Sonos reveals new flagship Play:5 Smart Speaker and Trueplay Tuning software

With no Trueplay and a tiny Play:1 speaker (Sonos’s coffee can-sized, entry-level unit) tucked behind a nightstand in a corner of the room, the Sonos representatives turned on Daft Punk, and it sounded as if I were outside a grimy nightclub around 3 a.m. With Trueplay on, though, it sounded as if we had kitted out the room with surround sound in about a minute.

“But won’t a logo on the front mess with the acoustics?’ we hear you cry – Sonos has thought about this and made it ‘acoustically transparent” thanks to 800 holes lasered into the material.

The sound is so good, you may not feel like you need another to pair up for stereo – which is a shame, as this functionality is decent. Your speakers should sound great, wherever you choose to put them. No Bluetooth pairing, no wires, just music. For one, multi-room playback is hard to demo in busy Apple Stores, but Best Buy and Target do okay with selling Sonos speakers, right?

The new Play:5 and Trueplay will ship later this year.

On a recent Sonos-sponsored trip to the company’s headquarters, executives described how they agonized over the new design. Apparently, the only off-the-shelf parts are the screws.

It doesn’t take long to do, it’s very easy to do and if it is going to make an existing speaker better, then why not? Sonos says that when you pair them vertically they deliver “top-of-the-line stereo sound with a focused and intense sweet spot”. Yes, I’m not just an audio gadget blogger, I’m a customer, too. At the touch of a button. The Play:5 can act as a rear speaker when paired with a Sonos Playbar and Sonos Sub. I went so far as to peek under the bed and check the closet to make sure I wasn’t being tricked-or even Punk’d. Sensors inside the cabinet know which orientation the speaker is in, so that swiping up always raises the volume. That changes the character of the audio you’re hearing, so even if you’re listening to an unbelievable speaker, the placement could still make the sound suck. If you don’t like the results, you can make further EQ adjustments manually. The new Trueplay tuning feature lets you use the microphone on an iGadget to calibrate the sound for the acoustics of your room, just like you can optimise many home theatre surround sound systems using the supplied microphone.

Want to put a speaker in a bookshelf or under a chair without compromising sound quality? But if your speaker is nearer the corner of the room, or obstructed by something then the software will work wonders.

Using the processor on the device and a DSP in the speaker, Trueplay will determine the location of the speaker within the room, analyze the room’s acoustic properties, and completely transform the speaker’s performance.

With the Trueplay system, you slowly walk around the room for 45 seconds waving the iPad or iPhone up and down while it plays a series of sounds that Sonos sound engineers jokingly call a soggy Light Sabre. That’s a high compliment, and something I’ve not been able to say about any Sonos before.

The Sonos Play:5 is the wireless speaker that started it all. Control every room in your home with one easy-to-use app that brings together your favorite music services such as Pandora, Spotify, TIDAL, Google Play Music, and Groove. The speaker has inactive microphones built in, which theoretically could be used for configuration, or other unknown-nefarious? With twelve months of development time invested in Trueplay before launch, the company putting its money where its mouth is. But the point here, is that Sonos is staying a step ahead of the top audio brands when it actually began way, way behind. We are passionate about the music experience and we know many creators – from the deepest music services to the newest mash-up innovators – are as well… Like its predecessor, it’ll be available in a choice of black or white and while the speaker looks great from afar, the closer you get to it, the more you’ll be impressed by the innovation under the hood. It was fun! I saw the company’s design process, drank local wine and beer, and talked to executives from Sonos about the company’s design process.