in mind.
Sonos Play: 5 is set to retail for $549. How do you make people who don’t know what they’re missing spend $500 on the new Sonos gear?
Sonos’ Trueplay will arrive, for free, on iOS devices later this year, and then an Android version sometime after that. For one, multi-room playback is hard to demo in busy Apple Stores, but Best Buy and Target do okay with selling Sonos speakers, right? It also has two microphones, though Sonos is not using them right now (perhaps the Sonos Play:5 will gain a few Amazon Echo-like functionality in the future).
How is Apple Music support on Sonos going and when they meet the “before the end of the year” deadline revealed at the beginning of summer? Instead of pushing buttons, you simply swipe across the badge with your fingertip. Nobody’s home has flawless acoustics, and we don’t want to adapt our lives around our speakers.
Being an audio geek, I had done my best with Sonos’s lone Treble and Bass sliders to account for any sonic wonkiness in my rooms, but that was never enough.
However, you could just borrow an iOS device and tune the system once, if you’re really keen. The Play:5’s also powered by the simple to use configuration and software that has made Sonos a victor all along. “It’s all about the speaker and all about the sound”.
There are more drivers inside, too.
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According to Sonos, the designers had a fight on their hands to keep the logo tag where it is but we are glad they did – it acts as a central point for the touch control. It’s a market that has served Sonos well thus far; with a broader and better product portfolio, the company should continue to find success with that somewhat niche group.
