Sonos Play:1: First Thoughts

Needed something at home to listen to music, so I decided to buy a network speaker.

Honestly, I know the best in this category is the Apple HomePod. But nobody in my house uses Apple devices except my wife, and I’m an Android guy, so buying it was obviously unrealistic.

Ended up going with Sonos, and I had solid reasons for choosing Sonos:

• Sonos speakers don’t use Bluetooth, they use Wi-Fi, which gives them more “potential” for sound quality than Bluetooth
• Sonos has an official mainland China release and explicitly supports almost every music platform in China
• Sonos can play songs on its own rather than being just a “sound-emitting machine” — a bit smarter
• Sonos’s lowest-end products are dirt cheap on Xianyu (important)

In the end I bought a 99-new Sonos Play:1 on Xianyu for just over 500 yuan. Almost no accessories, of course — just the unit and a charger. But that’s enough for this thing.

Since it’s second-hand, remember to reset it when you first get it. After resetting, make sure it shows a green light on boot rather than a white one, and then you can reconfigure it.

The first setup requires registering a Sonos account. Probably because my phone’s system is in English, the default account region was “United States,” and after activating the Sonso speaker I found there were no mainland China products among the music services I could add.

You need to log into the Sonos official website, change your account’s “registration region” to “China,” and wait about 15 minutes.

Then you can add the major domestic services.

It also supports search, and searching automatically queries the services you’ve added:

But a few things are worth mentioning:

• Sonos’s playback method is actually quite unusual. After adding a service, you don’t need that service’s app on your phone — it’s as if the speaker has the app installed itself. Just open the Sonos app on your phone and play
• Sonos doesn’t only support network apps, it also supports your local songs, including those on your phone and computer, and it supports Plex for playing songs from your NAS
• The sound quality exceeded expectations, and there’s a True Tune-like calibration mode in the phone app where you hold your phone and it uses the microphone to determine your room’s sound field. Before calibration the bass was way too heavy; after, it’s much better
• Sonos works like a “jukebox” — multiple people with the Sonos app installed can pick it up and queue songs, and add to the list. Very practical
• Sonos has multi-platform clients for Windows/Linux/Android/Mac, and seems to support the web too — at least you’ll have some way to queue songs
• Sonos doesn’t support being used directly as a speaker. There are third-party plugins, but I think… not great
• Once Sonos switches to the China region, YouTube and SoundCloud are gone forever. That bothers me
• Sonos supports Google Assistant by default, but after switching to the China region that stops working, and the Amazon service is gone too

Overall, getting one of these for just over 500 yuan to listen to music at home is pretty good. Great value — except it can’t play all audio like a Bluetooth speaker can.