Sonos has made a name for itself among audiophiles with its line of connected speakers.
Now it has a new model that does more than just allow you to play your favorite tunes in every room of your house.
The $200 Sonos One isn't just a connected speaker. It's a smart one.
Just like you could do with Amazon's Echo or Google Home, you can command the One to play music, control your smart home, give you a weather report, or tell you about your upcoming appointments, all by just speaking to it.
Right now, the One uses Amazon's Alexa as its built-in voice assistant to handle such commands. But Sonos plans to allow users to interact with the device using Google Assistant.
There are a growing number of smart speakers on the market. How does the One compare?
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The Sonos One produces great sound.
If you've listened to Sonos' Play:1 speaker, the One will sound awfully familiar. It offers the same excellent sound quality. That's impressive, especially since it comes from such a small device.
It's also a good-looking gadget.
The One's small form and conservative design help it blend in. You won't necessarily notice it when you walk into a room unless you're actually looking for it. Sonos designed the speaker to be that way, and it's done a great job.
That's not to say the One is just a wallflower. It comes in a smart modern form that's nice to look at. It fit in well with the relatively old decor in my home.
It comes with a feature that supposedly allows it to be tuned to produce the best sound for specific rooms.
Sonos speakers including the One come with a feature the company calls TruePlay. The feature is designed to adapt the speakers' sound to better fit the shape and size of the rooms they are placed in.
I was skeptical that TruePlay would do much of anything, but I was surprised to find that it wasn't a gimmick. In each room, the One sounded better after I used TruePlay.
I initially used the feature to tune the One for my living room. When I moved the speaker to my kitchen, it still sounded fine. But when I used TruePlay again to adjust the speaker to the new room, it sounded even better.
Using TruePlay to configure the speaker for a particular room is a bit awkward. You have to wave your mobile device while walking around the room. While you're doing that, the One plays a strange loud pulsating noise. The Sonos app on your mobile device uses that noise to understand how sound fills and echoes around the room.
If someone walked in on you while you were using TruePlay, it would probably look pretty strange to them. But the process only takes a couple minutes, and it's worth the effort.
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