Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 speaker reviews – improved audio quality and design

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• VERDICT

The Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 speakers are remarkable and offer an improved experience for music lovers. The Era 300 has created an all-new standard for us to enjoy our music more than ever before.

It’s appropriate the new Sonos speakers are called Era because they are heralding the start of a new ear for the brand with improved audio quality and design.

The Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 are more powerful and simply sound better.

The speakers maintain the essence of what makes Sonos speakers so appealing to existing customers but also have the quality and connectivity to bring new customers to the table.

The Sonos Era 100 ($399) and Sonos Era 300 ($749) can stream your audio via wi-fi or Bluetooth and can also connect directly to other audio devices using an auxiliary cable and the Sonos Line-In adapter.

And with Trueplay, the Sonos app can also optimise the speaker to suit its surroundings and sound the best it can.

And the Sonos Era 300 introduces a new design and Spatial Audio that adds a whole new dimension to your music.

SONOS ERA 100

This is a small speaker but the sound it produces truly belies its size.

Having a small footprint also gives you lots of options on where you can place the speaker in your home.

The Era 100 is a redesign of the Sonos One speaker and has improved acoustic performance.

Under the hood are two angled tweeters and a large midwoofer and the result of crisp audio with an impressive level of detail.

Those angled tweeters also offer stereo sound with distinct left and right output to add another layer to the enjoyment of your music.

But what really impressed us was the level bass you get from the Era 100 – it’s the deepest and best bass we’ve heard from a speaker of its size.

SONOS ERA 300

Sonos has made a breakthrough with the Era 300 in both design and acoustic performance.

On the design side, Sonos has made a huge swing here and produced a unique hourglass shape that houses its new acoustic architecture to provide stunning spatial audio.

It doesn’t look anything like any other speaker and doesn’t sound like any other speaker either.

It is compatible with Spatial Audio/Dolby Atmos on Apple Music and Amazon Music and the results are incredible.

We had some issues connecting the speaker to our account – and explain why. But several attempts later we finally had success.

For this review we listened to all types of music that were both regular and spatial audio tracks on Apple Music.

Most regular tracks sounded great but some weren’t a challenge for the speaker.

These actually sounded a little tinny because it didn’t have enough information for the speaker to process.

Don’t get us wrong this is a fine sounding speaker but not playing spatial audio tracks on this speaker is like only driving a Ferrari to pick up milk instead of on an open highway.

When we played Dolby Atmos/spatial audio tracks we had so much more to listen to with audio coming in several layers and from different directions.

There was so much more to hear it became an even deeper experience that created a deeper emotional connection to the music.

Placement of the Sonos Era 300, in our opinion should be somewhere in the middle of a room to get the most out of the spatial audio.

But even in a corner or against a wall, the speaker still sounded amazing.

If you have two Era 300 speakers you can even pair then with a Sonos Arc or Beam (Gen 2) soundbar and use them as home theatre rear speakers.

We didn’t get the option to do this, but we have no doubt it would sound great.

VERDICT:

The Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 speakers are remarkable and offer an improved experience for music lovers. The Era 300 has created an all-new standard for us to enjoy our music more than ever before.