Most of us can be forgiven for rolling our eyes when told of a new audio format that will enhance our listening. Admittedly, I’m no audiophile, but I have always struggled to tell what the advantage of whatever new Dolby settings did for my listening.
I was similarly unimpressed when I started hearing and reading about Apple’s new Spatial Audio feature.
I’m not a subscriber to Apple Music because I have been using Spotify from way back and have created custom playlists that mitigate switching to another service. The family option from the gold standard of streaming, if not the same as a source of revenue for musicians themselves, is a handy cost-effective offering for a, well, family,
I also don’t (regularly) subscribe to Apple+. If there is a new season of For All Mankind, The Morning Show, Ted Lasso or my new favourite, Severance, I subscribe for a month, watch the shows and unsubscribe. I use the same methodology for Amazon’s Prime Video. I think of it as a more prudent approach and certainly more cost-effective one, rather than having ongoing subscriptions for streaming services I seldom use.
But last year I was watching CEO Tim Cook launching the latest iPhone and its related announcements on my iPad with Apple’s AirPods and was struck by how wonderful spatial audio sounds.
Duncan Pike, Stuff’s deputy editor, was enthusiastic about how good this audio upgrade was when he was reviewing the Era 300 speaker. I decided to try it out and was just as impressed. There really is an appreciable difference in the sound quality and it really does sound like the audio surrounds you. I tried Duncan’s review playlist in Apple Music on my own Era 300 at home. It works and even us non-audiophiles can hear it.
The other reason I am a fan of the Era 300 is that it has a self-tuning feature. Previous Sonos units required you to walk around the room, slowly waving your phone around, as the app played pinging noises. This allowed the Arc TV soundbar, for instance, to map the room and effectively bounce sound around to give you a more immersive experience.
Sonos has cleverly taken that painful task out of our hands and the speaker does it all by itself. I used to think the built-in microphone in its speakers was only there for voice assistants like Amazon’s Alexa – which I will never use. After the many revelations about how invasive such voice services are, I don’t see any value in the privacy trade-off for a few instances when you ask it to play music or tell you what the weather is going to be.
But Sonos’s microphones are used for mapping the room and adjusting the sound to suit that space. That is worth it, as is the subscription for spatial audio.