Why You Can Trust CNET Sonos Play:1 review: Gorgeous Sonos Play:1 hits the sweet spot
The Sonos Play:1 finally brings the company's wireless audio magic to the masses in a fantastically designed compact speaker that's just $199.
Sonos has long been the best wireless audio solution, but recommending its pricey products always ended with a similar caveat: "if you can afford it."
Sonos Play:1
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
The new Play:1 ($199/AU$299) finally shakes that final reservation, making the Sonos experience available at the lowest price yet. It's a beautiful little bookshelf speaker that feels like it should cost more than it does, with a refined design that looks great anywhere you put it. No major compromises have been made in the name of affordability. You get the full Sonos experience, with rock-solid stability and a long list of supported services, including Spotify, Pandora, Rdio, Amazon Cloud Player, and SiriusXM. While its sound quality may not satisfy the pickiest audiophiles, it's awfully good for the size, especially for the secondary listening locations (bedroom, kitchen, office) the Play:1 fits best in.
It all adds up to make the Play:1 our favorite wireless speaker yet, earning it CNET's Editors' Choice Award in the category. If you've been hesitating about making the jump to Sonos, the Play:1 is a great way to start.
Editors' note: Since this review was published, Sonos has updated its software to allow for direct connection to Wi-Fi wireless networks. It has also updated its control app with an updated design and support for universal search.
Design: A lovely compact speaker
The Play:1 is the best-looking Sonos speaker yet. The Play:3 and Play:5 both have a refined look that tends to blend well into your home decor, but can sometimes feel just a touch bland. The Play:1 has the signature Sonos look, but adds just a little bit of stylish sizzle, especially the black model. (It also comes in white.) It looks at home in a kitchen, bedroom or living room, and it's humidity-resistant, so it works as a bathroom speaker, too.
For a $200 product, the Play:1 is exceptionally well-made. You'll notice its heft as soon as you pull it out of the box and although the cabinet is essentially all plastic, it never feels cheap. Even the power cord on the bottom has a nifty design, tucking into the bottom for a seamless design. Despite the weight of the Play:1, note that there's no battery built-in. The Play:1 is designed to be placed in a room and left there.
There's a slight change to the standard Sonos controls on the top. The familiar volume rocker and status light remain the same, but the Mute button has been replaced with Play/Pause. It's a smart change, since it still immediately quiets the speaker, plus you have the option to resume whatever you were listening to with a single touch, even if it's hours later. (Sonos is also releasing a firmware upgrade to change the functionality of the Mute button to Play/Pause on its existing speakers.)
Behind the nonremovable grille, there's a midrange woofer and a tweeter. That makes it Sono's first "mono" speaker, although you were unlikely to hear much true stereo separation on the other models, especially the Play:3. It's also powered speaker, so there's no need for speaker wire or a separate amp, plus you can sync it with a second Play:1 for true stereo pairing.
Setup: As painless as wireless audio gets
If you've already got a Sonos system, adding the Play:1 is as easy as you'd expect: tell the app you want to add a speaker, press the volume-up and Play buttons when prompted, and you're good to go. It's seriously that easy.
If the Play:1 is your first Sonos, you have have two choices: you can plug in an Ethernet cable to the speaker's backside, or you can connect it to your Wi-Fi network. That second option is a new feature as of a September 2014 software update; previously, at least one Sonos component needed a wired connection. Now, if you've got three or fewer Sonos units on your network, you'll probably be fine on Wi-Fi. If not, you can invest in a Sonos Bridge ($50/AU$75) with a wired connection.
You can connect via Ethernet directly, but you'll probably want to go wireless.
While other systems have tried to make a virtue of running on your existing Wi-Fi network, Sonos' mesh network is really a strength. It may seem redundant to have a wireless network dedicated solely to stream music, but you can't argue with its reliability and low latency.
You'll also have to configure the Sonos to find your personal music collection. If it's stored on your PC, it's as easy as pointing it to the right folder, although note that you'll need to leave your computer running to access that music. You can also have Sonos pull music off a network attached storage (NAS) device, although setup is slightly more difficult -- I needed to input the network address of my NAS. It supports a reasonably large assortment of file formats (including FLAC and Apple Lossless), although high-resolution audio isn't supported.
What can you stream?
Sonos has all of its competitors beat when it comes app support. Many major services are supported, including Spotify, Pandora, Amazon Cloud Player, Rdio, SiriusXM, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, Stitcher, Rhapsody, MOG, Slacker, and Last.fm, plus plenty of neat niche services such as Wolfgang's Vault, Songza, 7Digital, 8tracks, Murfie, batanga, aupeo!, Dar.FM and Hearts of Space. For comparison, Samsung's Shape M7 supports only Amazon Cloud Player, Pandora, TuneIn Radio, and Rhapsody; Bose's SoundTouch only supports Pandora.
But Sonos isn't perfect. There are a few high-profile services it doesn't support, including Google Music All Access, iTunes Radio, iTunes Match, and Xbox Music. The lack of those services highlights the disadvantage of the Sonos' approach compared with simpler wireless audio solutions, like Bluetooth and AirPlay, which can stream from any app that's on your mobile device.
I felt that limitation the most when it came to podcasts. I'm heavy user of the Downcast podcast app for iOS, but with Sonos I couldn't walk into my home, take out my earbuds, and continue listening to a podcast over the Play:1; the same task is easy to do with Bluetooth and AirPlay speakers. (I could switch to Stitcher, which is supported by Sonos, but I prefer the Downcast app and it would take a while to migrate all my settings.)
Along similar lines, although Rdio is supported by Sonos, you have to access it via Sonos' app, which isn't as nice as Rdio's native app. And if you have guests, it's not as easy for them to play music straight from their mobile devices. The bottom line is that as good as Sonos is, you'll still feel some gaps in what you feel like you should be able to do.
The apps: Widely available, but showing their age
The Play:1 is controllable by Sonos' Controller app, which is available on iOS, Android, OS X, and Windows.
The app offers up a lot of flexibility -- letting you stream different music to different room or sync the same songs everywhere -- but it can take some time to get used to. For example, on the Android app, if a track is currently playing and you'd like to listen to something else, you need to press a tiny nondescript button in the upper left right hand corner, select Music, then you can navigate to the music you'd like -- it's not intuitive at all. The experience is more straightforward on iOS, especially the iPad, with its generous screen space making the multipaned layout feel less cramped.
Where the Sonos Controller really feels behind is on the aesthetic side, especially on iOS 7. It's not a bad-looking app, but it feels like a step back when you switch over from the eye candy of Rdio or the default iOS Music app.
Sound quality: A potent small room speaker
If there's one nagging reservation that I and the rest of the CNET crew have always had about Sonos, it's sound quality. No, I'm not talking about its reliance on compressed music sources or the lack of support for high-resolution audio, which I think are often overstated in terms of affecting sound quality. Instead, I'm referring to the quality of the integrated speakers on the Play:3 and Play:5. They're generally good, especially compared with other wireless audio products, but they have a mellow sound that can sometimes be hard to get excited about.
I started listening to the Play:1 in CNET's standard listening room -- a medium-sized space with high ceilings. Cranking the Play:1 all the way up was enough to get reasonably loud, but that's it. That shouldn't be a surprise for a speaker this big, but don't count on filling a large room with just a single Play:1. The nice thing is that even with the volume maxed out, the Play:1 refuses to distort, so you never have to worry about the sound getting harsh.
The Play:1 has a similar sonic signature to Sonos' other speakers. It produces a good amount of bass for its size (which still isn't much) and it's relatively rich-sounding, but at other times there can be a dullness and lack of clarity to the sound. Chris Cohen's "Overgrown" album is a perfect match for the Play:1, with its laid-back sound meshing well with the speaker's strengths. And "Stonecutters" by Flying Lotus sounded particularly big, showing that it can groove even with a bass heavy-track.
But switching to Neil Young's "Alabama" was a little disappointing, sounding unusually muffled and dull. Other tracks occasionally brought out the same quality, but to be fair, every small speaker has troublesome tracks. I ended up adjusting the EQ to raise the treble a bit and that helped bring a little more life to the speaker. The Play:1 is also particularly sensitive to placement; out in the open, it can sound a bit thin, but it fills out nicely in a corner.
Next up, I added a second Play:1 speaker to the mix, syncing them as a left/right stereo pair. This made the system a lot more enjoyable to listen to, bringing out a lot more detail and space in rockers from Queens of the Stone Age's latest, "Like Clockwork," although Neil Young's "Alabama" still sounded subdued. But the true stereo separation makes a huge difference, especially compared with integrated systems like the Play:3 and Play:5; I'd certainly rather pay an extra cash for two Play:1s ($400/AU$600) vs. a single Play:3 ($300/AU$449).
But in a lot of ways, the Play:1 isn't designed for the kind of dedicated listening sessions I started out with. For my next round of tests, I used the Play:1 around my home for casual listening while reading, eating, and writing this review. The Play:1 really came to life in smaller rooms, sounding surprisingly full for a mono speaker. And the ability to quickly pause and resume a Pandora station from a single button made me a lot more likely to toss on some tunes on a whim.
To wrap things up, I auditioned the Play:1 next to my old Squeezebox Radio (discontinued, but reborn at the Logitech UE Boom). Here, the Play:1 really shined, with the Squeezebox Radio sounding particularly thin, especially on cuts from Curtis Mayfield's "Roots." A few times I preferred the brighter sound of the Squeezebox Radio, but the Play:1's fuller and louder sound was the clear winner. Maybe I was expecting too much from the little guy at first.
Ultimately, I think most people will be happy with the Play:1's sound, especially for the size. (For all our reservations about Sonos' sound quality, the vast, vast majority of customers think they sound great.) If you're picky about sound quality, your best bet with Sonos is still to use your own speakers with a Connect or Connect:Amp, but that's an expensive, more complicated option that most buyers won't want to deal with.
What are the alternatives?
These days, the alternative to Sonos isn't so much a competing wireless audio system, but rather increasingly popular Bluetooth speakers. For example, the JBL Charge is just $150, has a built-in 12-hour battery, and can play any music service on your mobile device, using the native interface of your apps.
JBL Charge
On the other hand, the Charge's sound quality isn't in the same ballpark as the Play:1 and Bluetooth audio often suffers from dropouts, especially if you're over 10 feet away from the speaker. And better-sounding Bluetooth speakers, like the Bose SoundLink Bluetooth Mobile Speaker II ($300), surprisingly cost more the Play:1, despite feeling like cheaper products. Still, if you value the portability and are less picky about sound quality and streaming reliability, you may better off with a Bluetooth speaker -- check out our favorite Bluetooth speakers for more options.
Samsung Shape M7
There's also been an unexpected revival of interest in the wireless audio category as of late, with Samsung and Bose rolling out new Sonos competitors. We've yet to test the new systems (although we're planning to soon), but neither system seems like a serious challenger at this point. Sonos supports many more services, offers a wide range of hardware, and has a proven track record of supporting its products, which is especially important for wireless audio systems.
Conclusion: You might get hooked on Sonos
When I met with the Sonos team to discuss the Play:1, one of the first things they asked me was whether they'd won me as a customer yet. The answer was no. Despite all the praise CNET has heaped on the Sonos ecosystem, the pricing was always too steep for me, and while I liked the Play:3 and Play:5 speakers, I didn't love them enough to splurge.
With the Play:1, I'm closer than I've ever been before, especially with the current promotion that includes a free Sonos Bridge. And that's exactly what I suspect the Play:1 was designed to do -- create a lot of first-time Sonos buyers.
Executive Editor David Carnoy contributed to this review