Sonos Trueplay lets you tune your speakers to suit your home

In terms of the Sonos Play:5, the company says that its new flagship smart speaker has the ability to replicate the sound created by high-end studio speakers. It’s also why the company has included two microphones inside the new Play:5 that don’t even have a objective yet – but could one day conceivably be used to help the speaker tune itself or provide other “smart” functionality. The result looks and sounds fabulous.

You can position Sonos Play:5 in horizontal or vertical mode.

The Sonos Play:5 will retail for £429 and come in a choice of black or white. The existing Play: 5 will be phased out. Even the Sonos badge is punched out to ensure nothing gets in the way of your audio enjoyment.

Inside the sleek exterior are six custom designed drivers, three mid-woofers and three tweeters and all these components combine to pump out noise that is detailed, with impressive highs and lows and ridiculous amounts of volume – all without any distortion.

What use is a great speaker if it’s placed in a bad location?

What immediately stood out was how well the Play:5 copes with varying genres of music. During the Dylan track, there was excellent separation between vocals and accompaniment, with harmonica, guitar and percussion delivered with real presence. The Play:5 changes that, big time. Paired horizontally, they create a larger stereo image for an immersive, room-filling listening experience.

While the Sonos PLAY:5 can’t be called “small”, it remains compact, with clean lines undisturbed by any buttons.

Sonos has revealed its new Play: 5 multi room speaker which, combined with its new Trueplay software, promises “best-in-class sound for any placement, in any room”. The matte case has integrated touch controls on top, for swiping through your songs, pausing with a tap, or changing the (considerable) volume without needing to engage your phone. Thanks to orientation sensors inside the speakers, the inside-facing tweeters are disabled when two speakers are paired horizontally, which prevents the channels from being muddled. It may seem obvious, but it reinforces a message delivered by Fink throughout my time with the device – if Sonos can’t do things well, it simply doesn’t do them at all.

In fact, more than a product, the Play:5 is a statement of intent. “We should do the adapting to you, you shouldn’t have to adapt to us”, said Michael Papish, director of platform strategy at Sonos.

Sonos has completely redesigned the driver layout. Current Sonos customers will be happy to learn that Trueplay isn’t just coming to the latest connected speaker either… You should be able to put it wherever you choose and Sonos has made this more possible with Trueplay. As Fink explained, “At Sonos, we believe that everyone should enjoy music as the artist and the producer intended”. Trueplay is its name. It’s always connected to your home’s wifi network, and as you move in and out of wanting to listen to music, you can easily turn it on and off using your phone, tablet, computer, and yes, even simple hardware controls.

The aim is to tune your speaker to your room using the microphone on an iPhone or iPad. For example, in a particular echoy bathroom, Trueplay might reign in a speaker’s bass to prevent music from sounding overly boomy. A demonstration showed the feature to be really effective. The application measures how the sound from the speakers is reflected off the walls and the different materials around the room. I was able to pick out the sort of subtle details that get lost when I’m listening on the two Play:3s I use in my home office. The gesture controls are intuitive and it should let Sonos build in extra functionality with future software updates. “We are obsessed with improving the home music experience, which must take into account acoustically unfriendly rooms”. That means no matter where you place your speakers in your home they will sound nearly as good as they would if an audio specialist set them up for you. Or maybe its ears. Sonos Play:1 and Play:3 will also gain easy speaker calibrating with Trueplay through an update to the Sonos Controller app coming soon.

Furthermore, not all mobile devices will support Trueplay at launch.

Sonos is also working on Android support for the future, but right now mic calibration is just too varied between individual Android devices for it to work properly right now. This is because of the standard hardware inside, so Sonos knows how each microphone performs. As you’ll expect, this widens the soundstage versus a solo speaker.