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Ane of the things about the Bluetooth speaker revolution is that it's like shooting fish in a barrel to alloy self-independent, single devices into a room. That's swell for decor freaks, but it also means you may not be getting the best sound possible out of the unit. While traditional audiophiles will however insist on a pair of stereo speakers on proper stands abroad from the walls — or floorstanding speakers, which still be — that'southward not practical or desirable for many music listeners. Sonos, the venerable multi-room audio visitor, has just unveiled the redesigned, flagship Play:five, which unlike most speakers will configure its sound profile to match the room information technology'due south in automatically. The best function: You'll exist able to exercise that with any existing Sonos speaker as well.

Sonos Play:5

The new Play:5'southward dipole array of drivers disperses sound throughout the room, but that's not all that'south going on hither. It also has an accelerometer to assist it determine where and how it's positioned and will adjust its sound accordingly via DSP. And thank you to new software, the Play:5 and existing Sonos speakers can now account for the size, layout, and even furnishings of a room — for example, a room with hardwood floors and plenty of windows will sound quite dissimilar than i with thick pile carpet and a couple of material sofas.

How does that work? Many years ago, I had an AudioControl equalizer, which came with a pink-noise generator and a small microphone that would "listen" to the sound of the speakers in the room and let you EQ the room to compensate. Sonos's method is to use your telephone to basically to do that in contrary — it listens to the audio of the room, compares the sound of what it'southward hearing to what it's playing out and seeing the departure, and then adjusts itself on its own. Sonos calls this Trueplay, and it works by using an iPhone as the mic; you wander around the room with the telephone, and information technology will play some sounds and run some tests. (For now, this adequacy is iOS-only.)

Otherwise, the Play:five works within Sonos'due south multi-room ecosystem, which supports over 60 music services every bit well equally locally stored music on up to 16 PCs, Macs, or NAS devices. It's also a straight up Bluetooth speaker for connecting to your phone, tablet, or estimator. This affair is larger than most Bluetooth speakers, though; the Play:5 measures 8 by 14.3 by 6.1 inches (HWD) and weighs a hefty 14 pounds, putting it on par with something similar a Bower & Wilkins T7 or a Marshall Stanmore.

There are touch controls on the speaker itself, forth with six internal antennas to stabilize wireless functioning. It contains six grade-D amplifiers driving three woofers and three tweeters, and you can adjust bass, treble, residual, and loudness controls via the Sonos Controller app. It also contains 2 non-functional mics that could be used for additional customization down the line in addition to the new Sonos app.

Sonos says the Play:v is coming later this yr, will be available in either white matte or black matte with a graphite grille, and will cost $499 a pop. You tin can also buy a second Play:5 and the two units will configure themselves as a stereo pair, and interestingly, you can add together a pair of Play:5 speakers to a Sonos Playbar and subwoofer for a habitation theater setup. And of course, you can buy multiple speakers for different rooms in your house like whatever proper Sonos organisation.

Sonos Play:5

Audiophiles have had a bit of a second coming lately, thank you to a renewed focus on improved audio quality, defeating the loudness wars with elementary fixes like Apple'southward Sound Cheque and Spotify's automatic level matching, college-quality streaming services like Tidal, and (admittedly unnecessary) attempts to market place 24-chip/192kHz tracks to consumers. It'll be interesting to see how this speaker sounds when information technology comes out. Sonos speakers generally sound quite expert because their form factors, although they rely on a big amount of digital indicate processing that doesn't sound exactly natural, as I plant in a number of tests back when I was writing for our sister site PCMag. I'm looking forrad to hearing this latest Play:5 model.