Our first Sonos item was a Sonos One, which is the AirPlay 2, Alexa enabled speaker from Sonos.

… You know what though? I need to address something first. I like the Sonos stuff, but man, they could not have named and organized their lineup in a more baffling way. Technically, our first Sonos item was a Play:1, which is an older standalone speaker in the lineup. From what I could tell, it sounds really similar to the One, but it doesn’t have that same Alexa/AirPlay 2 compatibility, which I think is important to these speakers for anyone in the Apple ecosystem like me. The Sonos app, when it comes to playback, is really barebones and just not that nice to use, and if you want to play a podcast from Overcast or a video from YouTube from an iPhone, you can only do it via AirPlay 2. Knowing this, I had asked the person who picked it up for us to pick up a “Sonos One”, but to a person who isn’t familiar with the Sonos gear, Play:1 sounds about right?

Our kitchen One.

So, back to the store the Play:1 went, and we got the One instead, and it’s a really nice addition to our kitchen area. I’m a podcast addict, and playing Overcast through AirPlay 2 works seamlessly and fills the room with sound. When you do the initial setup, it does what Sonos calls a TruePlay tuning, where you walk around for a minute, waving your phone around while it listens to the speaker play noises that scare your dogs, and I don’t know how much of a difference it makes, but it sounds great! If you put on something like Loyalty by Kendrick Lamar, the ultra-low bass line really comes out amazing, and his higher-pitched vocal comes out super cleanly. If you put on Sharpness by Jamie Woon, his vocal works through the R&B beat like he’s next to you. These are two songs that really stood out to me when they first came on.

Connectivity-wise, pretty well all Sonos equipment can connect either through Wi-Fi or an Ethernet connection, and they even include a cable in the box. Our One has a line of sight to our UniFi AP Pro, so I definitely didn’t feel like running Ethernet to our kitchen area, and it seems to work really well that way. The setup is all done in the Sonos app, which doesn’t have you do anything goofy like going to your Wi-Fi settings connect to an ad-hoc Wi-Fi network like Amazon’s Echo speakers do. It just seems to work really simply out of the box.

As for Alexa, well, I have both the One and an Echo Dot, and they perform as a glorified egg timer and alarm clock, respectively, and they do a pretty good job at it. In the consumer tech world right now there does to be a bit of an obsession with Alexa-enabled gear, but I’ve personally never found anything that really works for my daily flow, aside from asking for measurement conversions and setting timers. Maybe that’s okay! I now really want one of these, so perhaps I’m part of the problem.

So, the One. Would recommend. Blows the pants off our old Bluetooth speaker we used to use with the sound and the functionality. It’s not particularly cheap (although better value than an Apple HomePod, and I’m normally a total Apple stan), but there is definitely an element of getting what you pay for.