The Sonos Era 300 and Era 100 smart speakers were unveiled this month, and though we only had a very brief hands-on session with the two, we can’t wait to get them into our testing rooms. Highlights include completely reworked speaker designs, which Sonos claims will lead to big audio quality improvements across the board, as well as the addition of Bluetooth and USB-C connectivity to both speakers. The larger, more expensive Sonos Era 300 even has spatial audio support, which makes it a direct rival to the Apple HomePod 2 – one of the best smart speakers we have reviewed.
But while we are excited about testing the new Era speakers, the What Hi-Fi? team has already started speculating about what could be next in the pipeline from Sonos. Specifically, whether a new, currently unconfirmed, speaker to succeed Sonos’s most premium offering, the Sonos Five, might be on the cards. If the ‘Era 500’ becomes a thing, here are five things we would like to see added…
UPDATED DESIGN
The Sonos Five isn’t ugly. It’s just a very utilitarian-looking box of a speaker. Our reviewers called it “straightforward in the manner of a brick, not so much been ‘designed’ as ‘hewn’.” This is why we would like to see any successor have a similar design update to the Era 300, with a “cinched hourglass” aesthetic we thought looked rather nice during our hands-on session. Our eyes on the ground were moved to conclude: “The quirky design makes it stand out – in a good way – compared to other traditional single speaker designs on the market.”
BETTER HANDLING OF LOW-END
We didn’t have massive problems with the Sonos Five’s sound quality, but our reviewers did find its low end was a little too flabby for serious listening without TruePlay – a tuning technology that works only if you are streaming from an Apple device. Playing Moodymann’s Taken Away from a non-Apple device, we found the Sonos Five’s sound was altogether too bass-forward and lacking in definition, with the lower frequencies dominating the rest of the frequency range. We would like this issue to be fixed on any successor to the Five. While we haven’t tested the Era 300 yet to see if the problem has repeated itself, the good news is that Sonos has done work to improve the newer speakers’ audio delivery. Specifically, Sonos has loaded the Era 300 with six drivers. There are four tweeters (one forward-firing, two side-firing, one upward-firing to deliver spatial audio with Dolby Atmos) and two woofers (angled left and right for stereo playback). Each of the six drivers is also powe
