Wireless smart speaker with 10-hour battery, room-filling sound, wifi, and Bluetooth is not your ordinary portable speaker
OUR VERDICT
It’s expensive. However, the portable Sonos Move justifies each penny with its smart connectivity and living room worthy solid.
The Good
| The Bad
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Sonos has at long last made portable wifi and Bluetooth speaker that sounds extraordinary – but it’s not quite what most will have imagined.
For a considerable length of time, Sonos has made a portion of the absolute best wifi speakers, recently adding optional voice assistants from Google and Amazon. Yet, they have never been wireless, waiting to be connected and on your home wifi network.
The Move changes that, basically taking the superb Sonos One and adding a battery to the base.
SOUND
The Move is intended to seem like the brilliant One, which is a generally excellent thing. You get punchy lows and mids, shimmering highs and an even, rich sound impeccably at home shooting you with high-vitality EDM before acing the nuances of Holst’s The Planets. It is, in reality, more forward and more durable than the One, which improves it appropriate for side trips outside.
It is also the first Sonos speaker to have Trueplay tuning, which modifies the audio output to sound its best when you move the speaker to a new location. Past Sonos speakers can do a comparative thing, yet it requires you physically waving an iPhone or iPad about your room as the speaker blasts you with what sounds like alien weapons from a sci-fi film.
Trueplay chips away at wifi, not Bluetooth. However, the Move sounds incredible inside or out with no changes. It is arguably the best-sounding portable speaker you can buy.
FEATURES
Sonos has a long heritage in Bluetooth and wireless audio, and just because it’s their first attempt at going portable, doesn’t mean it’s dropping any of that connectivity. Like other Sonos models, the Move can be made to work in a stereo pairing or part of a multi-room group.
The Sonos Move will work with all way of connected sound sources, online or put away on a network.
Move out of range of a wifi connection, and you’ve Bluetooth to count on. It’s the 4.2 adaptation of the network standard, as opposed to the more current 5.0. However, Sonos claims its experience in the 4.2 form of Bluetooth has let it eke more power-saving and range capabilities out of 4.2 than ever before. While it’s not quoting range for either it’s Bluetooth or wifi connections; it’s expressing that “on the off chance that you can hear it, you can control it.”
That top-mounted array of microphones serves a dual purpose. First, it gives you access to a choice of either Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant voice assistants – each AI helper is fully compatible with the Sonos Move, giving you the option as to which you want to use to set reminders, control smart home devices, access calendar and act as a voice-powered jukebox.
Secondly, those microphones are also the heart of the ‘Trueplay’ audio-tweaking system. They analyze the output from the Sonos Move and how its surroundings affect it and automatically adjust it to bring it closer to the intended studio sound. What’s amusing is that it knows when the Sonos Move has, err, moved – there’s an accelerometer onboard that triggers the TruePlay system’s tweaks when it detects movement.
AVAILABILITY AND COST
The Sonos Move costs $399 and comes in black only but is frequently discounted by as much as $70 from its RRP.
BUILD
If you are expecting a battery-powered, Bluetooth version of the Sonos One, reconsider. Genuinely, the Move towers over the One. Contrasted with most compact Bluetooth speakers, and without a doubt anything Sonos currently offers, it is generally tall (24cm) and heavy (3kg).
We can’t envision individuals will toss it in their baggage and taking it away on vacation. It’s more suited to be a semi-permanent design in a room of your house and made for occasional spins in the garden when the weather permits. Or on the other hand, without a doubt, when it doesn’t.
The Move is IP56-rated dust and water-safe, which means it should be protected from ‘harmful dust’ and ‘strong water jets from all directions.’ That is not the only new design characteristic to accommodate the Move’s portability, either. A recessed area around its back that your hand can slide into implies that it is genuinely simple to move around despite its size and weight. The Black Show finish (marginally lighter in the shade to the customary Sonos dark) has been picked as the best finish in terms of heat and UV resistance.
BOTTOM LINE
Having waited for this long for a Sonos convenient speaker, the company needed to pull something extraordinary out of the bag, and it has. There’s flexibility here with the Sonos Move Speaker in terms of how it can be used, from on-the-go portable playback to being part of the in-the-home multi-room setup. It’s heartbreaking that the potential to use the Sonos Move as part of a home-cinema surround sound setup isn’t here, but overall, color us impressed.
With its ground-breaking driver and full access to the Sonos software system, what you’re truly getting is a full-blown Sonos home speaker, which just so happens to be portable. Not that the portability is an idea in retrospect – battery life, carrying handles, and toughness represent that – however, the reality the Sonos Move can stand its ground with powered home speakers and not miss out that dazzles the most. That price tag will bite initially, but what the Sonos Move offers more than makes up for it.