When you connect a Sonos Boost to your router, all of the other devices in your house will continue to connect to your router as usual except for your Sonos products which will be redirected to the Boost on a dedicated wireless network. If you’ve splashed out for more than one speaker, your Boost will actually daisy chain the wireless signal from one device to the next. This can significantly improve the signal quality – especially in larger homes. Treble is crisp and clear, but treads a fine line between excitement and harshness. You’ll occasionally notice the odd sharp edge or hint of sibilance, but it’s not enough to be bothersome. More often, it’s simply clear and sparkly.

Sonos One review: still an excellent entry point into the Sonos One review: still an excellent entry point into the

The Sonos Play:1 is not like most other small wireless speakers. It doesn’t use Bluetooth, is not portable and won’t even take a 3.5mm plug to accept a non-wireless source. But for compact convenience and quality on a budget, the clever little One still comes highly recommended as an ideal, great-value entrance into the Sonos ecosystem. Why did Sonos create a second home entertainment device? The team did extensive research into how people used their Playbar at home and found that most people didn’t wall mount their televisions or Playbars. To that end, the Playbase was created to allow people to set their televisions right on top of the speaker, allowing for a compact home theater solution. Sonos is also less closed-off than it used to be. Until 2016, all music selection for your Play:1 had to be done through the Sonos app. The touch-control panel on the Sonos can be disabled via app settings, and the status light can be turned off if you find it distracting – all small yet useful features. Of course, if you want to add voice-activated smarts to the SL without purchasing a Sonos One, adding an inexpensive Echo Dot would also allow this.

Podcast fans may find their app of choice isn’t supported. Sonos’s solution is TuneIn Radio, the most popular internet radio app and also a good way to listen to podcasts. It comes ‘preinstalled’ in the Sonos app. Make sure you’re in the room you want to tune – a red dot should appear next to the room name if it hasn’t been tuned yet Only too keen to show that rhythmic fidelity isn’t left trailing, its agile, athletic posture keeps up with the sprightly keyboard cadence in Manfred Mann’s Earth Band’s cover of Blinded by the Light, the cymbal-tapping galloping precisely and punctually alongside.

Introducing Sonos PLAY:1 | Sonos

The Sonos One and Sonos One SL follow closely in Play:1's footsteps, offering a very similar design but with a few refinements. They too have rounded edges, tapered bottoms and grills surrounding them, but the top panels are flat with a capacitive control pad rather than indented with physical buttons. If your Sonos runs old firmware, or if the app struggles to find your Play:1, you just need to plug it into your router using an Ethernet cable to get started. There’s such a cable in the box. Either way, setup takes just a minute or two.

Remember the world before voice assistants?

The third reason is, of course, replication. If you’ve already got plenty of voice-activated speakers and suchlike, the arrival of yet another is needlessly confusing. That goes double if you already have a Sonos One in your home.

Sonos | Wireless Speakers and Home Sound Systems Sonos | Wireless Speakers and Home Sound Systems

Head into the dropdown menu at the top of the screen labelled ‘Room Settings for’ and choose the speakers you’d like to pair In the early days of the Sonos system you had to buy a bridge to connect your speakers to your home Wi-Fi. But now it’s much more like a standard wireless speaker. Read our review of the Sonos Play 1 My Wi-Fi still isn’t working (and I don’t mind getting technical) On top of that Sonos has released the Boost, which is like a turbo-powered Bridge delivering, as Sonos says, “enterprise-grade wireless capabilities”. Most homes will be fine with Wi-Fi or a Bridge, but for difficult environments, the Boost ensures that Sonos will work everywhere.

Two Sonos Ones can be combined to create a stereo pair capable of filling a room with hi-fi-like focus, and for the money that would be quite an accomplished little system. When the One launched, we thought it a shame that you couldn't form a stereo pair consisting of one One and one Play:1 – after all, buying two smart speakers for one room feels like overkill – but at least you can now pair aOneand One SL in stereo. The Sonos Play:1 is the most accessible Sonos speaker. It offers all the convenience of its streaming brothers in a smaller, cheaper form. Head into the drop down menu at the top of the screen labelled ‘Room Settings for’ and choose the speakers you’d like to pair Inside, Sonos has fitted a tweeter and a brand-new 3.5in mid-range driver (each has its own amp), which has more cone movement than a speaker that size usually does. So, while a speaker that size would normally have cone movement of 6mm, this one moves 14mm. More cone movement means more air movement, which means bigger sound. On top of that, the crossover between the tweeter and driver has been customised, so it’s much lower than normal. Sonos says that this means that you lose the directionality of the speaker, so your music should fill the room no matter where you put it.