Photo: Jon Chase
Sonos One Review: Is This the Best Smart Speaker?
Sonos announced the Sonos One SL, an addition to its speaker lineup.
The Sonos One SL is similar to the Sonos One, except the built-in microphones and smart assistant functionality have been removed. You can control it through the Sonos App and Apple AirPlay 2 or via streaming service apps. The Sonos One SL is available for preorder now for about $180 and is out on September 12.
Jon Chase
The Sonos One is a smart speaker that combines the multiroom audio capabilities and great sound quality of a Sonos Play:1 with the intuitive voice controls of Amazon's Alexa or Google Assistant. If that's exactly what you're looking for, we think it's a great addition to any existing Sonos system—aside from a few kinks.
A great-sounding voice-controlled speaker
The Sonos One may be the best-sounding Alexa- and Google Assistant–enabled speaker around and is a great addition to an existing Sonos system.
$200 from Amazon
$200 from Abt
The Sonos One wants to become "the one" for smart home audio: one voice speaker to control all your smart-home devices and music services across multiple platforms in every room. It's poised to offer all the functionality of the Amazon Echo, Google Home, and Apple HomePod in one device.
What is the Sonos One?
What we like about the Sonos One
Where the Sonos One falls short
Sonos is well-known for its line of pioneering multiroom speakers, which you can place throughout a home and connect wirelessly. Once you've set them up, you can join them to play the same music simultaneously, or split them into smaller groups to play different songs throughout a home. In addition to streaming your personal digital music collection, they integrate with virtually all of the most popular streaming services, including Amazon Music Unlimited, Apple Music, iHeartRadio, Pandora, Spotify, TuneIn, and others. (For a complete rundown of Sonos, see our guide to multiroom wireless speaker systems.)
To control all of these moving pieces, you have the Sonos app. Besides pairing speakers and setting up your system, the app is the only way for you to pick your music, create queues, and select what music will play on which speakers. It's a major job, and the app is largely effective at keeping things straight. But resorting to an app to peck around for that deep track by Desmond Dekker feels positively paleolithic in the Age of Alexa, Siri, Google Assistant, and Cortana.
The Sonos One is almost an identical twin to the excellent Sonos Play:1—not incidentally, a previous top pick for wireless multiroom speakers. It shares virtually all of the same hardware and looks largely the same; however, tucked inside is a sort of extra brain and some far-field microphones with which to host Alexa, the voice-control feature of Amazon's Echo speakers, and Google Assistant. And that little hack turns out to be a major addition, allowing Alexa or Google Assistant to take the wheel of your Sonos system and making many once-tedious interactions far easier.
Our hope was that the Sonos One would be a Rosetta Stone device, able to integrate all of our music services, audio systems, and smart-home devices, but it isn't quite there yet.
There are limitations to what's doable—some that are temporary and some that seem a little more thorny (see more discussion below)—but overall it's a big improvement. The gist is that once everything is paired up, you can then ask the Sonos One to play music or turn off a smart light, just as you would ask any smart speaker to do. A recent firmware update also allows any Alexa device on your system (such as a Dot or an Echo) to initiate a music stream to any other Sonos or Alexa device on your system—whether to an individual speaker or a group.
With our test system, which consisted of a Sonos One, an Echo, an Echo Dot, and three Sonos Play:1 units, I could use the Dot upstairs to order up a Pandora playlist on the living room Play:1, while my wife listened to NPR on the Sonos One in the kitchen. At any time you can tell Alexa to pause a stream in a specific room. Alexa is also a useful smart-home controller, so we were able to use the Sonos One to adjust a smart thermostat and to turn on lights with no issues.
Using voice this way takes some getting used to, but it's really powerful and useful once you get the hang of it. However, the Sonos One is still a work in progress. It's not seamless, and we did run into a wall when attempting to create groups of speakers that included Echo and Sonos devices (short answer: you can't). We also had some technical hiccups based on naming and some oddball app behavior (all of this is discussed below).
Our hope was that the Sonos One would be a Rosetta Stone device, able to integrate all of our music services, audio systems, and smart-home devices, but it isn't quite there yet. That said, although it may not be able to fulfill everyone's needs, for many people it will be just great: It's an Alexa device with a far better-sounding speaker.
Like its forebear, the Sonos Play:1, the Sonos One is a heavyweight puncher trapped in the body of a cruiserweight. From the moment you hoist its box, you feel its heft, thanks to a pair of substantial class-D amplifiers, and the power cord is extra thick and fits flush with the bottom of the device so it will never accidentally wiggle free or come loose.
For a modestly sized tabletop speaker, it's capable of producing terrific, rich, and detailed sound with dense but clear bass punch. It sounds significantly better than Amazon's flagship Echo. As a piece of functional hardware that's meant to be seen, it's both good looking and made of satisfyingly high-quality components.
Sonos offers a 30-day no-questions-asked return period for curious customers to try out all its products. We reached out to tech support about some of the issues addressed in this guide, and the representative said the company had extended the tryout period to 45 days in light of the important update arriving in late December—a fair and even generous policy.
If, like us, you had frenzied hopes that the Sonos One would swoop in and instantly cure an otherwise fractured home-audio and smart-home system, you will be disappointed. The good news is that our complaints are mostly software-related and could theoretically be fixed in subsequent firmware updates. The bad news is that there are quite a few of them. Sonos has added more than one meaningful software update since we originally published this guide, however—in particular, enabling Spotify streaming, and also drastically improving the One's listening capability for voice commands. These are notable improvements, which bodes well for some of the other issues we detail below.
As a speaker it sounds and performs great (see our guide to wireless speakers, where its near-identical twin, the Sonos Play:1, had been our top pick since it launched). And as an addition to an existing Sonos multiroom sound system, it's a near-perfect fit—its sole hang-up is that it can't be configured as a stereo pair with a Play:1, only other Sonos One units, which is inconvenient but not devastating.
It's the Sonos One's Alexa chops that are still very much a work in progress, and it seems there may be some hurdles that are insurmountable. Ultimately it's the seeming inability to fully mesh the Alexa music ecosystem with the Sonos One that should cause some potential buyers to pump the brakes. Services or functions that Alexa doesn't support, such as local music files, aren't accessible via voice control; you must go through the Sonos app. However, you can use Alexa voice controls to pause, play, and skip tracks once you've started playback using the Sonos app.
A chief annoyance is that currently Alexa does not allow for grouping Alexa devices with Sonos devices (and vice versa). In practice this means you can use any Alexa device to control your Sonos device, and you can control your Sonos network using an app, but you can't have Alexa and Sonos devices linked up into the same audio stream. For example, you can't have a speaker group that includes a Sonos One in the kitchen and an Echo in the den. This may be solvable by a software update at some point, but currently it's a no-go and an odd limitation.
We also miss the physical dial and lighting scheme of the original Echo (which are gone in the second-gen Echo), as well as the hardware buttons of the Play:1—the One has touch controls on top, and the volume up and down share identical icons, an inscrutable scheme of four dots that we've never seen used on any other audio device and that reliably befuddles anyone attempting to adjust the volume.
This top view of the Sonos One shows its confusing capacitive touch button interface. Note that the volume up/down buttons (left and right) share the same icon. Photo: Sonos
We have also experienced a fair amount of instability with the dedicated Sonos App, which frequently "loses" our network and can't see our Sonos system. The effect is that you're then scrambling to find the nearest Alexa device to pause audio for, say, a phone call.
More pressing, however, is that many of the signature skills that make Alexa great and desirable haven't been added yet. The most obvious missing link is the ability to use a large number of the streaming music services that are available either to Sonos or to Amazon's Alexa devices—so, no Apple Music. There's Pandora Plus or Premium, neither of which is compatible with Alexa on a Sonos One right now (though you can use the Pandora App to stream directly to Sonos devices); there's also TuneIn, iHeartRadio, and Amazon Music, but unless you pony up extra for Amazon Unlimited, you often get only sample clips of songs instead of the whole thing. We expect these deficits to be largely resolved soon, but it's confounding to be able to access Apple Music and play it on the One using the app, only to have it be unavailable for voice control via Alexa.
A fair number of quirks also arise when it comes to naming conventions of audio and smart devices. Alexa gets confused if more than one device shares a name, such as "kitchen light" and "kitchen speaker." Fixing the issue for now means being careful when naming things and going back and changing names to avoid overlap, but we hope a more nuanced solution surfaces.
If you have a Sonos system already, or plan to get one soon, the Sonos One is a great buy for the same reasons the Play:1 was our previous top pick for wireless multiroom speakers: It's a great-sounding, great-looking, versatile, and affordable speaker that can stream all the most popular music services. The ability to control some of that experience via Alexa, even if imperfectly, is gravy. Plus, as of July 2018, adding a Sonos One to an existing Sonos system makes it AirPlay compatible. If you were considering getting a Play:1, you should probably get the One instead; they cost and sound the same, but the One is already more capable and will likely get better sooner rather than later. Improvement isn't guaranteed, but Sonos's established track record of supporting its products gives us confidence that any software glitches and missing features will get ironed out in future firmware updates.
If you are a devout (or curious) Alexa fan looking to build a multiroom audio system and you don't care about Sonos compatibility, we recommend holding off for now, or simply building one from native Alexa devices. Buying a Sonos One with the intention of waiting on updates in the future is an option, but you might see better options from other speaker makers in the near future (hopefully with better microphones). We see no reason to place your bets now if you're not already invested in the Sonos ecosystem.
If you are mostly interested in having a voice-controlled home-audio system (possibly with smart-home features) with higher-quality sound than an Echo—and you aren't tied to Spotify—you might want to check out Apple's HomePod. It's the best sounding smart speaker we've tried so far, even though it's not as smart or useful as Alexa; but it only plays Apple Music through voice commands. Google's Home Max also has the potential to be the basis for a powerful multiroom audio system. We plan to test it soon as well.
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