The Sonos One is one of the best smart speakers out there at a lower price point but top specs and great intelligence. This is the one to beat. In this post, we will give you a detailed Sonos One review to consider whether it is worth buying.
Sonos One Review
1. Design
While the Sonos One’s design is generally based on the company’s existing Play: 1 smart speaker, some improvements have been made.
At the top, you’ll see a much nicer touch surface than Play’s trio of volume and play/pause buttons: 1. Swiping right or left will skip forward and backward through the current playlist. while touching the middle of the surface will play and pause your music. Finally, touch the left and right halves of the panel to increase and decrease the volume.
It might be a bunch of simple controls but, as always with Sonos speakers, you’ll spend most of your time controlling them through the app. The physical controls come in handy when you want to quickly skip a track, but you’re not likely to use them much, especially now that voice control is an option too.
To facilitate this voice control, Sonos has fitted the internal six-microphone speaker to let it hear you drunk asking to play ‘Hey, Jude’ just one more time and these microphones.
On top of the device, you also have an LED power indicator along with a small light to let you know when Alexa is listening. This second LED is connected to the microphone and Sonos promises that the microphone cannot hear you if it is not illuminated.
2. Features
Although you can switch Alexa and the Google Assistant off entirely, it’s often worth having them listening, particularly when they’re more deeply integrated here than with many rivals.
Alexa is particularly well implemented, in that you can talk to the One exactly as you would Amazon’s own Echo.
If you want to voice-control music in other rooms, specify where and the One will send music to the Sonos kit you’ve ascribed to that ‘zone’.
If you’re worried that having Dancing In The Street blaring from your One will prevent Alexa or the Google Assistant from hearing your request to skip Dancing In The Street, a combination of noise-canceling, something called “smart voice capture” and a custom-designed six-microphone array ensures that you can always be heard.
The Sonos One launched only supporting Amazon Music with voice control but has since added Spotify, Deezer, TuneIn, YouTube Music, Apple Music, and Audible into the voice control mix, which is very welcome.
Having held out on hi-res music support for so long, Sonos finally brought hi-res capability with its Sonos S2 platform update last summer.
Of course, you can also use Alexa or Google Assistant on the One exactly as you do on an Amazon Echo or Google Nest speaker, so as well as playing music you can set timers and alarms, check the weather, add items to your shopping list – all small features, but useful nonetheless.
With an Echo Dot, you look for a visual clue that Alexa is listening. The One’s chime is quicker and more in keeping with audio communication, so it leads to more natural-feeling interactions.
The quality of the microphones makes the One less likely to mishear your requests and instructions.
3. Sound quality
Given that this is a Sonos speaker, you wouldn’t be surprised to learn that the Sonos One sounds pretty great.
Throw Elegie with the Mouse at the Speaker Keys and the sound has real power and power over it. The push of the song … ah … created the charm and boosted the energy of the song. That’s an impressive amount of power from such a small speaker.
The speaker handled even more complex music admirably. Silent Earthling by Three Trapped Tigers sounded clear and sharp, although there were layers of musical instruments circulating throughout the song.
That said, the speaker doesn’t offer the separation of a pair of stereo speakers from the way music is cornered into a single channel, but it does a solid job at its size and price point, and Of course, the ability to be paired with multiple Sonos speakers enhances its sound even further.
From this Sonos One review, we hope that you can find your answer that this speaker is worth buying.
