Description
Introduction
When Amazon first released the Amazon Echo, the speaker that kick-started the voice assistant revolution in the home, there were two main criticisms that people levelled at the new device.
The first were centered around Alexa, the voice assistant powering the device. As an entirely new service, Alexa launched with pretty limited functionality at first, and people found it more useful as a novelty than a serious addition to their home.
The second was sound quality. The original Amazon Echo didnt have the greatest sound to it, and was distinctly lacking in the bass department.
The intervening years have seen numerous improvements made on the first point with the addition of countless pieces of functionality to the ecosystem, but now Sonos is here to do what it can with the second criticism with its first Alexa-enabled smart speaker, the Sonos One.
The multi-room companys previous speakers have shown that it knows a thing or two about packing impressive sound into compact speakers, so at the very least we were expecting the Sonos One to offer a significant boost over the existing Amazon Echos sound. (Which it has.)
But more surprising was how pleasant the addition of Sonos multi-room ecosystem was, which goes some way towards filling the gaps left in Alexas ecosystem.
And while Sonos has done a fantastic job with its Alexa debut, theres still some work to be done before this speaker is feature complete Google Assistant isnt due until next year.
Design
Although the Sonos Ones design is broadly based on the companys existingPlay:1smart speaker, there have been a number of improvements made.
On the top youll find a touch-sensitive surface thats a great deal sleeker than the Play:1s trio of volume and play/pause buttons. Swiping right or left skips forward and backwards through your current playlist, while tapping in the center of the surface plays and pauses your music. Finally, tapping the left and right halves of the panel raise and lower the volume.
It might be a simple series of controls but, as has always been the way with Sonos speakers, youll spend most of your time controlling them via the app. The physical controls are nice when you want to quickly skip a track, but youre unlikely to use them much, especially now that voice control is also an option.
To facilitate this voice control, Sonos has equipped the speaker with six internal microphones to allow it to hear you drunkenly ask to play Hey, Jude justone more time, and these are joined by more or less the same guts as the Sonos Play:1; namely its pair of Class-D amplifiers and a tweeter / mid-woofer driver combo.
On the top of the device youve also got a power-indicating LED alongside a small light to let you know when Alexa is listening. This second LED is hardwired to the microphones, and Sonos promises that the microphones cannot listen to you if its not illuminated.
Setup
Thanks to the combination of Amazons and Sonos services, the setup of the Sonos One is a little more involved than your average Echo device, but thankfully not horrifically so.
The process involves installing the Sonos and Alexa apps, and youll need to sign into both your Sonos and Amazon accounts, as well as any other music streaming services that youll want to listen to using the speaker.
Youll also be encouraged to go through a Trueplay Tuning process, which requires you to walk around your room with your phone as your speaker plays a number of test sounds. Your phone listens to how the speaker sounds in its environment, and tunes its sound accordingly.
Of course, you can also manually adjust the treble and bass levels of your speaker if you have more specific preferences, although we were content to leave them at their default levels.
Youll also need to assign the Sonos One a room to allow you to identify it from the Sonos app, and its here that youll also have the ability to pair the Sonos One up with another speaker to have them play music in stereo. Unfortunately you cant pair it with a Sonos Play:1, despite the similarities in form-factor.
Sound quality
Given that this is
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