Sonos is shaking up its current speaker lineup with two new additions. The Era 100 replaces the long-standing Sonos One speaker, while the Era 300 adds Dolby Atmos support to a new form factor outside of the Sonos Arc and Sonos Beam soundbars.
The Era 300 is a standalone smart speaker that's slightly smaller than the Sonos Five, and much more advanced. It supports voice control with Sonos Voice, and can provide access to Amazon Alexa for broader voice assistant features, a function the Five lacks.
It also works with Apple AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth 5.0, and can access music on over 100 different streaming audio services through the Sonos S2 app, including Amazon Music, Apple Music, SiriusXM, Spotify, Tidal, and YouTube Music.
More interestingly, the Era 300 features six directional drivers to provide spatial audio imaging. Two woofers and two mid-tweeters are positioned to provide stereo imaging, while a forward-facing mid-tweeter generates a center channel and an upward-angled tweeter enables acoustic reflection from the ceiling to produce a height channel.
This gives the speaker similar directional audio capabilities as the Amazon Echo Studio, or a soundbar with height channels like the Sonos Arc for playing Dolby Atmos content. The speaker can also adjust its sound for the geometry of the room using Trueplay in the Sonos S2 app, a feature that's now supported by both Android and iOS devices.
The Era 100 is a smaller speaker, and while it's a more direct replacement to another Sonos product (the Sonos One), it also adds a level of audio imaging to the mix. It doesn't support full spatial audio with height sounds, but with two angled tweeters in addition to a midwoofer, it can produce stereo separation when the One only had mono sound. It also has Sonos Voice and Amazon Alexa voice control, Apple AirPlay 2, Bluetooth 5.0, a slew of streaming services through the Sonos app, and can be automatically tuned with Trueplay.
Both speakers can be added as rear satellites to a Sonos Arc or Beam soundbar, like the One before it. The Era 100 should provide better rear imaging thanks to its angled tweeters, while the Era 300 can add rear height channels in addition to standard rear channels.
Both speakers arrive on March 28; the Era 100 is $249 while the Era 300 is $449.