We’ve brought you rumors about Sonos’ next speakers before, but now we’ve got official-looking images and rumored pricing to match the conjecture and rumor.
Pictured above is the Sonos Era 300. Its unusual shape is meant to showcase spatial audio and Dolby Atmos, with six drivers projecting sound forward, left, right and up. Reportedly costing around $450 (about £370, AU$650).
This information comes from The edge (opens in new tab), who has spoken to several people familiar with Sonos’ plans.
That price would make it cheaper than the flagship Sonos Five, suggesting the Five will remain part of Sonos’ offering, but more expensive than Apple’s spatial audio smart speaker, HomePod 2 (£299 / $299 / AU$479) .
The Sonos Era 100 will reportedly be a smaller, less powerful proposition, with a mooted price of $250 (about £200, AU$360). That could mean it takes the place of the existing Sonos One ($219 / £199 / AU$319)
Both speakers were due to launch at the end of March and will offer features not seen in previous Sonos home speakers.
Bluetooth will reportedly be standard, allowing you to wirelessly play audio on the speaker from your mobile device or computer. Previously, Bluetooth was only seen on Sonos’ portable speakers, the Move and Roam.
And both the Era 300 and 100 have a USB-C line-in, meaning you can physically connect external music sources such as a turntable to either speaker. You can see this in action in the image of the Sonos Era 100 above.
These additions will make the new devices more versatile and provide some differentiation from the smart speakers offered by Apple and Google, which lack physical ports.
As well as being used for music, the Era 300 and 100 can be paired with the Sonos Arc or Beam Gen 2 soundbars to work as part of a home theater system.
While the Era 300 is built to showcase spatial audio, Sonos is reportedly yet to make an agreement to allow Apple Music Spatial Audio tracks on the device (this could change by the time the speaker launches). But according to The edgeit will be set to handle spatial audio tracks from Amazon Music Unlimited.
The Era 100 reportedly doesn’t work with spatial audio tracks and doesn’t have up-firing drivers. It effectively becomes a more powerful Sonos One, with a new second tweeter for true stereo sound and a larger mid-woofer for more bass.
Both speakers would also support Trueplay tuning on Android phones, but with the speakers themselves doing the room analysis to optimize the sound (on iOS, the phone handles this part).
None of this has been confirmed yet, although the marketing materials are in The edge‘s report looks legit. We’ll bring you an official message as soon as we have it.
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