Sonos Enters Its Spatial Audio Chapter With the New Era 300 Speaker
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Imagine you’re in the middle of your favorite band’s performance onstage, or in the center of the room as they record a new track in the studio. Now speaker company Sonos wants to bring that immersive sound experience to your living room with its latest speaker releases. Today the brand announced a couple of new additions to its wireless speaker lineup, including its first spatial audio-ready speaker, the Sonos Era 300, and the Era 100, both now available for preorder on Sonos’ website.
Sonos made setting up the Era 300 easy out of the box: You can connect to both your WiFi or pair it with your device and control it via Bluetooth. With six drivers and a couple of woofers, the Era 300 also features a center tweeter, plus up-firing and side-firing tweeters to help achieve that immersive audio when listening in Dolby Atmos or, say, watching an action movie.
The Era 300 includes an hourglass-like design and compact footprint, and comes with a $449 pricetag — slightly more expensive than other portable, immersive audio-friendly speakers from the likes of Apple or Amazon.
Courtesy of Sonos
Vinyl collectors will also appreciate the new Sonos entry: The Era 300 can also work alongside your turntable setup with your aux cord and Sonos’ line-in adapter ($19). You can also listen to playlists using your favorite streaming app, from Sonos to Spotify to Amazon Music. Another bonus: Starting on March 28, Apple Music subscribers can listen to their music with the Era 300, including tracks designed to be heard in spatial audio.
“It’s a thrilling time in music as spatial audio — and the artist creativity that comes with it — continues to grow,” Giles Martin, a Grammy-winning producer, songwriter, and composer who’s also the vice president of Sound Experience at Sonos, shared in a statement.
Martin continued: “Sonos continues to put its listeners at the forefront of sound innovation, ensuring they have access through Apple Music to transformative experiences like spatial audio with Dolby Atmos, so they can feel more from the content they love.”
Courtesy of Sonos
In addition to the Era 300, Sonos also debuted its Era 100 speaker, a compact unit that works with both WiFi and features Bluetooth connectivity.
The Era 100 also boasts a built-in woofer that’s a quarter larger than the one in the Sonos One speaker, which helps deliver deeper bass. It also has voice-control tech, so you can play tunes using your favorite virtual assistant. And if you don’t want to use a voice assistant, you can now move a switch on the back of the speaker to manually shut it off. This being Sonos, you can also pair a couple of the Era 100s together for stereo audio, or add a soundbar for a theater-like sound system.
The Era 300 and Era 100 are both available to preorder today on Sonos.com, and expected to ship by the end of March.
