The company just announced a slick, new speaker product, along with a really interesting software option. The speaker has nearly 60,000 individually drilled holes in the grill because all the details matter in bringing you this sound quality that should make your parties, intimate gatherings, or just your daily time together, all the more musical. The horizontal position offers the wider soundstage, but if you’re looking for the widest sound, configuring twin PLAY:5s in a stereo pair is the way to go. From there, the app will tune the speaker to make the audio sound its absolute best.
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The new Play:5, which replaces Sonos’ current flagship product, boasts six synchronised drivers, three mid-woofers and three tweeters to deliver sound that Sonos co-founder Tom Cullen said was a “real statement” from the company.
Over the course of the test, the app figures out how the sound reflects off the furniture, windows, walls, and other objects, and adjusts the EQ accordingly for the best music playback.
Smart sensors make these touch controls responsive to all orientations, so the volume-up is always facing up.
Then there’s Trueplay, which – for now – will only work with Sonos Play:1, Play:3, and Play:5 speakers. Like its predecessor, it’ll be available in a choice of black or white and while the speaker looks great from afar, the closer you get to it, the more you’ll be impressed by the innovation under the hood.
Rotating the Play:5 will obviously also have an effect on the physical speaker arrangement, and Sonos has taken this into account.
The first thing you’ll notice about the new Sonos is the way it looks.
As you’d expect, the new speaker works with all of Sonos’ existing “smart” speakers, which are created to be wirelessly linked together in a multiroom audio setup with an initial wireless connection to your Wi-Fi router (Sonos speakers communicate with each other through their own mesh network).
Not to mention it only takes a couple of minutes to set TruePlay and enjoy the music from Sonos speakers. 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? Then, they turned Trueplay on and it was as pristine and enjoyable as sitting in an audiophile’s listening room. With TruePlay on, the room sounded more like a nightclub. The silver lining is that even if you don’t have an iOS device, you can still calibrate your PLAY speakers using a friend’s iPhone or iPad and the feature covers every PLAY speaker thus far.
Sonos Trueplay requires an Apple device that runs on iOS 7 and above. Because Play:5 can be paired with another unit for stereo playback, it needs a few sort of support to stand on its sides while still delivering HiFi quality sound. Speakers are designed to create a “sweet spot” that’s a certain distance and direction from the drivers; usually they are meant to sit at a particular height, on certain kinds of surfaces, with generous room left on all sides for air flow.
Sonos is not a company to move with speed.
The updated speaker is particularly interesting because it can be used in three orientations.
“I remembered my dad was making Tug of War with Paul McCartney and he had a Bentley, as you do, and he would sit outside the house in his auto listening to mixes”, Martin says.
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.
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I’ve been using the Play:1 for more than a year, and couldn’t be more pleased.
