Hi I’m Gidon from thetechnologyman.com. The Ikea Symfonisk table lamp has a WiFi speaker
built in that fully integrates into the multi-room Sonos wireless HiFi system, Airplay 2 for
direct WiFi streaming from Apple devices, and it’s a lamp.
It costs £150 or $179, so more pricey than the bookshelf speaker that I reviewed recently
that is part of the same Symfonisk range. But it’s still competitively priced compared
to other Sonos speakers. I’ll be comparing it against the cheaper
Ikea bookshelf speaker and the more expensive Sonos One and Play:3, to determine if it’s
worth the money. Let’s take a look.
Overview Inside the box you get the glass lampshade,
the base speaker unit, a quality braided power cable, and an Ethernet cable if you want to
go the wired route. There is also a brief graphical guide that basically shows you how
to plug it in, turn it on and suggests you download the Sonos app. And there’s a separate
written user guide that explains the physical controls on the speaker.
The lamp accepts an E14 or E12 in the US, screw in bulb up to 7W. There are no smart
lighting features built in, so you’ll need a smart bulb if that’s something you would
like. You could use some Philips Hue bulbs which require a seperate hub, or some WiFi
bulbs that don’t, like the Teckin ones I reviewed a while back, but you’ll need to
find some with the smaller E14 or E12 fitting or an adapter.
I think the best option if probably Ikea’s own Zigbee-based Tradfri 600 lumen smart bulb
for an extra £15 or $20. You’ll also need the Tradfri Remote control for another £15
or $16 to control its brightness and colour temperature. And if you want to control multiple
bulbs using the Ikea smartphone app or use a smart assistant like Amazon Alexa or Google
Home, you’ll also need Ikea’s hub that plugs into your router - the Tradfri Gateway,
for a further £25 or $35. For one lamp I think the Remote control alone is adequate
and is what I went for. Screw in the bulb and attach the handmade
glass lampshade. Screw in until it you get a positive click - it’s quite stiff and
would be quite difficult if you have smaller hands.
The speaker lamp is available in white or black, and has a typically Ikea, timeless,
homely design. The speaker is covered in an elasticated woven fabric.
The build quality is good, but doesn’t feel as quite as premium as the Sonos One. The
plastic base has some flex when you move it around and apart from the lamp shade, and
the aluminium knob, the whole speaker is made of plastic. But the glass lampshade and fabric
cover make it look elegant, nicely complementing their cheaper bookshelf speaker if you have
one and blending into its surroundings very well.
It’s a little bigger than I was expecting at 216mm by 216mm and 401mm tall and weighs
3.25kg. There are four silicone rubber feet under the base to limit any vibrations.
The three physical buttons on top of the base control the speaker without using the Sonos
app, that I’ll come to shortly. There are no touch controls like on the Sonos One.
The buttons are also used for setup. And there’s a status light.
On the side of the speaker is the knob to turn the light on and off and around the back
is an Ethernet port for a wired connection. I imagine most people will be using this wireless,
but it could be useful if you have any problems with setup.
Initial setup There’s no Bluetooth, so you’ll need to
connect to the speaker via WiFi or wired Ethernet using the Sonos app in the first instance,
which will guide you through the setup process. I covered setup in more detail in my previous
review of Ikea’s Symfonisk bookshelf speaker. The process is identical. I also compared
the advantages and disadvantages of using WiFi over Bluetooth - so please take a look
at that video if you haven’t already. They’ll be a link to it in the on-screen card and
down below. Download the app on iOS or Android and follow
the steps to create an account or sign in if you already have one.
Tap on “Set up speakers” and make sure your speaker is plugged in and the status
LED is flashing a faint green. Tap on continue and the app should find your speaker. Tap
on “Set up this speaker”. For wireless setup we’re configuring here you’ll then
be guided through connecting the speaker to your wireless network. After finding your
wireless network, tap on next to join the speaker. Then tap on Done. You’ll be prompted
to press the Play and Vol+ buttons on the speaker simultaneously with a resulting pleasant
chime and the speaker is setup. Tap on Next to choose a room name or type your own. Tap
on continue to finish off setup. If you have any issues using this method to
setup the speaker you’ll be prompted to use an “Alternative setup” which creates
a temporary SONOS wireless network you can connect to. And failing that you can complete
the initial setup with the included Ethernet cable plugging the speaker directly into your
router. To add the table lamp speaker to an existing
system. Just open the Sonos app, tap More | Add Speakers, then tap Continue a couple
of times, again ensuring the status LED is flashing green and the app will find the speaker.
Tap on “Set up this speaker”, and again press the Play and Vol+ buttons on the speaker
to continue the setup. Confirm whether you want the speaker in a new room or in a home
theatre setup. In this case we’re setting it up as a seperate speaker.
If you’re using iOS, you can fine tune your speaker with Sonos’s Trueplay system, which
tunes it based on its position in the room using the phone’s microphone to measure
how sound reflects around the room. Tap on continue and you’ll be prompted to remove
any case and walk around the room waving your phone around whilst the speaker emits a tone.
In most cases any adjustment is very subtle, so I wouldn’t worry too much if you don’t
have an iPhone to configure this feature. They’ve promised the ability to do this
on Android for a long time, but the huge variations in microphones on Android devices appears
to have made it very complex. Tap on “Add a music service” to choose
from a huge range of supported services including Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music.
If you don’t want to pay for a streaming service and already have a music library on
your computer or a NAS, you can stream this directly through Sonos. It’s easier to configure
from a PC or Mac. Download the Sonos app and choose Manage | Music Library Settings. You
can then select your music library folder on your hard drive or NAS. You’ll need the
computer or NAS to always be on, and ideally connected over a wired ethernet connection
for the best reliability. Like the bookshelf speaker, there’s no built
in microphone for voice commands but it’ll work with Amazon Alexa or Google Home if you
have one of those. Go to More | Voice Services and add your preferred service. Here I’m
adding Amazon Alexa, which will open the Alexa app and prompt you to enable the Sonos skill.
You’ll need to sign in with the Sonos account you created or used earlier and give Alexa
permission to control your Sonos. Tap done, and then let Alexa discover your Sonos devices.
If you’re not using Amazon Music, I’d recommend setting your default Music service
in the Alexa app under Settings | Music | Default Services.
Now you can say “Alexa, play “Liability” by Tape Machines in the Study”.
If you want Siri control, you can add the speaker via the Apple Home app. Tap on add
accessory, “I don’t have a code or cannot scan”, then tap on the Ikea speaker. Then
you can activate Siri and say “Play “Out of here” by Sugar Blizz in the Study”.
With no Bluetooth support if you want sound from a YouTube video say, to come through
the speaker you’ll have to find a third party way of doing this like SonosTube. But
this is something that is incredibly simple with Bluetooth.
If you’re using Apple devices this speaker does support Airplay 2 which means you can
stream audio directly over WiFi from most apps, but as with the bookshelf speaker, Android
users are left wanting.
If you’re using a standard light bulb the knob on the side of the speaker just turns
the lamp on and off. This doesn’t control the speaker which will remain in standby mode
when you’re not playing music, which I measured consumes around 2.5W. You can’t turn the
speaker off completely off without unplugging it.
If you’re using the setup I have here, with the Tradfiri smart bulb and remote control,
first turn on the lamp. The bulb will come on at its default 100% brightness and 2700K
colour temperature. You’ll then need to remove the battery cover
on the remote and insert the supplied CR2032 Lithium battery. If you bought the bulb and
remote separately they won’t be paired, so after inserting the battery press the pairing
button for at least 10 seconds. The red LED on the front of the remote will light up and
the light bulb will dim and flash to indicate pairing is successful.
You can now leave the lamp on and control it with the remote, which has a magnetic base
for permanent installation. The power button in the middle turns the light on and off,
the left and right buttons change the colour temperature from the default 2700K warm white
to an even warmer 2200K warm glow or a cooler 4000K cool white. And the brightness buttons
will dim the light up and down either continuously if you hold the buttons down or in steps with
short presses. You can press and hold the power button for
3 seconds to return the bulb to its defaults. The bulb has a colour rendering index or CRI
of greater than 90 for more accurate colours and through the glass lampshade the light
really does have a very pleasing quality to it, something that can’t always be said
of LED lighting. The Sonos app
We’ve already used the Sonos app to setup the speaker, but its main purpose is a fully
fledged music player and controller. You can download the app on iOS, Android, PC and Mac.
I covered the Sonos app in the bookshelf speaker review, but I’ll discuss it again here for
completeness. You can always skip to the next section using the timestamps below.
If you have multiple music services it can search across all of them at once. You can
search by artist, song or album. You’ll need to ensure you tap the appropriate search
category if no results come up. You can also browse radio stations. Enter
your location and you’ll see your local radio stations, but you can listen to almost
any international station there is. Another feature I use a lot is playing back
podcasts. The easiest method is to search under Podcasts and Shows, and tap on Recent
episodes. For quick access in the future to your favourites,
tap on the three dots to “Add to My Sonos” for any content. This will then be available
from the “My Sonos” tab along the bottom of the app.
All your settings and favourites are accessible through any connected app on that Sonos network.
So I can go across to my iPhone and continue control from there.
You can of course play, pause, adjust volume and skip tracks through the app. Or you can
use the speaker’s controls. A single press of the play button starts and stops your music,
a double press skips forward a track and a triple press skips back. If you have other
Sonos speakers, holding down the Play button will add music playing in another room to
this speaker, automatically creating a group. Any tracks you play are added to a queue.
When you choose to play more music you either replace the current queue or add music to
the end of the queue, by tapping on the three dots. You can view your current queue by tapping
the top right Show Queue icon from the room view on a smartphone. On a tablet you can
choose to Show Queue with the current track still displaying. You can also save the queue
as a Sonos playlist. Since this speaker might be used on your bedside
table, there’s an alarm feature that might come in handy. Tap More | Alarms and choose
what you want to wake up to, from the Sonos Chime to a radio station to a track or playlist
of your choice. If you tap Settings under More, and choose
Room Settings, you can change the room name, configure Trueplay if you’re on iOS, and
adjust EQ settings. This is fairly basic, but enough for most of us. There’s also
a Loudness setting. I’ll come back to EQ settings when I talk about sound quality.
If you have a second Ikea table lamp speaker you can create a stereo pair here too. Any
two identical speakers from the Sonos range can be paired together apart from their Sub,
Playbar and Playbase. You can also use two of these speakers as rear speakers for a wireless
home theatre system, if your TV’s connected to a Sonos soundbar namely the Playbar or
Playbase. Go to Room Settings for the soundbar to configure.
If you already have other Sonos products or purchase more in the future, the true wonder
of a multi-room system like this comes into play. Sonos supports up to 30 speakers. Under
Rooms, you can group speakers together. You can individually select what speakers you
want to group together, or you can tap Everywhere to play your music through all the speakers
at the same time. You can individually control the volume or mute a grouped speaker by tapping
on the volume control. All the speakers play in perfect sync.
If you do have the Playbar or Playbase for your TV, you can group it with the Ikea speaker
and continue listening to Breakfast news for example as you get ready for work.
You could also group the Ikea speaker, which supports Airplay 2 with an older Sonos speaker
that doesn’t support Airplay like say the Play:3. There’s a setting in Settings | AirPlay
to keep non-AirPlay speakers grouped with speakers that are playing AirPlay. You could
even mute the Ikea speaker to only stream to the non-AirPlay speaker. Tap the Airplay
icon when playing back any media from you Apple phone, tablet or Mac to stream audio
to the Ikea speaker and speakers it’s grouped with.
Sound quality & performance The speaker is based around the Sonos One
and older Play:1 and sounds very similar. Which is to say it sounds very good. Vocals
are excellent but it also handles bass well for its size. There is some distortion at
higher volumes on bassy tracks particularly. But it’s a loud speaker which could easily
fill a medium sized room, so you’ll mostly be listening to it below its full volume,
well within its limits. The Ikea bookshelf speaker I reviewed previously
sounded good, this sounds even better. It has a richer sound and doesn’t suffer from
the vibrations I got from the less expensive speaker with some more bass heavy tracks.
But then it is £50 or $80 more expensive - the bookshelf speaker is still excellent
value for money. I also compared it to the Sonos One and the
Sonos Play:3. You can listen to a sound comparison shortly. The Sonos One costs £199 or $199
and sounds very similar, just perhaps slightly crisper to my ear. It also has built in Amazon
Alexa and Google Home support. The now discontinued stereo Play:3 does sound noticeably better,
but overall I very much doubt you’d be disappointed with the sound from this speaker. Creating
a stereo pair with another identical speaker would sound even better.
You can adjust EQ settings but I found the default settings with Loudness on sounded
well balanced for most of the music I listened to.
Although it looks like a 360 degree speaker, the sound is quite directional so you’ll
need to have the speakers’ controls facing you.
Setup on WiFi, as long as the speaker was in range of my router, I experienced no issues
with dropouts. Since you’re only controlling the speaker from your phone or tablet, even
if that loses signal to your WiFi, the music will keep playing.
I’ve recorded the following sound test with binaural microphones that capture stereo sound,
to try and provide the closest representation of what I’m hearing. Please listen with
headphones for the best experience. To hear a sound test with another music track, take
a look at my bookshelf speaker review. Use the timestamps below to skip ahead to the
conclusions if
you like. Conclusions
The Ikea Smyfonisk table lamp speaker sounds very good and its space saving design wouldn’t
look out of place in most homes. It fully integrates into the Sonos WiFi system with
arguably one of the best music controller apps available and an easy upgrade path to
multi-room audio. The price is very tempting, especially when you consider it’s also a
stylish lamp. It’d make a very nice addition to an existing Sonos system too.
It could also be an alternative to Apple’s HomePod at close to half the price, but does
lack integrated Siri support. It looks pretty similar too, just with a lampshade on top.
It’s disappointing it has no smart features built in for controlling music or the lamp.
It would have at least made sense to enable it to act as a hub for Ikea’s own smart
light bulbs. As it is, to make it a completely smart speaker lamp, assuming you had nothing
already, you’d need to spend at least £25 or $30 on something like an Echo Dot in one
of Amazon’s frequent sales, then a further £40 or $50 on an Ikea Tradfri bulb and gateway.
And like the bookshelf speaker there’s no Bluetooth. If you’re on Android you can’t
use Airplay, so you’re forced to use the Sonos app in most cases which can be quite
limiting. If you’re not interested in the lamp, the
Symfonisk bookshelf speaker still sounds very good and is significantly cheaper. It also
has some real space saving installation options. And the Sonos One for £50 or only $20 more
sounds a fraction better to me and already has Amazon Alexa and Google Home built in.
And you can still get the Sonos Play:1 for £10 or $40 less on Amazon at the moment which
will sound very similar but doesn’t have AirPlay 2 support.
The Ikea Symfonisk table lamp is still one of the best sounding speakers I’ve listened
to at this price. Together with full Sonos integration, AirPlay 2 support and doubling
up as a table lamp I’d have no hesitation recommending it.
I’d love to hear your thoughts. What do you think of the design? How do you think
it sounds compared to the Symfonisk Bookshelf speaker and the Sonos One? Let me know down
below. Don’t forget to check out my review of the Ikea Bookshelf speaker if you haven’t
already. And as always, if you have any questions,
please ask - I read every comment and will do my best to respond.
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