Sonos Five Smart Speaker Review

[pavuol]

The versatility of combining their products into sets is quite interesting, so you can cheer your friends with this single "stereo boombox" in a garden party and than take it back to your living room to return it to the "dual Fives + sub" setup to achieve lower distortion at higher SPL?
Do they support some standalone mics with their room correction or just smartphones's microphones?

The electronics lifetime expectancy as pointed above is sure a question too though..

As a sidenote, I have studied some soundbars lately (I have a strong shield against your stones ) just to get surprised how many models have not a single tweeter driver fitted..

 

[kemmler3D]

When I was demoing speakers to use as a reference for our own lifestyle all-in-one speaker, the equivalent speaker (Play 5 iirc) at the time was one of our top contenders. As I recall it had the flattest-sounding response of any mainstream AIO on the market at the time. It seems they are still walking the straight and narrow path.

This is why I am not personally very upset that SONOS has taken over so much of the "hi fi" market. While the focus is not on traditional 2-channel stereo listening, they clearly have a lot of respect for the listener and the concept of a neutral speaker.

People sometimes say they're surprised at how good a friend's Sonos system sounds. I guess there's no reason to be surprised or concerned about that.

 

[CHNtentes]

The versatility of combining their products into sets is quite interesting, so you can cheer your friends with this single "stereo boombox" in a garden party and than take it back to your living room to return it to the "dual Fives + sub" setup to achieve lower distortion at higher SPL?
Do they support some standalone mics with their room correction or just smartphones's microphones?

The electronics lifetime expectancy as pointed above is sure a question too though..

As a sidenote, I have studied some soundbars lately (I have a strong shield against your stones ) just to get surprised how many models have not a single tweeter driver fitted..

I have a Q990B which does not have tweeter. If you listen to music the lack of high freq is pretty noticable, but when watching movies the overall sound is enjoyable enough.

 

[martin900]

Say what you want but this is some incredible garbage going on when looking at the distortion chart. It doesn't produce any bass, it produces harmonic distortions below 100Hz.
Typical case of trying to achieve the 'with sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine'. DSP doesn't fix physics.

 

[Haskil]

Thank you Amir for this very informative test.

The results are remarkable, but the price is still high: 1100 dollars for the pair... For less money, you can find amplified speakers among your tests which will be even better, barely more bulky but obviously less pretty... but without an integrated streamer of course...

What is remarkable is the quality of the study which can make many high fidelity speaker manufacturers blush with shame... I hardly dare say it, but in on vacation, far from home, I took a JBL flip 4 which sold for around 100 euros in France and I was also amazed by the quality of this little thing which allows you to listen to music without frustration... work on acoustics, broadcasting, measurements and serious comparative listening has made it possible to program DSPs which both get the best out of each speaker while controlling them and allow filtering and tuning in an incredible way. The only real progress in the field of sound reproduction is there in this conjunction between measurements-listening-psychoacoustic-tuning-DSP: they announce to us active high fidelity speakers integrating "automatic" correction systems like Dirac or Audyssey whose quality will be stunning...

I have two small Sonos Ones in my room bought in a store that was closing its doors at a lower price for the pair than the price of a single new one!
I am amazed every time I listen to France Musique, the national classical music channel, by the quality of the sound that comes out of this pair of small speakers... I used their integrated sound optimization system based on speaker layout. I'm not as harsh as Amir about the application itself, but I am on the owner's side of the system: mine don't accept Airplay. You have to go through Roon to send them sound or of course through the Sonos application, but as I only use them to listen to the radio and very exceptionally Qobuz it's very good like that...

 

[Deleted member 48726]

That's very impressive! Nice to see that the measurements confirm that I like the sound from Sonos in general. I think their products are somewhat expensive though but they surely know what they are doing IR to DSP!

 

[FrantzM]

Hi

I have been waiting for a review of these speakers; I actually did post about those, IIRC, in a thread where someone was comparing these to Genelec Studio Monitors. and ... measurements confirm what I heard. These are really good speakers. Better than audiophile of all creeds, would credit these for.
An interesting dichotomy is how easy SONOS is to use within the SONOS ecosystem" With an App it would take you less than 30 minutes to set up 5.1 or even 5.2 system ... OTOH, trying to integrate SONOS anything in a "traditional" stereo or MCH setup... is at best a fool's errand ... SONOS doesn't seem to "play nice" with anything that is not SONOS, except, perhaps with Apple but ... that's about it!

I have heard the ARC, their TOL soundbar at home and have the "Beam", in my bedroom, a small, ,impressive soundbar.

Peace

 

[AudioSceptic]

This is a review, listening tests, and detailed measurements of the SONOS Five streaming wired/wireless smart multi-room speaker. It was kindly drop shipped by a member and costs US $549.

View attachment 342206
The Five is solidly built and feels rather substantial in hand. Packaging is always is apple-like. Usability however, is quite poor with cryptically labeled buttons with various icons. And blinking lights you are supposed to decode like a world war II Morse operator. Needless to say, the app is must have and this time unlike previous SONOS products I have tested, it found the Five quickly and proceeded to update its firmware. As with physical controls, I find the usability of the app quite poor, requiring me to fumble around to get things done. Touching a two bar icon for example, asked me if I want to "end a session." Say what?

Volume control jumps in big increments of 4 (or more?). Worst thing is the very long latency. Feed it analog audio which you think would play instantly and it takes it good 2+ seconds before it plays. Use airplay and the same long pipeline delay exists. The delay was so long that it confused Klippel standard measurement method, forcing me to opt for a longer scan using asynchronous mode. I wonder if they are using long FIR filters and hence the long latency.

Speaker has an impressive array of three woofers and three tweeters:
View attachment 342207

There is a forward firing tweeter which I used as the acoustic center when scanning using Klippel NFS. There are two side firing tweeters, likely designed to spread the sound and not having it sound like a focused mono speaker. The interference from all three tweeters made for a complicated soundfield. Using my standard measurement scan of 1000 points, I was not able to get high accuracy much beyond 10 kHz (see below). As it is, the scan took five+ hours so I was in mood to double it just to get more accuracy there.

SONOS Five Measurements
Let's start with our array of frequency response measurements per CEA-2034 standard:
View attachment 342208
I must say, with all six drivers whaling, I didn't expect to see such a flattish on axis response. The listening window as indicated in green shows what it averages to which is pretty nice. Even nicer is the impressively low response. It goes deep to 30 Hz! It is boosted in that region but likely to compensate for non-declining high frequency energy due to extra side-firing two tweeters. We can see this effect in early window and predicted in-room responses:

View attachment 342209

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We will have to listen to assess the tonality as our models don't fit this type of speaker well.

Horizontal directivity is rather chaotic but wide as you can imagine:
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Vertically it looks more typical although we have tall excursions vertically:
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Distortion is quite high due to two areas of concern:
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I could not hear them much though as I was listening to the sweep which was cleaner and deeper than many speakers.
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Note that the graph on the right represents the loudest I could get the unit to play. Bass is around 96 but the rest of the response is closer to 92 dBSPL.

Waterfall display shows a number of resonances:
View attachment 342216

And step response shows the 2+ second latency:
View attachment 342217
A lot of post ringing which I could after the sweep was finished (this happens with a number of active speakers).

SONOS Five Listening Test
I chose to listen to the Five in near-field at about 2+ meters/5 feet. First impression was most impressive. We are talking almost the same accuracy of a studio monitor! Sound was clean, and tonality was right on the money. Bass notes were deep and so much so that they activated the room modes, sounding a bit tubby at times. I made an attempt to reduce that by lowering the hump at 180 Hz and that helped a bit. Forgot to save it though.

At moderate volume, sub-bass reproduction was excellent, way beyond any bookshelf speaker. At max level though, it got distorted. Outside of that region, the sound was extremely nice even when maxed out, producing not only accurate but very pleasing tonality.

I covered the two side firing tweeters with my hand and the sound was still quite good. Taking my hand off gave a wider sense of space without the highs getting bothersome.

Conclusions
What is the old pilot line? Any airplane landing that you can walk out of is a success? Applied here, any smart speaker that doesn't sound like garbage is a major accomplishment. SONOS however, goes way beyond that requirement and produced an excellent sounding speaker that is powerful with very deep bass. Its response is not perfect but comes close to being accurate especially for this class. Side-firing tweeters provide the spacious and wider dispersion that such a speaker needs to have. And triple woofers provide the impressive dynamics. Clearly strong engineering and acoustic design has been used in develop of the Five.

I am happy to recommend the Sonos Five smart speaker.

------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.

Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/

Whaling? That conjures up some nice images. ;-)

 

[OldTimer]

Taking a closer look;

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Looks like they cheaped out on the caps a bit, using CapXon brand. Isn't that the brand Samsung and others used 8 - 10 years ago that all failed? Appears to be 5 x TI TPA3118's for amplification, SoC is a MediaTek MT8521PBAI.

Nice to see the results on this @amirm, cheers.


JSmith

it has a cpu, mediatek arm. What is it doing?

 

[ZolaIII]

I don't see what are the thrills about? Not good for much lifestyle speaker with actually very low score which doesn't improve much even with EQ and sub's. It might not be bad for such but really? Over DSP-ed and in a bad way to give unrealistic bass extension for it's physics the deliberate use of bad quality caps so that you in cuple of years don't have nothing puts a final nail into the coffin. From personal decency I vote not terrible but seriously on the absolute scale it's bad and among such (in it's own category of such speakers) actually good.

 

[thewas]

One thing that should be said and also considered when measuring it that as its lying orientation it plays as a stereo loudspeaker sending different signals to left and right tweeters while when rotated to be standing it changes its configuration to become mono speaker, so personally I would use that for such a single speaker measurement and listening evaluation.

 

[spac3manG]

oh - this review now has me thinking and double-guessing.....

I currently have two Sonos "Play Five (GEN 2) "setup as a stereo pair with a SUB GEN 1.

I have a NUC with ROON feeding an SMSL SU-1 DAC that goes line in 3.5m on one speaker and a Pro-Ject Debut Pro S Turntable via a Pro-Ject Tube BOX S2 into the 3.5m on the second speaker.

HD from Roon for "as god intended", and nostalgic vinyl via the tube for "Hygge vibes".

I was/am about to remove the Sonos play fives and purchase a Pro-Ject Stereo BoX S3 and a pair of KEF LS50 meta bookshelves with a WIIM pro plus.

I had assumed the ADC/DAC on the Sonos + any other lifestyle compromises would make this a smart move for improved attentive listening experiences.

Yes, my Sonos Play Five's are the previous version to this review, but with results like this, am I wasting money on my planned "upgrade"?

G

 

[Tovarich007]

Connected speakers these days have made substancial progress, due to the financial and R&D resources of the big companies at the forefront of this tech trend (Sonos, Harman/Samsung, Google, Apple, Bose). So they can put very solid engineering in designing those little beasts.

Their VFM is quite good, they sound pleasantly good and loud (I own a much smaller and cheaper JBL portable speaker and I am overall surprised by its quality for size and price, not really Hifi but good and convenient).

Nevertheless, I was quite puzzled to read Amir assessing this speaker sounds almost like a good monitor. Well, I don't agree at all.
First, this kind of speaker isn't intended for such a purpose.
Second, the level of distorsion, multiple resonances and uneven FR and directivity are far from good monitoring, the likes of Genelec, Neumann, PSI, JBL Pro or some others, and also from top notch hifi speakers like KEF or others. His measurements don't show a monitor like quality, that's a strange shift between the objective measurements and listening comments -unusual from Amir.

Of course, these speakers, like most other connected easy living speakers, are designed for a large sweet spot, not for ultra spacial accuracy, and they can be EQed as well, but if EQ is able to correct effectively FR anomalies, it can't correct distorsion at high level.

So, all summed up, this Sonos is a very good, powerful and convenient little speaker for its size, but with obvious limitations in terms of accuracy.

 

[Grotti]

Voted "not terrible" because it will serve it's purpose as a lifestyle speaker and might sound subjectively good. But I can't ignore the amount of distortion which partly seem to be the result of forcing the speaker to output much more bass than it could handle. And at elevated listening levels dynamics also suffer from this "misuse" of DSP.

Subjectively I listened to the speakers at a local dealer a few month ago and I remember not being impressed at all: simply not my cup of tea, I suppose.

Anyway: thanks for the review!

 

[Deleted member 48726]

I don't see what are the thrills about? Not good for much lifestyle speaker with actually very low score which doesn't improve much even with EQ and sub's. It might not be bad for such but really? Over DSP-ed and in a bad way to give unrealistic bass extension for it's physics the deliberate use of bad quality caps so that you in cuple of years don't have nothing puts a final nail into the coffin. From personal decency I vote not terrible but seriously on the absolute scale it's bad and among such (in it's own category of such speakers) actually good.

True. I looked at the frequency response and the bass extension. That is impressive and surprising to me. Other than that you are right on the money.

 

[fredoamigo]

Voted "not terrible" because it will serve it's purpose as a lifestyle speaker and might sound subjectively good. But I can't ignore the amount of distortion which partly seem to be the result of forcing the speaker to output much more bass than it could handle. And at elevated listening levels dynamics also suffer from this "misuse" of DSP.

Subjectively I listened to the speakers at a local dealer a few month ago and I remember not being impressed at all: simply not my cup of tea, I suppose.

Anyway: thanks for the review!

I voted "not terrible" also because even if there is solid engineering, even if it is cheaper than a Devialet Phantom, if you want two to have a stereo pair, you will have to spend 1000 Euros or USD. and this type of "all-in-one" product is much more prone to breakdowns than any other products and once the two-year warranty has passed, you find yourself with an irreparable and unsellable product (not to mention low-end Chinese capacitors) I also find the distortion a little too high...if not, it is the ideal product for listening in the kitchen.

 

[JSmith]

it has a cpu, mediatek arm. What is it doing?

Well it's a "smart" speaker, so it needs to think etc.

While the Sonos 5 doesn't have any built-in voice assistants, the manufacturer states that you can control the speaker via Google Assistant or Alexa when connected to a third-party voice-enabled device over Wi-Fi.

Now I look again it seems there is both a MT7615 (Wi-Fi) and MT8521 (CPU, also used in Sonos Amp).


JSmith

 

[FrantzM]

I voted "not terrible" also because even if there is solid engineering, even if it is cheaper than a Devialet Phantom, if you want two to have a stereo pair, you will have to spend 1000 Euros or USD. and this type of "all-in-one" product is much more prone to breakdowns than any other products and once the two-year warranty has passed, you find yourself with an irreparable and unsellable product (not to mention low-end Chinese capacitors) I also find the distortion a little too high...if not, it is the ideal product for listening in the kitchen.

Just an observation. Based on my personal experience using and having installed over a dozen of these products, their reliability is on a Bose-level, i-e high. They simply work and well.. And they retain their value on the used market ...
For a person with a love of music, not an audiophile, and who's (this is non-intuitive, the IOS app works better it seems) within the Apple ecosystem, I believe this is the best way to spend $1000 toward a HiFi and high performance audio system for most any room. These things play music (and movies) surprisingly well. Once they are set, an easy process and the SONOS' TRUEPLAY, works a bit of its magic , you have a very good, easy to use audio system... Easy to control with phones or tablets..

Peace.

 

[dasdoing]

we can see that these types of speakers have variable frequency responses. the drivers actually only go down to 100Hz and frequencies below are boosted at low levels

 

[Ra1zel]

When a lifestyle product does a better job than some speakers marketed as "studio monitors".

What a time to be an audio hobbyst.