Sonos Era 300 - The Best I've Tried

You can get really carried away when you're setting up a sound system for your home.

There are audiophiles out there who will happily spend thousands and thousands of dollars bringing together the finest, high-end audio components to create the perfect aural environment - I'm not just talking pricey speakers but also other amps and processors designed to reproduce any audio exactly the way it was intended to be heard when first recorded.

Those sorts of people will happily spend hours fine-tuning their setup, getting speaker placement just right, making absolutely certain the sub-woofer is in phase - perhaps even manually setting the EQ for each listening session, depending on the nature of the content.

Nerds.

The rest of us connect our phones to a bluetooth speaker on a shelf and stream the "Today's Hits" playlist while we're getting ready for work.

Just keeping it real.

Me? I guess I'm somewhere in the middle. While I'm sure a $20k sound system is probably technically amazing, I'm also sure I can't afford one, don't need one and nobody in my house would know how to use it properly and that would drive me nuts.

Hell, I probably wouldn't know how to use it properly and that would drive me even crazier.

That's why Sonos is the sweet spot for me. It sounds high-end enough with a minimum amount of setup and of course, these are the guys who mastered wireless, multi-room sound systems before just about anyone and made them easily available to the masses.

And boy oh boy has Sonos brought something new to the party...

What's the problem with your average bluetooth speaker? The sound is usually pretty average. The main reason for this is it's only one speaker. As I've often lamented, somewhere along the way we seemed to stop caring about decent surround sound (or even just stereo) speaker setups and settled for the convenience of a single speaker we could play our phones through.

The Sonos Era 300 aims to reverse this trend in one fell swoop, promising to "Put you inside your music." It strives to achieve this magical feat by including six class-D digital amplifiers, four tweeters and two woofers, all precisely positioned and angled in a completely new form-factor for Sonos (or indeed, any speaker) - a kind of off-balance hourglass lying on its side.

This odd shape suggests audio performance won out over aesthetics when it came to the final design. I'm not saying it's an unattractive device by any means - just unconventional. Although it is quite bulky when compared to most other smart speakers, soundbars excluded. 

At almost 4.5kgs and 26cm across, the Era 300 requires a pretty heavy-duty box for delivery although this packaging now conforms to a new regime of eco-friendly recyclability. No plastic tape or polystyrene in sight - just moulded cardboard and an ingenious locking system to keep the box lid in place - all 100% recyclable. Even the speaker itself is constructed from 40% post consumer-recycled(PCR) plastics. As it should be.

Once out of the packaging, it's clear the Era 300 is truly intended to fire its sound all around, with audio grilles facing most directions. These aren't just for show, either. Under the hood there's a forward-firing mid tweeter, mid tweeters on each side to create convincing stereo effects and an upward firing tweeter built into a directional horn to achieve the impression of realistic height required by Dolby Atmos. Even the woofers (not one but two) are more directional than is commonplace with other single speaker designs - again this further aids with stereo separation.

So where's the best place to set up the Era 300? As I would quickly discover, this doesn't really matter that much. Although I tried it in a few places, for most of the review period I actually had it stashed in about the worst place possible for a speaker; on a bottom shelf in the corner of a large room partially obscured by two couches. Oh yeah... and right next to a door leading into another room.

How do you like that challenge, Era 300?

Incredibly, the Era 300 didn't take that awful positioning as a challenge at all. Like other Sonos speakers, during setup using the Sonos app, you have the option of automatically tuning the speaker's performance to its environment with TruePlay - this uses a combination of your phone's microphone and the Era 300's own far-field mic array to bounce a bunch of weird noises off the various surfaces in the room in order to eliminate any dead spots. In the case of the Era 300 it's also adjusting the balance of all those built-in drivers so hopefully you'll get the benefit of any high-definition, surround or spatial audio from wherever you're listening in the room.

Here's the amazing thing; it seems to work. Although I couldn't have smothered the Era 300 more if I'd locked it in a box in a cupboard, I still found it filled the entire room (an open plan living room with hard floors) with a rich, full sound. The detail and power was all there and depending on the mix of individual tracks, sometimes I had to check I hadn't accidentally switched my audio to other speakers already in the room - that's how convincing the spatial audio effects can be.

Even when listening from the room through the door (remember the doorway next to where I put the speaker?) the Era 300 still managed to sound like a speaker in that room too.

The Sonos app has evolved quickly and now lets you link to almost any music streaming service you may be subscribed to - not to mention giving you full access to Sonos radio itself; a collection of genre-specific stations I find to be just as well-curated as many of my favourite playlists from other services.

But the big breakthrough for me is the advances Sonos has made with voice control. The Era 300 lets you use Amazon Alexa, Sonos' own voice assistant or a combination of the two and this actually works really well. In fact, I own several Amazon Echo speakers but none of them respond as quickly and as accurately as the Era 300 does. Given the Sonos voice assistant is a relatively new feature, I wasn't expecting much but the results were so good I found I never really had to use the redesigned physical touch controls on the top of the speaker at all. However, if the thought of an always-active mic listening for your commands isn't for you, there is a physical switch around the back to deactivate the mic completely.

There's also a USB-C line-in - but don't get too excited. This will only work with the optional Sonos Line-In Adapter, an accessory specifically designed for anyone wishing to connect a turntable or similar external device. Otherwise, unless streaming directly over Wi-Fi or as part of your wider Sonos, multi-room system, you do have the option of using the Era 300 as a bluetooth connected speaker. Unfortunately, this is only via Bluetooth 5.0 which does mean a bit of lag when compared to the more recent 5.2 and 5.3 devices.

As there's no HDMI or optical input, I assumed this meant I wouldn't be able to pair the Era 300 with my TV to use as a kind of proxy-soundbar - and that's certainly not something Sonos has suggested in any of its marketing. However, for the sake of proper research I gave it a go anyway and guess what? It was fabulous. Indeed, due to the bluetooth lag I had to tweak my TV's audio-sync settings quite a bit but once I got that right the Era 300 did a fine job.

Frustratingly, given this scenario, it's a shame you can't pair it with a set of surround speakers such as the recently launched Era 100s. However, you can add either the Sonos Sub or Sub Mini - which I immediately did. While this added a bit of extra bass punch I'd have to say the Era 300 does such a good job handling the lower frequencies on its own, I wonder if the extra woofer really offers much to enhance an already solid bass response.

Ironically, Sonos does suggest the using Era 300 itself as a surround sound solution. You can link two of them as a stereo pair or team them up with a Sonos soundbar like the Beam (2nd gen) or the ever-impressive Arc for a full-throttle surround-sound home-theatre experience the likes of which I can only imagine.

(I can only imagine it because Sonos only sent me one Era 300 to review. I bet a pair of them sounds pretty incredible though.)

The thing I always judge a speaker like this by is not how good it sounds at full volume, but how good it sounds when being used quietly, in the background. When you're trying to create a bit of dinner party atmosphere, can you still pick out the vocals, the various instruments, the solos - all without drowning out your conversation yet still filling the room with a warm, rich mix?

That's a trick the Era 300 absolutely masters - making it a genuine home hi-fi solution in a single, weirdly-shaped speaker. NZ$849.00 might seem a lot for one speaker but when this one speaker provides real, multidirectional, spatial audio more effectively than other multi-speaker systems I've tried, it quickly adds up to being a great choice.

    

Click here for more information and pricing on the Sonos Era 300.