The speaker cabinet has been completely redesigned and is, in my opinion, a vast improvement over the original Play:5, which is beginning to look a little dated.
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Trueplay combines the SONOS app, the microphone on your iPhone or iPad, and a special tone emitted by your SONOS speaker.
We had a chance to hear the speaker in action and it does a spatially mixed, ultra-clear and detailed sound that non-audiophile consumers aren’t accustomed to hearing at home.
For starters, Trueplay works with Play:1, Play:3, and Play:5 speakers and will roll out across the rest of the Sonos lineup over time. The new Play: 5 is available in two colors, matte black and matte white. New touch-sensors provide capacitive controls for changing volume and for playing and pausing music.
There are no buttons to control the Play:5.
Another new feature for the 2015 Play:5 is how it can be orientated, though this will only really be of interest if you plan on picking up a pair. Our new Play5 brings together all of our learning from many years of hardware and software design and iteration.
The contrast was huge – the song was much more crisp and it no longer sounded like the speaker was muffled. There’s also the issue of the Sonos app, which can often feel like a cumbersome kludge in a world of AirPlay and Chromecast devices.
Sonos believes this software will change the way it makes speakers in the future and I am inclined to agree. Trueplay coming to the old Play:5 is a ideal example of that. Play:5 is built to sit on its bottom or on either side when paired in stereo mode. Look closely – even the Sonos logo on the face of the speaker is dotted with holes. Since the speaker has Wifi antennas, six of them to be exact, the metal interferes with the performance of the wifi feature.
It’s an impressively elegant solution to a complicated problem (as no two user’s rooms will likely possess the same acoustic properties) and the results speak for themselves.
If I can be afforded one complaint over Play:5 (besides the usual lack of Bluetooth or AirPlay from Sonos) it’s the presence of these feet on either side of the speaker.
In a demonstration of the software last week at Sonos headquarters in Santa Barbara, Sonos sound experience leader Giles Martin put one Sonos Play: 1 speaker on a book shelf in the open, and one inside a kitchen cupboard and with the magic of Trueplay you couldn’t pick the difference. Well, everyone with an iOS device as it isn’t ready for Android just yet.
Sonos’ Trueplay application though simply uses the microphone on either your iPhone or iPad, a simple tone from your Sonos speaker and is then able to calibrate it specifically to your room. The end result in either case is quite brilliant. Like you have done for decades so far. And Trueplay needs a quiet room to work correctly during the setup process, but it is smart enough to know it should ignore a few background sounds.
While Trueplay does need a quiet environment to work best, it takes into account the noisy lives we live in our homes sometimes. That’s great for decor freaks, but it also means you may not be getting the best sound possible out of the unit.
Sonos Play: 5 is set to retail for $549.
Mr MacFarlane praised Apple for what it’s done for the music industry, saying the tech giant “moved the whole ecosystem forward”.
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Packed with six drivers, three mid-woofers, and three tweeters, the speaker can easily fill a room with sound. This information is then used to determine the layout of your room and the tuning will take place automatically. A lot of detailed design decision went into the product. The short answer is that there has been talk in this space in the past, but there hasn’t been a compelling reason for both Apple and Sonos yet. Thankfully, about 80% of Sonos-owning households have an iOS device.
