Sonos Era 300 Speaker Review

The Sonos Era 300 is a sleek and premium speaker available in both 'Black' and 'White.' It's meant to be placed horizontally, and you can purchase separate brackets from the manufacturer if you want. The mounting holes let you mount it to your wall. It's rather large, but given its plain design, it doesn't distract from your home decor.

The Sonos Era 300 is designed for home use and isn't meant to be taken outdoors. It has to stay connected to a power source to work, but that's not a big deal if you plan to keep it in one place. However, if you move it to another room, you'll find it's a bit heavy to move with one hand. The Sonos Move 2 is a good alternative if you want a speaker to take with you outdoors.

The Sonos Era 300 has a fairly premium build. It's mostly made of plastic, including the grilles covering the drivers inside. Since it's meant for use indoors, it isn't rated for weather resistance. It's advertised to be humidity resistant, though, like the Sonos Five, which is handy if you want to use it in a high-humidity room like a bathroom with a shower.

The controls are on top of the speaker and are easy to use. There's a physical microphone switch on the rear of the speaker, which disables microphone-centric features like Trueplay room correction and voice assistants.

'+/-' buttons:

• Single press or swipe: Controls the volume.

Play/pause button:

• Single press: Plays/pauses audio.
• Press and hold: Adds audio that's playing in another room.

Fast Forward button:

• Single press: Skips to the next track.

Rewind button:

• Single press: Skips to the previous track.

Voice Service button:

• Single press: Enables/disables voice control.

Bluetooth button:

• Single press: Connects to a previously-recognized device.
• Press and hold: Pairs a new device.

You hear audible cues when you reach min or max volume, and the green light on top of the SONOS logo lights up when you're at the lowest volume setting. Plus, the light on top of the speaker lets you know when Voice Services are enabled. There's also an audible chime as well as a blue light when you pair and connect devices over Bluetooth.

• Setup guide
• Power cable (6.4 ft / 1.9m)
• Sonos Era 300 speaker

This speaker has very good frequency response accuracy. We tested it with the Trueplay Advanced Tuning room correction feature, which automatically adjusts the speaker's sound based on your room's unique acoustics. Overall, it has a balanced sound suitable for listening to many different types of audio content. Voices and lead instruments reproduce accurately, and voices are crisper and more controlled than what you get with the Sonos Five. However, it reproduces a touch less low bass than the Five, so its sound isn't quite as thumpy and thick. That said, there are options in the companion app to adjust the bass and treble levels if you want to tailor the sound to your liking.

The Sonos Era 300 has an excellent soundstage. It has great directivity, and the reproduction is stereo, so you have a clear separation of instruments between the right and the left drivers.

As with other premium speakers, like the JBL Authentics 500, this speaker supports Dolby Atmos Music, which is available through certain subscription music services like Apple Music. Given that the speaker already offers a pretty immersive sound with non-Atmos music, there isn't a huge difference in the sound with Atmos content. Certain tracks, like Money by Pink Floyd and Bad Guy by Billie Eilish, seem a bit wider as instruments and other sounds stretch closer to the walls of the room. This effect seems a bit overprocessed at some parts of certain tracks, though this is typical of virtual surround-type features.

The Sonos Era 300 gets fairly loud, filling an average-sized living room with sound. That said, there's some compression when you push it to max volume, which impacts the overall clarity of your audio and creates some pumping artifacts.

Built-in Alexa offers an incredible performance. It won't have trouble hearing your commands, even if you're further away or in a noisy environment. If you have the Apple Home app, you can use an iPhone, iPad, or Apple TV to ask Siri to play audio through Apple Music. However, Siri can only control the music through this setup. Similarly, the Sonos Voice Control feature is only available through certain music services, like Sonos Radio and Amazon Music. You can ask it to play certain tracks, artists, or albums, adjust the volume, and move music to certain rooms in your home.

The Sonos S2 app is a handy tool to control your speaker from the comfort of your couch. You can adjust the bass, treble, and height levels. Plus, you can enable the room correction feature called Trueplay, which automatically optimizes audio based on your room's unique acoustics. The full feature is only available with iOS, but Android users can use the Quick Tuning tool instead. Quick Tuning only uses the microphone in the speaker itself, while the full feature uses the microphones in your iPhone/iPad, too. Also, the manufacturer advertises the Loudness tool to boost certain frequencies, like the bass, when you want to listen to your music at lower volumes. It's designed to make up for normal changes in the ear's sensitivity when listening to audio at low volumes.

As with other Sonos speakers, the app lets you connect with compatible devices to spread audio throughout your home. For a full video of the app, check here.

The USB-C port is designed for ethernet connections or for playing audio from another device. However, you need to purchase a Sonos Line-In Adapter or Combo Adapter separately to do so, as they aren't included in the box.

Unlike previous Sonos speakers, this device supports Bluetooth connectivity. You can stream audio wirelessly from your mobile devices. Though we measured some degree of AV synchronization error, this won't matter if you're just streaming a podcast or music. Even with videos, in our subjective impressions, we found that it wasn't very noticeable with regular content. Some apps, like YouTube, compensate for latency, which may explain part of the difference. Depending on the status of their servers, the AV synchronization error could also vary.

The Sonos Era 300 supports 5GHz Wi-Fi, unlike the Sonos Five. This frequency band is faster than 2.4GHz, though it doesn't work over quite as long of a range, so the flexibility to choose between the two is handy. It also lets you stream audio from your Apple devices over Apple AirPlay.