Introduction
Sonos is an American developer and manufacturer of audio products best known for its multi-room audio products with the Sonos Multi-Room System. The first thing that the company caught my attention was its logo, as even if you flip over its logo, it’s still the same “SONOS” logo. TC Acoustic, the official distributor of Sonos in Malaysia, recently sent us the Sonos Beam and Sonos One to try out, as well as testing out its multi-room system feature. Without further ado, here’s a quick review of the Sonos Multi-Room System, featuring the Sonos Beam and Sonos One.
Sonos Beam
The Sonos Beam is a smart and compact soundbar for TV, music, and more. In fact, it’s more than a soundbar as it’s also wireless and can play music just like other Sonos speakers.
The top of the soundbar has capacitive touch buttons and an LED status indicator. There’s the microphone button above the LED indicator, which is being used for turning on/off the microphone as it supports voice assistant, but at the moment Google Assistant isn’t available yet for our region. The other three capacitive touch buttons are for volume up/down, previous/next track, and play/pause.
The back of the soundbar has the power port, Join button, Ethernet port, and HDMI port. The HDMI port is for you to connect the soundbar to your TV’s HDMI ARC port.
And that nice Sonos logo is located at the front of the soundbar. The soundbar has a fabric material covering the speakers. The overall audio quality is quite impressive as expected from Sonos.
Sonos One
The Sonos One is a smart speaker with voice control built-in. If you don’t need the voice control feature, you can opt for the cheaper One SL.
Just like the Beam, the Sonos One has the same capacitive touch buttons and an LED status indicator. The capacitive controls work the same — volume up/down, previous/next track, play/pause, and microphone on/off.
The back of the speaker has the Join button and Ethernet port, while the power port is located below the speaker. It doesn’t have an HDMI port since this is not a soundbar, you don’t need to connect it to your TV.
Unlike the Beam, it doesn’t have a fabric material covering the speakers. It has great audio quality and if you pair two Sonos Ones in the same room, you’ll get stereo separation and more detailed sound. It’ll definitely improve your home theatre audio experience if you use a pair as rear home cinema surrounds with Beam.
Sonos Multi-Room System
And here comes the main point of the review — the Sonos Multi-Room System. Obviously, being a smart audio product, you’ll need to have an app. Both the Sonos Beam and Sonos One support the Sonos S2 app, which we’ll get into it later. You can also use the desktop app, but I’m not really recommending it as it’s not that user-friendly and the design looks outdated.
To set up both speakers, you’ll need to download the Sonos S2 app and have a Sonos account. Sonos mentioned that the app is more than just an app. It’s a platform that brings together all your streaming, voice, and control services so you can easily browse music, radio, podcasts, and audiobooks, and listen your way. All your streaming services can be found in the browse section.
The Sonos S2 app has enhanced protocols, including support for elliptic curve cipher suites in SSL/TLS, keep your system safer and your data more secure.
According to Sonos, the app supports higher resolution audio technologies for music and home theatre, including Dolby Atmos. It supports all the main file formats, including MP3, WMA, FLAC (up to 16bit/44.1kHz), WAV, AAC, and AIFF, recommending FLAC format for lossless files to ensure the most accurate indexing.
In the system section, you can add your products and assign them to different rooms. You can group them together and play both speakers at the same time, so no matter where you are you can still enjoy your music, and it works like a charm! I personally really enjoy using this multi-room feature. For AirPlay 2, I notice that there’s a slight delay after pressing the next track button, and the first few seconds of music will be cut off.
Final Words
In conclusion, the Sonos Multi-Room System is really a great feature if you have multiple Sonos products. It definitely lights up your mood and improves your productivity. When you pair two Sonos Ones as rear home cinema surrounds with Beam, your home turns to a theatre, obviously, you’ll also need a great TV or projector. Everything costs lots of money, but you get to live a better lifestyle. You can purchase the Sonos Beam and Sonos One via its Lazada Official Store below:
- Sonos Beam: RM2,399
- Sonos One: RM1,199
- Sonos One SL: RM999