Post by Porscheguy on Jul 25, 2011 23:01:48 GMT -5
Review: Sonos Play:3
Is this all-in-one streamer the music system of the future?
BY BRENT BUTTERWORTHPOSTED JULY 25, 2011
The new Sonos Play:3 is small enough to integrate into most any room.
Sonos' Play:3 packs all of the streaming functionality of the company's previous offerings into a compact (and impressive sounding) package.
ENLARGE
The minimal back panel of the Sonos Play:3. With the focus on streaming, connectivity is limited to a single Ethernet port.
ENLARGE
SONOS PLAY:3
(2) 3” midrange drivers
3/4" tweeter
(3) Class-D digital amplifiers
Passive rear-firing bass radiator
EQ correction and stereo-mono switching done automatically based on orientation of unit.
Ethernet port
Wireless control via Android and iOS apps or dedicated Sonos hardware controller
5.2 x 10.5 x 6.3 in. / 5.7 lb.
$299 sonos.com
The CD is dying. iPod sales are declining. More and more, people are getting their music from … well, everywhere: MP3s stored on a hard drive, Internet radio and music services like MOG, Pandora and the recently hyped Spotify. Problem is, we tend to get this stuff through our computers and smartphones, and too often the music never gets from those devices to a decent sound system.
Sonos aims to solve this problem with the new Play:3, a compact music system that packs all the technology Sonos has developed since its 2003 debut into a device similar in size and form factor to the ultrapopular Bose Wave Music System. You won’t find any inputs or outputs on the Play:3, except for an Ethernet jack on the back. It pulls music either from the hard drives and computers connected to your home network or from its own Internet connection, which can be wired or wireless. You control it through a free app running on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Droid, or through the $349 Sonos Control.
The Play:3 sells for $299, just under what many consider the “magic price point” of $300 required for a consumer electronics product to have a chance at going mainstream. For a $299 device, it’s packed with technology, including an internal 366 MHz computer, three digital amplifiers, two 3-inch midrange drivers, a ¾-inch tweeter and a 3 x 4½-inch passive radiator for bass reinforcement.
The basic design of the Play:3 emerged from Sonos’ speaker engineering team, which includes ex-Velodyne and Boston Acoustics guys. From there, they tweaked the sound by using some of the digital audio processing power of the onboard computer. One really cool engineering twist I have to share: They used the internal circuit board as a brace to damp enclosure vibration.
But what’s really cool about Play:3 is its versatility. Place it horizontally and the midranges run in stereo. Place it vertically and the midranges automatically switch to mono—because you wouldn’t want the stereo soundstage running up and down, right?—and a slightly different EQ curve kicks in. Add a second Play:3, make one little change in the app on your smartphone, and you can run the two in stereo, with one Play:3 as the left speaker and the other as the right.
You can set up a whole houseful of Play:3s (in conjunction with other Sonos products like the larger Play:5, if you wish) just by plopping them down and pushing two buttons to make them connect to the Sonos network. You can give each unit whatever name you want, like Kitchen, Living Room, etc., and run them all off a single smartphone or tablet.
Setup? What setup?
I’ve used a ton of networked audio products, but the Play:3 is the most user-friendly I’ve encountered. Sonos gear streams audio on its own wireless network, not your WiFi network, although you do have to use your WiFi network for your phone or tablet to communicate with the Sonos products. One Sonos product has to have a wired connection into your network router; if that’s not convenient, you’ll have to add the $49 Bridge. The rest can run wireless.
The Bridge comes with a software CD, which has a simple setup routine. Basically, you tell it you’re going to add a Sonos device, then you go hit two buttons on the device and you’re done. I set up a two-zone system in about 10 minutes, and that’s without ever having set up a Sonos system before.
Once I downloaded the Sonos app to my Motorola Droid Pro smartphone, I was ready to play.
A zillion tunes at your fingertips
Here’s an obligatory, boring list of all the services currently available on Sonos: AUPEO, iheartradio, Last.fm, MOG, Napster, Pandora, Rdio, Rhapsody, SiriusXM Internet Radio, Spotify, Stitcher SmartRadio, TuneIn Radio and Wolfgang’s Vault. You can also get thousands of Internet radio stations through Sonos’ own menu. And, of course, you can access the digital music files you already have, in a wide range of formats including MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, OggVorbis and WAV.
Rather than try to tell you every last thing the Play:3 can do, I’ll just relate one anecdote: My friend Terry came over for a late-night music-listening and cigar-smoking session. It took him no more time to warm to the Sonos interface than it did for him to clip and light his La Gloria Cubana Artesanos Retro Especiale. After flipping through some of the options on my phone, he settled on the Mellow Jazz channel from JazzRadio.com. A few minutes later, a burnin’ cut featuring guitar and Hammond organ came on.
“Who’s that?” I wondered out loud. “Sounds like Jimmy and Wes,” Terry replied, referring to organist Jimmy Smith and guitarist Wes Montgomery. But I own both albums Jimmy and Wes recorded together, and knew this wasn’t on either. “Sounds like a couple of guys trying to sound like Jimmy and Wes,” I suggested. “And doing a damned good job of it,” Terry said.
So I checked my phone to find that the tune was by a guitarist named Jake Langley. After it was over, I flipped over to Spotify, and in seconds we were digging Langley’s album Doug’s Garage. In less time that it took for our cigars to burn an inch, we’d discovered an artist we’d never heard of and dug deep into his work.
The sound of Sonos
When you’re packing a few small drivers into an already-cramped box measuring 5.2 x 10.6 x 6.3 inches, you have to make compromises. For the most part, I think Sonos’ engineers made the right ones.
I did most of my listening with a single unit placed horizontally, which is the way I think most people will use the Play:3. In this position, the sound is unusually satisfying for a product in this size and price range. It’s a big, room-filling sound, with ample bass and a nice—although obviously modest—sense of ambience. Voices sound pretty smooth, with just a little trace of edginess in the upper midrange and an occasional touch of sibilance. The treble is a little on the mellow side, but it’s definitely there; the dense, high-pitched, tinkly percussion on Holly Cole’s “Train Song” (from Temptation) rang out clearly and even gave me some stereo effect despite the close spacing of the midrange drivers.
The bass has a “high-Q” sound, meaning that it has a noticeable resonant peak, but you probably couldn’t get decent bass out of this little box if it didn’t have that. With most music, this effect just made the bass fatter and a little softer, but still quite grooving and satisfying. The bass tuning bothered me only on one recording, jazz guitarist Julian Lage’s Gladwell, which features an acoustic bass sound that’s already a bit on the thuddy side; through the Play:3, it just sounded even thuddier.
I enjoyed cranking the Play:3 all the way up with rock music; Sonos cleverly designed it so that it doesn’t play loud enough to trash the driver or even to distort to a noticeable degree. The clanging percussion that opens Devo’s “Freedom of Choice” (from the album of the same name) sounded dynamic, powerful and obnoxious, just as it’s supposed to. “Highway Star,” from Deep Purple’s Made In Japan, had all the simplistic-yet-slamming groove and raw power I crave from this tune.
What’s most impressive is what the Play:3 doesn’t have. There’s no ersatz stereo expansion or phony surround effects to mess up the sound. You won’t hear the vibration of a flimsy plastic cabinet as you do with many iPod docks. You won’t hear the nearly absent treble that many small systems suffer because they lack tweeters. And you won’t hear the annoying “cupped hands” coloration (sounding as if singers had their hands cupped around their mouths) that mars the sound of many products in this general category.
The stereo sound feature may be nice if you want to add onto your Play:3 at a later date, but it didn’t thrill me the way a single Play:3 did. I compared it to a little stereo system I threw together comprising Hsu Research HB-1 Mk2 speakers and a Topping TP30 amplifier, a rig that would cost around $450 in total, and fed it sound from the same laptop the Play:3s were drawing from. In this setup, the Play:3s’ tweeters sounded overly crisp, and the Sonos system lacked the punchy bass, airy treble and strong stereo imaging that the Hsus delivered easily.
If you want to do stereo, I’d strongly recommend getting Sonos’ $499 ZonePlayer 120, which works the same way as the Play:3 but incorporates a 55-watt-per-channel stereo amp that you connect to the speakers of your choice. The ZonePlayer 120, combined with a good-quality speaker selling for $200 to $300 per pair, would give you a great-sounding little system for just $100 to $200 more than a pair of Play:3s, with the same zillions-of-tunes-at-your-fingertips power.
I didn’t have a way to get signals from my measurement gear into the Play:3 (that would have required the $349 ZonePlayer 90, which I didn’t have time to get in before deadline), but I was able to feed it pink noise and put it up on my measurement stand. The frequency response chart you see here represents an average of the left-channel response over a ±30° window, spliced to a ground plane bass measurement at 1 meter with the mic placed equidistant from the front drivers and the rear passive radiator.
This is a crude measurement, so I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it and I hope to have the chance to do more thorough tests at a later date. But it does show two things clearly.
First, the frequency response is much smoother than average for a device of this sort. I’ve measured lots of iPod docks having a similar form factor, and their frequency response charts tend to look like random scribble-scrabble drawn in crayon by a 2-year-old amped up on Red Bull. The Play:3’s response, though, shows no major peaks, no major dips, none of the scattershot response typical of small desktop audio devices. In other words, it measures like a real speaker. Even way out at 45° and 60°, it’s pretty smooth except for some narrow dips that occur between 1.4 and 1.7 kHz region. Playing both left and right channels simultaneously results in a dip of -2 to -5 dB between 1.5 kHz and 4.5 kHz.
Second, the Play:3 seems, at least on the basis of these measurements, to have a downward tilt to the treble, resulting in a ±12.2 dB response from 66 Hz to 20 kHz. If my measurements are correct and this is what the device is actually doing, I believe it’s intentional and wise. A speaker with limited bass response tends to sound bright and harsh if it has flat response out to 15 or 20 kHz. By rolling off the treble, the engineers could balance out the Play:3’s lack of bass response to create a more psychoacoustically pleasing sound. As you’ll find if you hear the Play:3, it sure doesn’t sound dull.
I wouldn’t say the Play:3 plays loud enough for a party, but it comes close. On my proprietary, highly unscientific MCMäxxx™ maximum output test (cranking Mötley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart” up as loud as it’ll play without a lot of distortion, then measuring the average output at 1 meter), the Play:3 delivered 92 dB, which is perhaps 1 or 2 dB higher than average for a device of its size and configuration.
Wrap-up
I’ve rambled on an awfully long time about a $300 product, but that’s for two good reasons: The Play:3 does a lot of cool things and I really, really like it. In my opinion, this is the compact music system for the next decade.
Is this all-in-one streamer the music system of the future?
BY BRENT BUTTERWORTHPOSTED JULY 25, 2011
The new Sonos Play:3 is small enough to integrate into most any room.
Sonos' Play:3 packs all of the streaming functionality of the company's previous offerings into a compact (and impressive sounding) package.
ENLARGE
The minimal back panel of the Sonos Play:3. With the focus on streaming, connectivity is limited to a single Ethernet port.
ENLARGE
SONOS PLAY:3
(2) 3” midrange drivers
3/4" tweeter
(3) Class-D digital amplifiers
Passive rear-firing bass radiator
EQ correction and stereo-mono switching done automatically based on orientation of unit.
Ethernet port
Wireless control via Android and iOS apps or dedicated Sonos hardware controller
5.2 x 10.5 x 6.3 in. / 5.7 lb.
$299 sonos.com
The CD is dying. iPod sales are declining. More and more, people are getting their music from … well, everywhere: MP3s stored on a hard drive, Internet radio and music services like MOG, Pandora and the recently hyped Spotify. Problem is, we tend to get this stuff through our computers and smartphones, and too often the music never gets from those devices to a decent sound system.
Sonos aims to solve this problem with the new Play:3, a compact music system that packs all the technology Sonos has developed since its 2003 debut into a device similar in size and form factor to the ultrapopular Bose Wave Music System. You won’t find any inputs or outputs on the Play:3, except for an Ethernet jack on the back. It pulls music either from the hard drives and computers connected to your home network or from its own Internet connection, which can be wired or wireless. You control it through a free app running on your iPhone, iPad, iPod touch or Droid, or through the $349 Sonos Control.
The Play:3 sells for $299, just under what many consider the “magic price point” of $300 required for a consumer electronics product to have a chance at going mainstream. For a $299 device, it’s packed with technology, including an internal 366 MHz computer, three digital amplifiers, two 3-inch midrange drivers, a ¾-inch tweeter and a 3 x 4½-inch passive radiator for bass reinforcement.
The basic design of the Play:3 emerged from Sonos’ speaker engineering team, which includes ex-Velodyne and Boston Acoustics guys. From there, they tweaked the sound by using some of the digital audio processing power of the onboard computer. One really cool engineering twist I have to share: They used the internal circuit board as a brace to damp enclosure vibration.
But what’s really cool about Play:3 is its versatility. Place it horizontally and the midranges run in stereo. Place it vertically and the midranges automatically switch to mono—because you wouldn’t want the stereo soundstage running up and down, right?—and a slightly different EQ curve kicks in. Add a second Play:3, make one little change in the app on your smartphone, and you can run the two in stereo, with one Play:3 as the left speaker and the other as the right.
You can set up a whole houseful of Play:3s (in conjunction with other Sonos products like the larger Play:5, if you wish) just by plopping them down and pushing two buttons to make them connect to the Sonos network. You can give each unit whatever name you want, like Kitchen, Living Room, etc., and run them all off a single smartphone or tablet.
Setup? What setup?
I’ve used a ton of networked audio products, but the Play:3 is the most user-friendly I’ve encountered. Sonos gear streams audio on its own wireless network, not your WiFi network, although you do have to use your WiFi network for your phone or tablet to communicate with the Sonos products. One Sonos product has to have a wired connection into your network router; if that’s not convenient, you’ll have to add the $49 Bridge. The rest can run wireless.
The Bridge comes with a software CD, which has a simple setup routine. Basically, you tell it you’re going to add a Sonos device, then you go hit two buttons on the device and you’re done. I set up a two-zone system in about 10 minutes, and that’s without ever having set up a Sonos system before.
Once I downloaded the Sonos app to my Motorola Droid Pro smartphone, I was ready to play.
A zillion tunes at your fingertips
Here’s an obligatory, boring list of all the services currently available on Sonos: AUPEO, iheartradio, Last.fm, MOG, Napster, Pandora, Rdio, Rhapsody, SiriusXM Internet Radio, Spotify, Stitcher SmartRadio, TuneIn Radio and Wolfgang’s Vault. You can also get thousands of Internet radio stations through Sonos’ own menu. And, of course, you can access the digital music files you already have, in a wide range of formats including MP3, WMA, AAC, FLAC, OggVorbis and WAV.
Rather than try to tell you every last thing the Play:3 can do, I’ll just relate one anecdote: My friend Terry came over for a late-night music-listening and cigar-smoking session. It took him no more time to warm to the Sonos interface than it did for him to clip and light his La Gloria Cubana Artesanos Retro Especiale. After flipping through some of the options on my phone, he settled on the Mellow Jazz channel from JazzRadio.com. A few minutes later, a burnin’ cut featuring guitar and Hammond organ came on.
“Who’s that?” I wondered out loud. “Sounds like Jimmy and Wes,” Terry replied, referring to organist Jimmy Smith and guitarist Wes Montgomery. But I own both albums Jimmy and Wes recorded together, and knew this wasn’t on either. “Sounds like a couple of guys trying to sound like Jimmy and Wes,” I suggested. “And doing a damned good job of it,” Terry said.
So I checked my phone to find that the tune was by a guitarist named Jake Langley. After it was over, I flipped over to Spotify, and in seconds we were digging Langley’s album Doug’s Garage. In less time that it took for our cigars to burn an inch, we’d discovered an artist we’d never heard of and dug deep into his work.
The sound of Sonos
When you’re packing a few small drivers into an already-cramped box measuring 5.2 x 10.6 x 6.3 inches, you have to make compromises. For the most part, I think Sonos’ engineers made the right ones.
I did most of my listening with a single unit placed horizontally, which is the way I think most people will use the Play:3. In this position, the sound is unusually satisfying for a product in this size and price range. It’s a big, room-filling sound, with ample bass and a nice—although obviously modest—sense of ambience. Voices sound pretty smooth, with just a little trace of edginess in the upper midrange and an occasional touch of sibilance. The treble is a little on the mellow side, but it’s definitely there; the dense, high-pitched, tinkly percussion on Holly Cole’s “Train Song” (from Temptation) rang out clearly and even gave me some stereo effect despite the close spacing of the midrange drivers.
The bass has a “high-Q” sound, meaning that it has a noticeable resonant peak, but you probably couldn’t get decent bass out of this little box if it didn’t have that. With most music, this effect just made the bass fatter and a little softer, but still quite grooving and satisfying. The bass tuning bothered me only on one recording, jazz guitarist Julian Lage’s Gladwell, which features an acoustic bass sound that’s already a bit on the thuddy side; through the Play:3, it just sounded even thuddier.
I enjoyed cranking the Play:3 all the way up with rock music; Sonos cleverly designed it so that it doesn’t play loud enough to trash the driver or even to distort to a noticeable degree. The clanging percussion that opens Devo’s “Freedom of Choice” (from the album of the same name) sounded dynamic, powerful and obnoxious, just as it’s supposed to. “Highway Star,” from Deep Purple’s Made In Japan, had all the simplistic-yet-slamming groove and raw power I crave from this tune.
What’s most impressive is what the Play:3 doesn’t have. There’s no ersatz stereo expansion or phony surround effects to mess up the sound. You won’t hear the vibration of a flimsy plastic cabinet as you do with many iPod docks. You won’t hear the nearly absent treble that many small systems suffer because they lack tweeters. And you won’t hear the annoying “cupped hands” coloration (sounding as if singers had their hands cupped around their mouths) that mars the sound of many products in this general category.
The stereo sound feature may be nice if you want to add onto your Play:3 at a later date, but it didn’t thrill me the way a single Play:3 did. I compared it to a little stereo system I threw together comprising Hsu Research HB-1 Mk2 speakers and a Topping TP30 amplifier, a rig that would cost around $450 in total, and fed it sound from the same laptop the Play:3s were drawing from. In this setup, the Play:3s’ tweeters sounded overly crisp, and the Sonos system lacked the punchy bass, airy treble and strong stereo imaging that the Hsus delivered easily.
If you want to do stereo, I’d strongly recommend getting Sonos’ $499 ZonePlayer 120, which works the same way as the Play:3 but incorporates a 55-watt-per-channel stereo amp that you connect to the speakers of your choice. The ZonePlayer 120, combined with a good-quality speaker selling for $200 to $300 per pair, would give you a great-sounding little system for just $100 to $200 more than a pair of Play:3s, with the same zillions-of-tunes-at-your-fingertips power.
I didn’t have a way to get signals from my measurement gear into the Play:3 (that would have required the $349 ZonePlayer 90, which I didn’t have time to get in before deadline), but I was able to feed it pink noise and put it up on my measurement stand. The frequency response chart you see here represents an average of the left-channel response over a ±30° window, spliced to a ground plane bass measurement at 1 meter with the mic placed equidistant from the front drivers and the rear passive radiator.
This is a crude measurement, so I wouldn’t stake my reputation on it and I hope to have the chance to do more thorough tests at a later date. But it does show two things clearly.
First, the frequency response is much smoother than average for a device of this sort. I’ve measured lots of iPod docks having a similar form factor, and their frequency response charts tend to look like random scribble-scrabble drawn in crayon by a 2-year-old amped up on Red Bull. The Play:3’s response, though, shows no major peaks, no major dips, none of the scattershot response typical of small desktop audio devices. In other words, it measures like a real speaker. Even way out at 45° and 60°, it’s pretty smooth except for some narrow dips that occur between 1.4 and 1.7 kHz region. Playing both left and right channels simultaneously results in a dip of -2 to -5 dB between 1.5 kHz and 4.5 kHz.
Second, the Play:3 seems, at least on the basis of these measurements, to have a downward tilt to the treble, resulting in a ±12.2 dB response from 66 Hz to 20 kHz. If my measurements are correct and this is what the device is actually doing, I believe it’s intentional and wise. A speaker with limited bass response tends to sound bright and harsh if it has flat response out to 15 or 20 kHz. By rolling off the treble, the engineers could balance out the Play:3’s lack of bass response to create a more psychoacoustically pleasing sound. As you’ll find if you hear the Play:3, it sure doesn’t sound dull.
I wouldn’t say the Play:3 plays loud enough for a party, but it comes close. On my proprietary, highly unscientific MCMäxxx™ maximum output test (cranking Mötley Crüe’s “Kickstart My Heart” up as loud as it’ll play without a lot of distortion, then measuring the average output at 1 meter), the Play:3 delivered 92 dB, which is perhaps 1 or 2 dB higher than average for a device of its size and configuration.
Wrap-up
I’ve rambled on an awfully long time about a $300 product, but that’s for two good reasons: The Play:3 does a lot of cool things and I really, really like it. In my opinion, this is the compact music system for the next decade.
