NEW Sonos Five | The Flagship Sonos Wireless Speaker

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The Five is a sleek box with rounded edges available in a monochromatic black or white finish. As with all Sonos products, build quality is very high. At Audio Advice we are very diligent about tracking failure rates of the products we sell - Sonos products have by far and away the lowest failure rate of anything we sell. They just work. This is probably because rather than testing random samples, they actually test every single piece as it comes off the line. Plus they way over engineer things to last for decades. The Five is physically pretty stout at 14 pounds and is a little over 14 inches wide, about 8 inches tall, and 6 inches deep. If you want even better sound, two Fives can be set up as a stereo pair. In this case you would set them both up vertically and the speakers smart software will adjust the audio, which is a pretty cool feature!

First and foremost, the Sonos Five is designed to provide you with room filling, high quality sound. But not far behind is the Sonos music app that lets you explore more music streaming services than any other app out there. We applaud Sonos for the way they keep improving their control app as they just updated it to a new Sonos S2 version, which works with the new Five. Be sure to check out or video that goes over all of the cool features of the new Sonos S2 app. The new Five has much faster processors and more memory built in that enhance its current performance and allow for future improvements. From a connection standpoint, you’ll be able to stream just about any service with the Five, and with it’s analog input, you could connect a turntable with a built in phono preamp or other legacy audio source. If that weren’t enough, Apple Airplay 2 is built in as well. While most people will use the Sonos app for control, there are some quick touch controls on the top of the unit for play/pause/mute and swiping for track skipping and repeating. Voice control is also available with Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant.

There are 6 separate fine tuned amplifiers inside the Five that power the six speakers. To provide room filling stereo sound from a single box, Sonos points one tweeter straight out, while the other two are pointed at an angle on each side, which projects a very big sound. These are coupled to three mid woofer drivers that can move very far to give you big, full bass. One thing that will surprise you is how much output a single Five can put into a room, it is quite powerful. Sonos and Audio Advice both believe the room has a huge impact on your sound, which is why we love Sonos TruPlay which is included with the Sonos app. This walks you through steps that play a series of test tones to fine tune the Sonos Five for your room. TruPlay only works on iOs devices as they have consistent microphones. The difference to our ears is pretty amazing. Should you wish to further fine tune your sound, the app has eq settings for bass and treble.

When you consider its price, the Sonos Five is a very impressive all in one speaker. It has a warm, rich sound with the ability to play very loud, yet it still sounds full at very low volume levels. The fact that it’s under $500 with 6 individually powered speakers with TruPlay built in is very pretty amazing. Nothing else we can think of has all of this for the cost of a Sonos Five. We also love the fact you can add a second Five for a great stereo pair of wireless Sonos speakers and if you really want to smile, add a Sonos Sub! The smart speaker market is certainly crowded with products from both huge tech companies and smaller niche companies. Sonos strikes a wonderful balance of having a large engineering staff on hand to keep up with tech and their great app, while also devoting a good portion of their research and development towards better sound. The Five truly is a world class, high performance music speaker.