This week Sonos unveiled its new Era 300 and Era 100 speakers to the world, ending months of leaks and speculation about the new smart speakers – and they look impressive.
While we haven’t had them up for review, they both look like significant upgrades to the line of smart speakers and multi-room experts that could offer serious benefits to music and movie fans. Highlights include reworked internals, Bluetooth support, and USB-C connectivity – the latter two both being firsts for Sonos.
Although after speaking with our regular audio editor, Kashfia Kabir, I personally find one speaker much more interesting: the Era 300.
To update you, the Era 300 is a direct rival to the Apple HomePod 2, which we awarded 5 stars earlier this year when our team of experts put it to the test in our dedicated listening rooms.
The Era 300 has the same core upgrades as the Era 100, which is essentially an upgrade from the Sonos One, but with the added benefit of spatial audio.
To be clear, I’m not thrilled because I think spatial audio is a must-have feature right now. As we’ve pointed out many times, spatial audio in music is still in its Wild West stage of development.
This is mainly because most music studios don’t record or master tracks in Dolby Atmos, which powers the hi-res spatial tracks on Apple Music, Tidal, and Amazon’s premium tiers.
Instead, most of the focus has been on optimizing Atmos for film, TV, sports, and even video games, where 360 sound makes a lot more sense. playing games makes a huge difference. I still have nightmares from my time playing Resident Evil Village because of this.
Instead, I’m excited because of a comment from Giles Martin, head of audio at Universal Music Group, at the Era launch event attended by Kashfia. Especially when he said:
“We have Era 300 in studios that are used as reference speakers for producers and mix engineers as they create Atmos tracks. They listen to them on Era 300 to make sure it sounds the way it should.
“Right now, about 90 of the 100 greatest albums of all time are available in immersive formats. But there hasn’t been a really good way to listen out loud. [That’s why we] has developed a standalone product that delivers spatial audio that’s better than stereo – so it’s not a gimmick, so you actually want to listen to it [spatial audio].”
The main thing here is what he said about making sure the spatial audio part adds to the experience, rather than just doing it for the experience’s sake.
This is a very important step to take with any milestone change in the way we master music and by extension any audio/visual format. We saw the same teething problems way back when people moved from mono to stereo.
Although stereo was developed as early as the 1930s, many musicians still recorded in both mono and stereo into the 1960s. There were several reasons for this, first, that most people didn’t have the hardware to hear the difference, and second, the added complexity of recording in stereo.
It wasn’t until more affordable stereo systems became common and people could properly hear the audible improvements of recording in stereo that the standard really took off. For me, the biggest moment and the biggest change you get from listening to stereo comes from jazz cuts and recording sessions.
Forget listening to the difference between Miles Davis’ Sort of blue in stereo versus mono. The big difference comes from how different the stereo image is on the different shots and different shots he’s done throughout his career. In this, the placement of the microphones, the locations of various instruments and the acoustics of the room really came out differently – at some points I heard the band’s standard playing in a whole new light. This is one of the reasons why jazz fans are so concerned about specific recordings and recordings.
If Sonos, which is one of the few big name brands besides Apple, is willing to put in the time and effort described by Martin to make sure spatial audio arrives the same way and adds actual benefit, then I’m all for it, and can’t wait to try the Era 300 in our listening rooms.
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