Sonos speakers are actually pretty good

Last Christmas I got my wife a couple of Sonos One speakers so she wouldn’t have to listen to music through her phone’s tiny speaker. She does have a good pair of headphones, and the audio quality of AirPods is decent enough I’m in no hurry to replace any of those. However, when we listen to music together over a game of Scrabble or Bananagrams, iPhone or iPad speakers simply won’t cut it.

I’ve seen some people obsessed with Sonos, to the point they would collect speakers made by the company. Considering their price tag, I could only picture the company as the “Apple of speakers.” While that view hasn’t exactly changed, the fact you can “extend” your speaker setup by adding more Sonos speakers to it got to me. If you have a home theater setup, you might say this is as simple as wiring more speakers to your receiver, which could all come from different manufacturers. Well, we don’t have that. We don’t even have a TV yet.

How it works

Take this with a grain of salt since the only speakers I have currently are second generation Sonos One speakers. Once you get a speaker or speaker set from Sonos, you’ve started what can be called a Sonos system, and you can combine multiple speakers to act as a unified sink for an audio source. That means with two speakers you’ve created a stereo pair, and with more you have a surround sound setup.

This combination of speakers likely has its own rules. For instance, you can purchase a Sonos Beam or a Sonos Arc, both meant to as a sound bars for a TV setup, and pair it up with two Sonos One speakers as well as a Sonos Sub or Sonos Sub Mini for a 5.1 surround sound setup. Plenty of trademarks in that sentence, right? One contains a pair of tweeter and mid-range drivers, serving as a… regular speaker, while Beam and Arc feature multiple speakers each, the latter being this big assembly with angled speakers!

One possible and perhaps even common setup for a home theater is to have a Beam act as a sound bar for your big TV, a pair of One speakers on stands at the back for the surround channels, and a Sub or Sub Mini acting as the subwoofer. If you have a big room or particularly expensive taste, you’d substitute the Beam for the Arc, perhaps the One for the Five, and the Sub Mini for the Sub. That would set you back over a thousand dollars, for sure.

Anyway, this is all to say that I don’t regret the purchase too much since I know the speakers I got for my wife, even if we decide not to use them for music anymore, can be used when the time comes to set up our little home theater. Let’s hope we can afford that by then.

Spotify and convenience, I guess

My wife used Spotify for quite some time before meeting me. Meanwhile, for the longest time I just used mpd with Syncplay and beets taking care of synchronizing my music library across my devices, while most recently using Navidrome as a self-hosted music streaming service. For whatever reason, she thought it was cool that I could do that, and ditched Spotify to use my instance of Navidrome.

Well, she didn’t need to complain for me to know it was inconvenient to have to ask me to download the music she wanted to listen to, and turns out it’s much more complicated to set up Sonos speakers with Navidrome than it is with Spotify. So I signed us both up for a Spotify Premium account, despite my personal distaste for the service.

It’s good that it’s convenient to use, and the music selection nowadays makes it viable for me to use it as well, missing only a tune or two from the ones I’d like to put on — e.g. soundtrack albums from The Legend of Zelda, as well as the 25th Anniversary Orchestra album. On top of that, there’s easy integration with Amazon Alexa, which I despise, but it makes my wife happy and content, so I’m not complaining. Happy wife, happy life. I’ll admit I also find it convenient for setting alarms and timers.

The speakers

I’m no audiophile, but the speakers sound pretty good to me, which I think is what counts. Spotify streams lossy audio at 320 Kbps. Because I wanted to test my ears (and the speakers), I signed up for a freel trial of Tidal, which streams lossless audio at 1411 Kbps. The differences are subtle, but they’re there. Not enough of a difference to make me want to pay for Tidal, at least not currently.

Also, I got the missus two speakers precisely to make them into a stereo pair for higher audio quality, or, should she want to, a speaker to put in the kitchen and one to put in the bedroom. They work very well as a stereo pair, and while one of the speakers is currently in a position where it loses WiFi signal from time to time, even one speaker is high enough quality not to be too concerned and just wait patiently for the other to reconnect.

Listening to Sweet John and 古川本舗 through the speakers has been a pleasant experience. There’s enough bass and treble to make the music sound really good, but you can also adjust their levels through the Sonos app.

For now, these speakers have my seal of approval!