Sonos One review – in pictures

ONE AND ONLY

I’ve had an Amazon Echo for almost a year now and it is brilliant at almost everything. It is now my alarm clock, my meteorologist each morning, and the architect of my smart home. The one problem? It is not a great speaker, and music is the main thing I use it for. Enter the Sonos One: a Sonos Play:1 with Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant. Or in other words, it’s an Echo that sounds good. Better than than good, actually. It sounds awesome. In many ways the Sonos One is the smart speaker I’ve been waiting for. Only, having spent a week with the thing, it’s a little rough around the edges – and you can blame Alexa for that. Still, if past Sonos speakers are anything to go by, the One is only going to get better.

SLEEK SOUND

Apparently Sonos toyed with lots of designs for the One before landing on the same cute cuboid shape that we’ve already seen in the Play:1. It’s an Apple-like approach to aesthetic consistency, and one that we’re absolutely fine with. The Play:1 was an adorable-looking speaker and the same goes for the Sonos One. It’s got a fun wrap-around grille that dominates its front, allowing as much space as possible for its array of two Class-D digital amplifiers, one tweeter, and one mid-woofer to blast out their almighty noise. Clasped on that grille’s top and bottom is a matte-coloured black or white shell that’s a tad sleeker than what you got with the Play:1.

TOUCH ME

Similarly, the One has done away with the physical buttons of its predecessor and gone with touch controls instead. Place your digit on top of the One and you’ll be able to adjust your music’s volume, skip and pause tracks and turn its microphone on and off. Or you could get Alexa to do all of that for you instead. To get Amazon’s voice assistant working properly Sonos has integrated a six-microphone array into the One. It’s the first Sonos speaker to have this setup bestowed upon it and the only one that’ll work with Alexa straight up. This all makes the Sonos One a unique proposition among smart speakers and a bona fide alternative to the Amazon Echo, Google Home and Apple HomePod.

HIGH STANDARDS

Sonos has built the One to have exactly the same ‘sound profile’ as the Play:1, which is a fancy way of saying it should live up to the same audio standards as as its predecessor. Having placed the two speakers side-by-side, that’s exactly the case. The Sonos One doesn’t sound better than the Play:1 but it still ranks as one of the best small speakers you can buy right now. So who really cares? Crucially, the difference in sound between the Sonos One and Amazon Echo is night and day. I’ve happily stuck on a few tunes with my Echo while frantically getting prepped for work, but I wouldn’t want to sit through the new Alvvays album in its company. It’s too coarse and unrefined for that kind of listening. In essence, the Echo is like the car radio in an old banger – you put up with it because other features are more important.

PAIR ‘EM UP

With the Sonos One, it’s a speaker first and a smart home whizz second. It’s got the power and the detail to do justice to your favourite tunes, even more so when you pair two of the things together for stereo sound. And of course as with all Sonos kit, the One can be paired with another One, or a Play: 3 or 5 or whatever. You’ll get by just fine with the One in solo mode, though. Whether it was blasting out Brand New, Solange or Vince Staples, everything sounded pretty much spot on considering this speaker’s diminutive size. For that added finesse you’ll want a bigger, dumber model such as the Play:5 or Naim’s Mu-so QB.

FRESH START

Sonos cut its teeth as a connected speaker company and, until recently, that’s meant its apps – desktop or mobile – have been the main way you interact with its devices. Well, unless you remember the days when it made a standalone remote. Over the years, though, the mobile app in particular has grown a little bloated with new features that make it harder to simply find a song and press play. Fortunately, a recent update has seen it drastically streamlined; it’s now a lot more usable and just generally faster, although adjusting to the new layout does take a bit of getting used to.

‘APPY DAYS

Not that you necessarily need the app so much these days anyway. Spotify Connect integration last year gave users a much simpler way to control their Sonos setup, and if you mainly use that streaming service then you could easily avoid touching the Sonos app for months. Honestly, I couldn’t remember the last time I opened it before testing the One. Of course that won’t work for everyone, particularly if you have a load of music stored on a NAS drive (AKA a network-connected hard-drive). Hence why Sonos is seeking to further simplify matters by giving us all voice control. As ever, setting up a new speaker using the app is supremely easy: you just follow a succession of steps and everything just works.

THE VOICE

Sonos initially had a little trouble getting Amazon’s voice assistant to dance along in time with its One speaker. But, several months down the line, the One is an altogether more well-rounded device than it was at launch. It now supports Spotify with voice controls, as well as Amazon Music and TuneIn Radio. And the Alexa-incurred hiccups we first encountered seem to have been fixed after a series of software updates.

WHAT’S THE VERDICT?

If you care about music and have kitted out your home with at least a smattering of smart kit, then the Sonos One should be teetering close to the top of your smart speaker wishlist right now. Most of its early inconsistencies have been ironed out by some software updates and, even if it can sometimes be a little hard of hearing compared to Amazon’s Echo, it’s a superb wireless speaker. Given the One is a carbon copy of the already brilliant Play:1 with a fresh paint job and the same internal driver configuration, that’s no surprise at all. Alongside the HomePod, Sonos’s Alexa-powered speaker remains a class apart from the competition – and won’t force you to commit to Apple’s ecosystem ’til death do you part.