Sonos was rumored to be announcing an Alexa-powered speaker today, and now it’s official. The company debuted the Sonos One this morning, which features Amazon’s own smart personal assistant, Alexa, as well as having a six-microphone array inside. This is going to make it easier for Alexa to hear you, from far away, or in a noisy room. The Sonos One is actually very similar to the Sonos PLAY:1 which has been the company’s entry-level speaker for quite some time. In fact, looking at the Sonos One, you may think that it was the PLAY:1.
The Sonos One does more than just have Alexa built in. With Sonos, you get music streaming over WiFi, and the company touts that there are over 50 services currently available. These include Spotify, Apple Music, Google Play Music, Amazon Music, SoundCloud, Deezer and many others. The Sonos One, as you would expect, does also connect with Sonos’ other speakers that are in its portfolio, allowing users to have multi-room listening. So you can have the Sonos One in your office playing a song and you can move to the living room and have it automatically start playing on the Sonos PLAYBASE (which is its TV soundbar).
Inside the Sonos One, the company touts that there are two Class-D digital amplifiers, one tweeter and one mid-woofer. These ensure that you get the best sound out of the Sonos One. The company touts that the Class-D digital amplifiers are “perfectly tuned to match the speaker drivers and acoustic architecture”. As always with Sonos’ products, you do have the option of adjusting the bass and treble if you’d like. So if you want more bass, you can do just that. The top of the Sonos One has capacitive controls, allowing the user to adjust the volume, skip or go back a track, as well as play/pause. Now with the Sonos One, since it has Alexa available, there is also a way to turn off the microphone. This is going to be useful if you are watching a video that says “Alexa” a lot, and don’t want to have any false triggers.
Sonos will be offering the Sonos One in white with a white matte grille and also in black with a black matte grille. So the black does look a bit different than the PLAY:1, which had more of a gray grille on the front. This is going to look more like a jet black color. Sonos says that the One will be available for purchase later this month on October 24th. It’ll be priced at $199 in the US and €229 in Europe. Pre-orders are open beginning today.
Pre-Order Sonos One
