Sonos PLAY:1
Bought a set of 2 Sonos PLAY:1 speakers recently. It is delivered in a larger box containing 2 boxes of individually packed Sonos PLAY:1.
The Sonos PLAY:1 is a wireless speaker system that works over wifi. It is able to play music from internet sources (ie streaming music services such as internet radio, spotify etc). It can also play music from your mobile device or a networked storage or computer.
It does not support bluetooth or any line in audio source. It also does not come with a battery and will need to be connected to an electrical power outlet to work.
The Sono speakers can be configured to work separately as individual speakers playing the same or different music. When playing the same music, with both speakers in the same room, I could not perceive any audio lah between both speaker outputs.
They can also be configured to work as a set of stereo speakers. In such a configuration, you will have the left audio channel playing from the speaker configured as the left speaker and vice versa.
More Sonos speakers can be added to the network in future and configured to work together. For example, the Sonos PLAY:1 speakers could be configured as rear speakers working with the Sonos PLAYBAR to create a 5.0 surround sound system. A sub-woofer could also be added. (It is not stated if more PLAY:1s could be paired together for the similar effect)
Lastly, the Sonos app includes the Sonos Trueplay speaker tuning software, which makes use of the phone’s microphone to tune the speaker outputs to deliver the best sound. (Think of it as “THX” for consumers.)
The sound has been quite good for its size and considering that it operates over wifi. In fact, I find the sound slightly better playing the same file from a network share over wifi and via line-in on my old Bose SoundDock Portable. (I can’t remember if the file on my iPod was downsampled to 192 Kbps. And it was against 2 PLAY:1 operating as a set of stereo speakers. But the test suited my purpose to compare the sound quality for my specific usage.)
More images here.
Useless titbit: “SONOS” appears the same even when upside down.
