Sonos play:5

It’s been a while since we’ve had an update to the Sonos series of speakers, and that probably gave the rest of the competition a chance to catch up as we saw new players from the likes of BlueSound and Lenco throw in solid offerings last year that not only did multi-room audio, but offered full support for High Resolution Audio (HRA) too.

Mar 2016

It’s been a while since we’ve had an update to the Sonos series of speakers, and that probably gave the rest of the competition a chance to catch up as we saw new players from the likes of BlueSound and Lenco throw in solid offerings last year that not only did multi-room audio, but offered full support for High Resolution Audio (HRA) too.

That’s changed somewhat with the new Play:5. It now supports HRA streaming, with the capability to play WMA, AAC, Ogg Vorbis, Apple lossless, FLAC, and uncompressed WAV and AIFF files, but only at sample rates up to 48kHz, slightly higher than the 44.1kHz sampling of PCM audio.

The speaker now sports a brand new design internally and externally. The base port is gone, and the speaker now has a full design which according to Sonos, allows the speaker to produce even deeper bass than their Playbar. It looks sleeker overall, and works in both horizontal and vertical orientations; the latter being the recommended option if you’re going to do stereo pairing.

Internally, the drivers have also been slightly readjusted to better radiate sound in all directions. Sonos says the new Play:5 offers the best off-axis performance amongst all their players, so that’s perhaps a nod to the growing trend of 360-degree audio. In any case, the new Play:5 certainly has no issues filling rooms with sound and it seems easily more powerful than the previous version.

As before, the new Play:5 retains a simple interface, with just two buttons for volume control and a play/pause button on the top. These have gained a slight upgrade though; with capacitive pads replacing the old physical buttons so that controls work via touch.

Attention to detail is certainly evident on this speaker, as even the logo–that appears dead center on the speaker–has had some 800 holes laser cut into it, so that it meshes well with the 60,000 holes in the grill to allow sound to pass through unhindered.

The app interface remains largely unchanged, but you now have the option to use your smartphone to perform audio calibration for your speaker. Called TruePlay, this measures the audio characteristics of your room so it can best tune your Play:5 for optimal performance, much like what we found with the Archt One.

Supports the most streaming services.

Audio could do with a bit more detail and finesse.