Sonos Five

[aalpar]

I'm looking at getting a Sonos FIve and/or and Arc with some add-ons (Ones or the sub) and would love to see frequency response and distortion measurements along with environment measurements (rooms size, acoustic treatments).

Has anyone seen any?

With that, I've listened to the fives, and a few other of Sonos' products. My impression is that the speakers are studio monitors that are designed to work in multiples with sonos' True Play EQ. The drivers aren't meant to handle loud and I suspect their room EQ makes the speakers work better in multiple (I suspect they merge stereo signals to give a little better dynamics and bass when there are multiple units).

I'm curious to see measurements for Sonos in multiples to see how they do - in an anechoic chamber or in a room with some basic published measurements (distance from wall, etc...).

 

[Darwin]

Thanks for the replies. Good to know that what I hear seems to be similar to what others are hearing. Still I might get another one for a stereo pair, which should sound a good bit better.

Has anyone tried TruePlay room correction? Maybe I'll borrow an ipad and give it a try.

I’m just now reading this but seeing your previous posts I was thinking did he do trueplay?
Also check darkos site for additional comments after his video. He realized he missed some things. I’ve been quite happy with stereo Five’s. Clean versatile great sounding solutions without a lot of fuss.

 

[Darwin]

I'm looking at getting a Sonos FIve and/or and Arc with some add-ons (Ones or the sub) and would love to see frequency response and distortion measurements along with environment measurements (rooms size, acoustic treatments).

Has anyone seen any?

With that, I've listened to the fives, and a few other of Sonos' products. My impression is that the speakers are studio monitors that are designed to work in multiples with sonos' True Play EQ. The drivers aren't meant to handle loud and I suspect their room EQ makes the speakers work better in multiple (I suspect they merge stereo signals to give a little better dynamics and bass when there are multiple units).

I'm curious to see measurements for Sonos in multiples to see how they do - in an anechoic chamber or in a room with some basic published measurements (distance from wall, etc...).

Look up Peter pee on You Tube. Extensive measurements. I’ve never had to go above halfway on my Fives but that’s me. paired Ones that are true played sound pretty darn good for the price but don’t want to go above 50 percent volume with this as they fall apart quickly. But for the size and looks plus the Sonos app or airplay they are pretty darn good.

 

[Darwin]

It does seem bright. That said... while RTings is one of my favorite review sites in the world I do not think their frequency response measurements are useful, or even worse, they can be misleading.

They are only testing in-room measurements with unclear procedures. Without an anechoic response to reference it to nor more details about the procedure/distance/placement, etc, an in-room response is nigh useless. That frequency response could be caused by directivity, room interactions, the speaker's tuning, or any of a myriad factors. Without the anechoic response, you cannot know which deviations from the target are good, and which ones are bad. Sometimes it'll work, other times it won't.

For example, here's their frequency response for the Google Nest Audio:

View attachment 117716

Which makes it look like an awful speaker. But here's my spin:

View attachment 117717

Honestly, no clue how they ended up with that response, but I am quite sure it tells you nothing about how the speaker sounds. It's really quite disappointing they're not providing at least a quasi-anechoic on-axis response, seemingly ignoring all the speaker science out there on the importance of anechoic results and the problems with in-room measurements...

Second, note that they tested the Sonos 5 with TruePlay -- an optional feature -- and only in the horizontal orientation. In the Sonos One Gen 2 review, we also see an elevated treble which isn't present in the Sonos One SL review, even though the speakers have identical acoustic components (they mention a firmware update might be the cause).





The most likely explanation could be exactly what you've said: In horizontal mode, one speaker acts as a 'stereo unit, dividing the midwoofers and tweeters into left and right units.

In vertical mode, the entire speaker is mono.

When listening, that basically means one speaker has to do twice the work in horizontal mode.

I'm not completely sure why that would affect distortion measurements if you are playing the same signal for the 'left' and 'right' parts of the speaker, but I very much suspect this very likely has something to do with it.

Two Sonos Fives sounded much better than one from my recollection. Trueplay also worked well -- it's essentially performing an MMM measurement and applying bass calibration. And you could also mess with the tone controls as well.

RTings is not good. They knowingly published faulty Sonos arc measurements and left them up for months saying they didn’t have time tog et to it.

 

[Darwin]

I could be wrong but I suspect that Sonos adapts and modifies the frequency response of the speaker with firmware updates. This may be behind the rtings note in the Sonos One Gen 2 frequency response section (as mentioned by napilopez above). rtings noted the difference between the One SL and Gen 2 and they are apparently planning to re-measure the Gen 2 so their results reflect the any change due to the latest firmware. Speculation of course until we see the updated Gen 2 result from rtings.

One thing that I can confirm from my own experience (when i owned a pair of Sonos One Gen 2 speakers), is the bass bump at around 50-60 Hz (as also measured by rtings). Super boomy bass there (+10db boost or so). Placing them near corners made it unbearable to me. Trueplay tempered it a bit... nowhere near enough unfortunately

my paired ones never go above 50% volume. I don’t need them to since they are bedroom speakers and sound starts to fall apart after that.

 

[io53]

I just learned that the Five & One SL (other Sonos products?) require 802.11b or 11g if using wifi. 11n, finalized in 2009(!), is not supported, never mind newer standards. Putting an 11g device on your wifi can slow all 2.4GHz traffic. Keep your computers on 5GHz or use the speaker's Ethernet port.

In addition, if using SMB/CIFS for local file sharing, Sonos requires SMB1. Be careful with this, folks. Consider a NAS, rather than allowing SMB1 on your computers.

This is a little frustrating, isn't it? I expected that a newer tech company would be stronger on the computer side than the audio. That does not seem to be the case here.

I got 2x One SL on 5Ghz wifi, so that definitely works.

 

[HammerSandwich]

Thanks for that update. I see that both models' specs now show 11n & both bands. Perhaps a new software version finally added support?

 

[GXAlan]

Look up Peter pee on You Tube. Extensive measurements. I’ve never had to go above halfway on my Fives but that’s me. paired Ones that are true played sound pretty darn good for the price but don’t want to go above 50 percent volume with this as they fall apart quickly. But for the size and looks plus the Sonos app or airplay they are pretty darn good.

Peter Pee’s measurements for the Five and Sub Gen 3.

https://m.youtube.com/channel/UCnUOo0U4wI2b9R4ghXmKblw

Note the Y-axis scaling.

The downward tilt is missing from the target curve which is why it may be a bit bright sounding compared to a classic Harman curve. It’s not clear if this is taken with or without the Loudness compensation which defaults to on.

Trueplay does indeed appear to correct more than bass frequencies and relies on model specific calibration which is why it is only for the iPhone. They do mention that different speakers have different target curves.

Trueplay Spectral Correction

Read more about the unique combination of software and hardware that powers the Sonos ecosystem. Welcome to our technology blog.

tech-blog.sonos.com

AVSForum reviewed the earlier generation, although again, I do not know if this is with or without loudness

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/sonos-play-5-review.2232162/

The treble is hot at 6kHz, so you’d have to wonder if the EQ can bring this down. No idea what the Q and center frequency is for the “treble” setting.

DXOMark has another FR which shows the up tilting treble, though again, no info on loudness on or off.

But what is impressive is that the Sonos is pretty reasonable with distortion



@hardisj or @amirm
Is the Sonos Five one of the speakers you would be willing to buy out of pocket just to test given the impressive IKEA results? Has horizontal and vertical modes (different DSP and some tweeters turn off) and a line in. Factory “treble” and “bass” EQ options and loudness option. Room correction with iPhone moving microphone technique…

VP of Product Management. Chris Kallai, spent a short time with Harman and was Director of Engineering for Velodyne before moving to Sonos.

Paul Peace, one of the Principal Audio System Engineers at Sonos spent years at JBL Pro.

Paul Maclean, a Director of Audio System Engineering at Sonos, is from Paradigm during the 2000-2010 era.

Their anechoic chamber at Sonos Santa Barbara is claimed to be the largest in the West Coast (?). Not sure how it compares to Harman Northridge or Samsung Los Angeles.

SONOS - The Howard Electric Company

The world leader in audio speakers and wireless sound systems. New Sonos testing facility included construction of the largest Anechoic Chamber on the west coast. This giant chamber is built as a steel-box with a trampoline style net floor. The chamber continues below, with the...

www.howardelectricco.com

Their Boston chamber is claimed to be the largest in the world, dedicated to speakers.

Sonos Behind-The-Scenes In Photos | Digital Trends

Take an exclusive look at how Sonos develops its state-of-the-art wireless Hi-Fi speakers with our behind-the-scenes photo gallery

www.digitaltrends.com

 

[Darwin]

Sonos now supports SMB2 and 3

Sonos finally supports SMB2 and SMB3 - California18

There are still signs and wonders taking place. Sonos has been riding on the outdated and insecure SMB1 protocol for what feels like ages. As is well

california18.com

 

[GXAlan]

Sonos now supports SMB2 and 3

Sonos finally supports SMB2 and SMB3 - California18

There are still signs and wonders taking place. Sonos has been riding on the outdated and insecure SMB1 protocol for what feels like ages. As is well

california18.com

Sonos making thousands of SMB3 connections to Synology | Sonos Community

Not sure if anyone else is experiencing issues with Sonos Music Library and the Synology NAS becoming unresponsive or very sluggish, or with random speakers disappearing from the S2 app. I recently enabled the Music Library feature in Sonos (before the 13.4.1 update in Dec 2021 which introduced...

en.community.sonos.com

Still in beta, but promising progress.

I still think it’s a surprisingly good solution though it is hard to eliminate the bias of having reliability.

 

[Darwin]

Didn't know it was beta. I'm surprised they even implemented it since I'm guessing most Sonos users these days do streaming exclusively. I sure do and I started with cassettes and have done minidisc, CD's, and everything between but streaming is jsut too easy and convenient. I even finally gave up vinyl because it is such a pain in comparison.

 

[mmi]

Would love to see some of these, or any Sonos speakers, measured on the NFS. They get ignored here for some reason, but I love the Sonos products I have. Onboard auto room correction with IIR filters, very unique waveguide designs etc.

Am super interested in the effect of the Five’s double side firing waveguided tweeters on horizontal dispersion when in stereo pair (horizontal placement). Does anyone have any experience with this? If well done it could be just what I am after… freedom from the sweet spot.

 

[sfdoddsy]

Sorry to bring this thread back from the dead. But due to aesthetic considerations (AKA WAF) I am looking for a single box active speaker I can use for stereo rear surround.

As such, it would need independent L & R channels and control of them via my prepro.

The Sonos 5 accepts a stereo line in and is thus a possibility.

However, there was mention earlier in this thread about 'pseudo stereo'. Is this in fact correct or a throwaway?

Does the Five provide true (albeit not great) stereo, or a facsimile?

 

[bevok]

Hi there
If you stand them vertically in a pair you’ll get standard stereo. My experience is that they produce a good precise stereo image.
I bought them recently on a good special after a long period of paralysis by analysis over amp, speaker etc and am delighted with them.
Bevan

 

[Tupisac]

Any company that deliberately bricks their older products deserves to die.

I'd never recommend anything from this brand, ever.

 

[bevok]

Bricks their products? Which products stopped working?

 

[Tupisac]

Sonos explains why it bricks old devices with “Recycle Mode”

Getting a discount on a new Sonos speaker means sending your old one to the grave.

www.theverge.com

They've backed out from this, but yea... Nope.

 

[bevok]

Oh OK, I personally wouldn’t have an issue with a device I’d ‘traded in’ for a discount being bricked but I suppose some might want to have their cake and eat it! (have their speaker and hear it?).