Sonos One Will Make Your Life Easier And Louder

Sonos’ previous speakers has proved very effective in solving the main problem that Amazon Echo, the speaker that kick-started the voice assistant revolution in the home, had. Namely, low sound quality. Well, the new Sonos One shows how much the company knows about packing impressive sound into compact speakers.

This device runs on Amazon, Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility is coming in 2018. No matter which smart system you’ve chosen, you’ll be able to add Sonos’ multiroom and control it by voice. To facilitate this voice control, in fact, Sonos has equipped the speaker with six internal microphones

In terms of design, there have been a number of improvements made, too.

In shape and size, the One looks are practically identical to the Play:1. The most significant aesthetic change is the replacement of the Play:1’s grey wraparound grille with a black or white grille, depending on the colour of speaker you’ve chosen. Sonos One, in fact, was launched in black or white, although the brand has just revealed brand new red, green and yellow options.

At the back is an Ethernet socket, and a button for setup replaces the Play:1’s screw thread, which is specifically designed for mounting.

The surface you see on top is touch-sensitive which is much sleeker than the Play:1’s set of volume, play and 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.

Such a simple series of controls, which you can be in total control of via the app, reflects perfectly the way Sonos has approached this in the past. The physical controls are very handy when you want to quickly skip a track, but you’re unlikely to use them much, especially now that voice control is also an option.

You can tap to change volume, play or pause, and swipe to change tracks, however, being able to simply request songs by using your voice is far more convenient than having to go into an app on your phone.

You can also tap to mute the voice assistant, in case you would want to get rid of Alexa for a little while. There is also a set of six microphones, which use echo-cancellation technology to make sure Alexa can hear you call from another room, even when music is blasting.

Furthermore, you will be able to control Tidal via the Sonos app as normal, but if you were to request a specific song, it will stream it from Amazon Prime Music. However, when you play an album on Tidal, you can still use Alexa to skip tracks and turn the  volume up or down.

To remedy the lack of music streaming companies linked to this device, Sonos one has announced the addition of Spotify in early 2018. Making it an impressively featured multi-room speaker. The Sonos app that supports this device is the same that has been improving constantly in the past few years. Which now includes, as mentioned above, all major music streaming services.

Sonos has also announced that in 2018 Google Assistant will be added to the speaker, in addition to Alexa. Details on how exactly this will work are currently floating around, thus only speculation is possible at this stage.

However, the number of advantages that may spring form this is high. These include allowing you to sync the Sonos One with any Chromecast Audio-connected speakers in your home, for instance.

Sonos One can be yours for only $200.