That and Sony 360 Reality Audio are both object-based audio formats that promise immersive audio experiences, even with a single speaker cabinet or with certain high-end headphones, including models from Apple and Sony. Sony’s own series of spatial audio speakers, including the underwhelming-to at least one TechHive reviewer’s ears,- SRS-RA5000, came out in late 2020.ĭolby has likewise adapted its Dolby Atmos audio format, originally known for movie soundtracks, to music listening. Sonos product manager Ryan Moore says the company started working on its first spatial audio speaker “two and a half or three years ago.” That would place its origins about a year after Sony introduced its 360 Reality Spatial Audio format at CES in 2019, and six months after Amazon brought the first spatial audio speaker-the Echo Studio-to the consumer market. The new speakers are manufactured using “post-consumer” recycled materials and are assembled with screws instead of glue, to make them more likely to be repaired then tossed if something ever goes wrong. The Era series is more eco-friendly, promising to consume less power-just 2 watts-while on standby. Sonos says its speakers have improved touch controls and new USB-C connectivity, with two optional adapters: One has a 3.5mm analog line-level input and the other has both a 3.5mm jack and an ethernet port, so “people can get whatever content they want into their systems,” said Ryan Moore, Sonos product manager for the plug-in category. iOS users can either do the same or continue to use their mobile devices for room tuning. With the Era series, Android aficionados using Trueplay will rely on the far-field microphone arrays built into the speakers themselves.

In the past, this technology relied on the microphones in an iOS device to evaluate the acoustics of a listener’s room as such, Trueplay was useless to Android users.

On the other hand, Sonos has expanded its Trueplay room-equalization technology to support Android devices for the first time. Buyers will be able to deploy two of the new Sonos Era speakers (the Era 300 are shown here on stands) as stereo pairs or as pairs of surround speakers.

Dolby demo disc 2020