The Sonos One Gen 2 is a $219 smart speaker from Sonos that can run either the Google Assistant,
Alexa, or Sonos’ own Voice Control Assistant, supports Apple’s AirPlay 2 protocol,
has a premium build quality & design, and most importantly, it sounds incredible.
But in a world with a lot of first-party smart speakers, why would you get a Sonos One over a
speaker made by Amazon, Apple or Google? That's the question I think a lot of people face when
they look at getting a Sonos One. So I'll take you through my answer to that question and
some reservations I have about recommending the Sonos One and first, let's talk about design.
The Sonos One has a solid construction, it feels premium and has some weight to it.
It also has a nice aesthetic and should blend into your home with its simple design.
At the top of it you’ll find the touch controls for the device. These controls
have been solid over the past 6 months and I’m big fan of how Sonos designed them.
There’s a mute mic button, play pause button, volume control buttons and to
skip forward and skip back you actually slide across the top between the volume buttons.
Another great part of it’s design is the Sonos One is designed with high humidity
environments in mind, so you place one in a bathroom to listen to music on.
Now the main benefit of getting a Sonos One in my opinion is its sound. It outperforms every
other smart speaker I have tested at this point, including the Amazon Echo, Apple HomePod Mini
Nest, Audio Nest Hub Max etc, And to see more reviews of smart speakers in general.
Like those speakers, make sure you subscribe to the channel. The Sonos One produces a very crisp,
detailed sound which is pleasant to listen to, and has a surprising amount of bass given its size.
Overall it is definitely the speaker I prefer to listen to
anything on, compared to all of the other smart speakers that I own.
One feature that helps give Sonos speakers incredible sound is Sonos’ TruePlay feature which
is found in the Sonos app. TruePlay is an audio tuning feature that helps your Sonos One balance
its sound output based on the overall size of your room, as well as where you've placed your speaker.
Once you place your speakers, the Sonos App will use the mics on your phone to collect
info about your room as your Sonos One emits a semi-loud sound. But the result is your
speaker or speakers are going to sound way way better if you use Trueplay in my experience.
This feature will also take into account other Sonos speakers and will work with two
sonos speakers paired together as well. Pairing two Sonos speakers in the app is very easy and
gives you an even better sound stage. You can also group together multiple Sonos speakers together in
a room in the app. And because the Sonos One supports Apple’s AirPlay 2 standard,
they can be grouped in with any other AirPlay 2 speakers you have which is a great feature.
Now another thing that really stuck out to me with the Sonos One is its setup experience.
Oftentimes, when you're trying to set up a device like this, the process can
be a bit confusing but the setup experience with the Sonos one, is actually very good.
After I unwrapped the nicely packaged Sonos One, plugged it in, opened the app to begin setup,
I was gobsmacked the device was already showing up in the app, which is what should happen, but
with a lot of smart speakers, its not always this immediate. I also like that the Sonos app is smart
enough to automatically pull the WiFi network information from my phone so all you have to do
is put in the WiFi password. And when the speaker updates its software during setup, the app shows
you cards that walk you through more features of the speaker which is a nice touch while you wait.
Now, one of the main ways to control the Sonos One is by using the Sonos app. One of the cool
things Sonos did with their app is they make it very easy to connect all of your favorite
music streaming services into the Sonos app so you can play them on your Sonos devices and
they have a lot of services to choose from, not just the main ones you’d expect like Spotify,
Apple Music, YouTube Music, Amazon Music, Tidal, Pandora,
Deezer and TuneIn. You can also connect to services like Pocket Casts for podcasts,
Libby to listen to audiobooks you checked out from your library, Audible & many more!
Sonos also has their own radio feature as well, which is free with ads
and has live radio stations like NPR and BBC. They have an HD version for $7.99 a
month which gets you an ad-free experience with unlimited skips and lossless quality,
But for that price, I'm not exactly sure why you would subscribe versus just subscribing
to a music service.Now when you link a service in the Sonos app, you’ll be able to access basically
a mini version of that app, with Spotify’s looking the best to me out of the ones I’ve linked.
The Sonos app is also where you'll find all of the settings for your Sonos system. Like TruePlay,
audio compression, alarms if you put one of these in your bedroom,
media server and music library settings, the ability to put the Google Assistant or Alexa
on the speaker, parental controls, and a transfer system ownership feature, which is a nice touch.
Now after six months, I have to say, I don't really use the Sonos app. Typically,
I find myself casting media from my phone via AirPlay to my Sonos system
or I'll use Siri on a nearby HomePod Mini to play media on my Sonos system,
or I'll use the assistants that you can put on the Sonos speakers to play and control media.
And the Google Assistant, which is the main assistant I’ve used on the
Sonos One over the past 6 months actually works quite well. Unfortunately though,
the Assistants you can run on the Sonos One aren’t quite up to parity with competing speakers
from Google and Amazon. I ran into several issues trying to play music through them.
First, if you use either Alexa or the Google Assistant to play music from Apple Music or
YouTube Music, and you ask either assistant to just play a song, it will play that song but
then it'll play nothing after it, it just stops. Now, if you use either assistant to play Spotify
on the Sonos One, it will correctly play something after the original song you requested.
Also, for the Google Assistant specifically, after you request a song the Sonos One will dim
it’s volume so the Assistant can continue listening for a request,
but often it does this for way too long, you can be easily fooled to thinking the volume
is actually turned way down, so you go to turn it up, and then you’ll get blasted.
Also, the Google Assistant is much slower playing music on the Sonos One versus if you use Alexa
or Sonos's own voice control feature. Sonos’ voice control uses the Sonos One’s onboard mics to
control your music and your Sonos system without using Google or Amazon to process your voice data.
And in my limited testing of this feature, since it came out right at the tail end of
our review period. It's very fast, but it does come with quite a few downsides
that hopefully Sonos will be able to iron out over the coming months. First,
you can’t use the Google Assistant on the Sonos One at the same time as Sonos’ Voice Control,
which is a limitation imposed by Google not Sonos and it's stupid. Now thankfully Amazon doesn’t
impose such a limitation and you can have Alexa on the device at the same time as voice control.
At the time of recording you also can’t play Spotify or YouTube Music through Sonos Voice
Control, Apple Music is currently the only big player that has been implemented, and it also
suffers from an issue where you’ll ask Sonos to play a song and it’ll just play that one song,
but nothing after it. You also can't use Sonos's voice control feature to group in other AirPlay2
speakers like you can with Siri on Apple's HomePod Mini. However, you can use Sona's voice control to
play and pause when playing media on a group of AirPlay speakers that include a Sonos One.
So those are some of the downsides I've encountered with Sonos' voice control feature.
Now let's talk about a few other downsides with the Sonos One. And the first one is
chord management. Sonos doesn’t even include cable clips for their speakers and honestly
given Sonos is a more premium brand, I wish they'd spend a little bit more time with the design of
the speaker in making cord management easier, especially when you're placing these speakers
in areas like a kitchen counter, it's just not as easy as it should be to hide the cord.
Now the biggest downside I’ve found with the Sonos One is its lack of Google Cast support.
There is simply no way to directly cast audio from the Android operating system to your Sonos system,
like you can do on iOS through Airplay which in 2022 is honestly surprising.
The only way to play music from an Android device to a Sonos system is either through the Sonos app
or an app that can control your Sonos speakers like the Spotify app using Spotify Connect.
And this lack of support, it's why I'm so conflicted about recommending Sonos.
Sonos seems too focused on trying to keep people within the Sonos app for playing media on their
Sonos system. and unfortunately, the music service integration within the Sonos app is subpar
compared to just using the app built by the music service. This is especially true when you go into
a service in the Sonos app and select a single song to play, the Sonos app will just play that
single song on a service like Spotify or YouTube Music, but then nothing after it.
There’s no automatically generated play queue that appears like on the music service apps.
Now obviously going with the Sonos system has some upsides as well. You're not locked into
just using a single assistant like you would be if you bought a speaker from Amazon, Apple,
or Google. Sonos has some great accessories you can get with your speaker like the Sonos shelf,
wall mount, you can group other speakers together with your Sonos One like the One SL which doesn’t
have a microphone, the Sonos Arc sound bar or the Play 5 for even better sound in your room.
And a lot of Sonos speakers you can pair with your Sonos One don't have mics built in, which
could be great for those who have some privacy concerns or just don't need a mic built-in
to every speaker they own. And of course by going with Sonos, you’re choosing one of
the best sounding speakers you can get that are so easy to connect together and set up.
So considering all of the upsides and the downsides with the Sonos One, is this the
all-around best smart speaker? I really wish I could say it was because in my opinion it's
the best sounding smart speaker for the money. It just hits this really nice, sweet spot, but
unfortunately, it's just not the all-around best smart speaker for a lot of scenarios.
About the only scenario I can think of where it is the best smart speaker is if you have
a lot of Apple products, you have an iPhone and you want to run Alexa on the Sonos One,
it is the best smart speaker for that particular scenario.
But Sonos’ own voice control right now is too limited with its music service integration,
and the Google Assistant implementation on it isn’t as good as on Google’s own
Nest speakers. And if you’re an Android user, the Sonos One certainly isn’t a slam dunk of
a product because of its lack of cast support and subpar music service integration in the Sonos app.
Right now I think Android users are better off going with speakers
made by Google's Nest brand, which don't sound nearly as good as the Sonus One,
which is a situation that kind of sucks. Now if you have an iPhone or iPad you use to play music
on, and you primarily want to use smart speakers to play music, I think the Sonos One is a great
choice because of it’s great sound and AirPlay 2 support, and if you want to purchase one,
you use the links in this video and in the description below to purchase a Sonos One.
But I still can't get over how big of a miss it is for Sonos to not have cast support in their
products in 2022. And I know some of you are going to point to, well there's been ongoing litigation
between Sonos and Google and frankly, I don't care. I am just looking at the user experience,
and after spending six months with the Sonos One, there is no denying the user experience
is negatively impacted and significantly so, by not having cast support and look,
I know Sonos has broader aspirations for their company and brand and to grow their user base
past affluent people who just have Apple products. If you look at their most recent products,
like the lower cost sound bar to compete with Vizio and the low-cost portable Bluetooth speaker,
it's obvious the company's trying to reach a broader demographic of users and become
a larger brand, which makes the omission of cast support even more glaring.
So those are all of my thoughts about the Sonos One. If you have any further questions about this
product, leave them in the comments below and I'll answer them there. And while you're down there,
hit that thumbs up button if you found this video helpful and liked it, and subscribe to the channel
for more reviews of audio products like this one. If you're looking for what to watch next,
check out some of our other audio product reviews, like a reviews of the Apple AirPods Max,
the Nest Audio, Amazon Echo, and our recent review of the Sony WF-1000XM4s,
terrible name, but great product, great set of earbuds, and you can check those reviews
out by clicking on the playlist to my right. For 6 Months Later, I'm Josh Teder, thanks for watching.