Sonos Era 300 review

Best Prices Today: Sonos Era 300

The Era 300 is part of a pair of new Sonos products intended to kick the company off into a new… well, you can guess. 

While the smaller Era 100 is likely to prove more popular thanks to its lower price, the Era 300 is undeniably the more interesting: it packs the same welcome connectivity concessions in the form of Bluetooth and line-in, but also boasts spatial audio support and a radical physical redesign to make the most of it. 

The good news is that the Era 300 sounds great no matter what you throw at it, and Dolby Atmos support ensures that a pair of these is the new requirement for the best possible Sonos surround setup. 

The bad news is that the spatial audio, while impressive, is limited for solo speaker setups, and miserable software support should ensure that you’re unlikely to use it much anyway. The potential here is obvious, but at this price you’d better be sure that you’re also happy with what it delivers right now. 

Design & build 

• Unusual hourglass shape 
• Excellent touch controls 
• Black or white options 

While the Era 300 is naturally positioned as the replacement for the old Play:3, this is no simple upgrade. Sonos started again from scratch, and that’s obvious even from the outside. 

The Era 300 looks downright unusual, with an hourglass figure that tapers in the middle and expands out to the front and back. The fluted shape is to maximise its spatial output, with one of the six speakers angled slightly upwards to blast audio out into the room, rather than simply straight forward. 

I quite like the look, which saves the speaker from blocky blandness, but I’m sure it’ll prove divisive elsewhere. It is at least finished in classic Sonos style, with black or white options and simple detailing including a small logo along the front.  

One downside to the shape is that you’ll have to be specific about the speakers positioning – it can’t be placed in any other orientation, so can’t as easily hang from a wall or otherwise. If you want to make the most of the spatial audio you’ll also have to position it somewhere with space around and above it, so this isn’t a speaker you can tuck into a corner or hide in Ikea storage shelves. 

There are two other design tweaks to the 300, both shared with its smaller Era 100 sibling.  

The first is revamped touch controls, with play/pause and track change buttons easily positioned at the front, a voice control button further to the back, and volume controls smartly situated in a tactile trough you can slide along. The overall effect is that controls are easier to find at a glance or even without looking, and harder to mis-hit. 

The second change is to the speaker’s construction. Glue is out, and screws are in, making the speaker more eco-friendly and, theoretically, much easier to repair. 

Connectivity 

• Bluetooth included 
• Line-in and Ethernet via dongle 
• Wi-Fi 6 

As a Sonos speaker, it should come as no surprise that the Era 300 is intended to be used over Wi-Fi. 

What might come as more of a surprise is that it isn’t your only option. For starters, like the Era 100 this now includes a Bluetooth option, which I’ve been putting to the test with my Bluetooth-enabled record player. 

Having the Bluetooth option at all is a welcome step from Sonos – which has previously limited support to its portable Move and Roam speakers – as is the fact that Bluetooth audio can be shared to the rest of your Sonos setup through the app.  

Less welcome is the fact that I’ve found performance distinctly spotty. My record player is an uninterrupted two feet away from the Era 300, but signal drops happen a few times every album, possibly thanks to Sonos using the older Bluetooth 5.0 spec here. You also won’t be able to stream spatial audio over Bluetooth, but that’s to be expected. 

Sonos has also included aux line-in support, but here there’s an even bigger caveat: this requires a dongle to connect to the speaker’s USB-C port. Sonos sells said dongle for $19/£19/€25, and you probably will have to buy it – existing 3.5mm-to-USB-C connectors tend to be monodirectional, so won’t carry audio from a 3.5mm source. Mine didn’t work, and yours likely won’t either. 

Before you rush to buy one, bear in mind that you might want a whole other dongle. That’s because you now need the $39/£39/€45 combo adapter to add an Ethernet port to the Era 300 (along with line-in as well, so this one does pull double duty). 

You may well be happy to go wireless of course, but if you’ve gotten used to a wired connection on an existing Sonos set-up then it stings to have to pay extra to maintain that performance. 

Sound quality 

• Excellent sound across a range of genres 
• Spatial audio works – when you can find it 
• Great surround potential 

Sound quality for the Era 300 can really be split into stereo or spatial, so let’s keep things simple and start with the former. 

Use the Era 300 to listen to regular stereo recordings and it excels. With six speakers (four tweeters and two woofers) this can cover the spectrum well, and custom waveguides help audio dispersion even on a stereo mix, reducing the importance of the sonic ‘sweet spot’ and helping tunes sound great wherever you are in the room. 

A single Era 300 is easily powerful enough to fill even larger rooms, handling my open-plan living room and kitchen comfortably. Even at higher volumes there’s crisp separation, the bass on Pink Floyd tracks thrumming along while guitar and vocals wane in and out, never muddied along the way. 

It’s really this effect that’s enhanced when you throw on a spatial audio track using Dolby Atmos, the format Sonos supports.  

I’ve been testing a single Era 300 speaker, and on its own it simply can’t create that room-filling effect the format promises, putting you in the middle of the music. Sonos’s efforts to bounce the sound up and out into the room don’t totally eliminate the sweet spot, or trick your ears into thinking the sound is coming from anywhere other than the speaker. 

What the Era 300 can do, with a good mix like some of the recent Beatles Atmos remasters, is separate every element to create more expansive audio, a more open soundstage. 

It’s subtle at first, though you definitely miss the effect when it’s gone, with other tracks feeling almost flat by comparison. 

Whether the effect is more pronounced with a stereo pair, I can’t say – or assess how well it works using 300s in a surround setup. But taking a single speaker as is, the spatial audio is welcome but a bad reason to upgrade on its own – not least because of how awkward the software side of the experience is. 

Smart features 

• Spatial audio only through awkward Sonos app  
• Trueplay tuning – on both iOS and Android  
• Basic voice controls  – but no Google Assistant 

Like all Sonos speakers, the Era 300 has some built-in smarts – though it’s lost a little along the way. 

The speaker is primarily controlled by the official Sonos app, which allows you to manage settings, tweak sound, and hook the Era 300 up to the rest of your Sonos setup for multi-room audio, or integrated into a stereo pair or full surround sound array (though this is only possible with the Sonos Arc or Beam Gen 2, plus any Sub). 

The app is also used for music playback, allowing you to link accounts from various streaming services to control through the app directly. 

This is, for now at least, the only way to stream Dolby Atmos spatial content. You’ll need a subscription to either Amazon Music or Apple Music – the only two streaming services supported for spatial – and will have to navigate their libraries through the Sonos app, not their own. 

Unfortunately, the Sonos app only shows you if any given song or album is Atmos-enabled once it’s already playing, with no indication at all while you’re browsing. So for albums with multiple versions, there’s a game of trial and error to find the one that makes the most of your $449/£449 speaker.  

The experience is so bad that I took to searching for songs in the Amazon Music app to find Atmos versions, then repeating those searches on Sonos to find the matching files, jumping back-and-forth between apps every time I wanted to change albums. Hopefully things will get better, because right now it’s miserable, and is likely to put you off ever trying to track down Atmos music at all. 

Elsewhere things are better. Whether you want to make the most of spatial audio or not, you can use the Sonos app to tune your Era 300 for its specific spot in your room using the company’s Trueplay tech. 

Previously limited to iPhones only, a simpler version is now also enabled on Android phones, using the speaker’s own microphones instead of your phones. Even this quick tuning really enhances the speaker’s depth and clarity, and those with an iOS device still have the option of waving their phone around the room for a minute for finer adjustments. 

Finally, the speaker naturally includes voice controls. Amazon’s Alexa returns, as does Sonos’s own in-house voice assistant – which does the job for music playback, but not much else (and not if you’re a Spotify user, either).  

Missing this time around is Google Assistant. This used to feature on Sonos hardware, but ongoing legal squabbles between the companies seem to have gotten in the way. That’s a downside if, like me, you have Google integrated elsewhere in your smart home, because the Era 300 can’t stand in as a Google smart speaker. 

Price & availability 

The Era 300 is available now for $449/£449/€499, and you can pick one up direct from Sonos, or from stores including Amazon. 

That price sets it between the Era 100 and the older Five – the latter probably still wins in stereo, but lacks the Era 300’s spatial audio support, and is presumably due for an upgrade to the Era 500 before too long. 

Remember that if you’re hoping for a pair for stereo or a surround setup you’ll need to spend double that. If you want to use line-in that’s a further $19/£19/€25 per speaker, going up to $39/$39/€45 if you want Ethernet too. 

For more options, check out our full ranking of the best Sonos speakers, or the best Bluetooth speakers for audio from other manufacturers. 

Verdict 

The Era 300 is in an odd spot. It’s an excellent straightforward speaker: expensive, but with the quality to make that price worthwhile. I’ve only used one, but I bet a stereo pair would sound fantastic, and the potential in a surround setup is obvious. 

The problem is that the 300’s killer hook – spatial audio – isn’t quite there yet. The experience on a single speaker isn’t transformative enough to justify an upgrade on its own, and the software side of the experience is simply frustrating. Think of spatial audio as a nice-to-have, but not a necessity. 

Meanwhile the addition of Bluetooth is welcome, but performance is sadly spotty, and locking line-in and Ethernet support behind expensive dongles feels like a step backwards for the company. 

In terms of simple sonics, this is still one of the best speakers around. It would make a great (albeit pricey) entry point to the Sonos system, or a welcome way to upgrade on an Arc or Beam soundbar. 

It’s not a totally clear-cut upgrade over the older Play:3 however, with spatial audio not enough to make up for the omissions of Google Assistant and Ethernet, so owners of those may be happier staying put. 

Specs 

• Alexa or Sonos Voice Control 
• Far-field mics 
• Two woofers 
• Four tweeters 
• Six Class-D amplifiers 
• Touch controls 
• Wi-Fi 6 
• Bluetooth 5.0 
• USB-C port (line-in and Ethernet via dongle) 
• 160x260x185mm 
• 4.47kg 

Best Prices Today: Sonos Era 300