First impressions: Sonos Era 100 and 300 – Entering a new Era

Stuff had the chance to check out Sonos’ latest batch of smart speakers, the Era 100 and Era 300, with our own ears during their local launch.

The smaller of the pair, the Era 100, is positioned to replace the Sonos One Gen 2. While the latter was released in 2019 and sold for R5,500, the Era 100 and its slightly larger R6,500 price tag are sort of expected. The Era 300 most closely resembles the Play:3 which was discontinued back in 2018. The pair have considerably different purposes.

Back then, the Play:3 sold for $300, so the Era 300’s price tag of $450 (or R11,000 locally) is a steeper increase. But Sonos reckons the spatial audio smarts of the Era 300 (a first for the brand’s smart speakers) make it worth it.

Is this really a new Era?

At the launch event, hosted at Sonos’ local distributor Planetworld’s offices, Stuff spent some time listening to what the Era speakers could do in a few curated settings. Generally, the improvements in audio quality across the board were immediately noticeable. But we’ll get to the specifics in a bit.

We started with the Era 100. First in the play queue was Billions by Caroline Polachek. Here, the 100’s improved stereo capabilities over the One were put on show thanks to the two separate tweeters able to reproduce left and right channels. The third, larger mid-woofer is slightly bigger than in the One so we found a bit more punch behind the lower-mid and bass frequencies in our next track, Lizzo’s About Damn Time.

The Era 100 is roughly the same size as the One, only a little thinner and taller. You should also keep in mind that it is still a small single unit, so it’s not going to achieve ‘proper’ stereo separation. What it does achieve is clear and detailed audio, at least in the two hand-picked songs played for us.

It’s all around you

Next, we moved to the Era 300’s showroom to experience its spatial audio capabilities first-hand. The 300 employs six individual drivers in its attempt to surround you with audio. There are two woofers on either side together with a tweeter each, a tweeter pointing up for the height channel, and a single tweeter facing forwards.

The layout makes some sense for spatial audio playback but that singular front-facing tweeter can make stereo content from the 300 sound a little dull in comparison. That’s not to say the Era 300 doesn’t perform well. The side-firing woofers and tweeters allow for a decently wide sound stage, especially for a speaker this size, and the vocals in the stereo version of Rosalía’s LA FAMA were surprisingly crisp.

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Where the Era 300 shone was in the Dolby Atmos version of Finneas’ A Concert Six Months from Now. The rich, expansive audio filled up the room without losing definition which held up even as we moved around, looking for any discernable changes to tone and volume. Having said that, we highly doubt this will be true for every Dolby Atmos mix and will depend heavily on an album’s production as well as the room you’ve put it in.

Newer albums, like Finneas’ Optimist, that are produced from the outset with spatial audio in mind are likely to offer more than albums with Atmos added in post-production. We were told Finneas has signed a deal with Sonos and used the Era 300 as his preferred reference speaker which probably helps as well. But we’ll need to spend some more time testing this thoroughly.

Yours, for a small fortune

Finally, we seated ourselves in the third showroom in front of a large format TV, surrounded by a full complement of Atmos-enabled Sonos speakers for a showcase of what was possible if you have more money than sense. The flagship Sonos Arc soundbar and Sonos Sub were positioned in front, with a second Sub and pair of Era 300s on stands behind.

First, we viewed a clip from one of David Attenborough’s many nature documentaries followed by a scene from John Krasinski’s A Quiet Place. These clips offered excellent examples of what a full Dolby Atmos system can do. In the nature doc, we could hear the jungle rain hitting leaves seemingly behind the camera and the fullness it gave to Attenborough’s voice evoked childhood memories of watching his early documentaries when he was closer to 50 years old than 100.

If you haven’t yet seen A Quiet Place, we would strongly recommend you do so with a Dolby Atmos capable system if possible. There’s a good reason it was nominated for an Academy Award and a BAFTA in audio-related categories. It’s an already frightening film but the added immersion from the pair of 300s as surround units made it even more so.

Overall, we left the launch event with a few mixed feelings. The general audio performance improvements from both Eras were appreciated. The Era 100 is poised to be the next go-to smart speaker for people that want a smart speaker and decent audio quality. It’s just a pity Sonos and Google are still fighting so there’s no Google Assistant support. We’ll be spending more time with both units over the coming days, so expect a full review before too long.