Sonos Era 300 review: Music that fills the room and your heart

The speaker has touch-sensitive controls on the top. I loved the Touch Bar that lets you slide your fingers to adjust the volume exactly to where you want. There is also a voice button that activates voice controls, once you have set it up in the app. Interestingly, you can set up Sonos Voice Controls and Alexa separately on this device and play content using both. Sonos has taken voice controls to the next level by letting users control other connected Sonos devices, even playing and pausing in different rooms with just voice commands. The voice controls work really well, even when you are playing something at top volumes. Some of us might not be sure of a speaker listening in on our commands, and maybe more in the living room. So the Era 300 has a physical button at the back to kill the microphone when not needed.

Set up is easy with the Sonos app, but like other speakers from the company this is primarily meant to work via wireless and you need a stable Wi-Fi connection at home for this aspect to be smooth. This gives you access to Sonos Radio, Apple Music, Spotify, and other music services that can play independently of your smartphones. But then the Era 300 also offers Bluetooth which is an added advantage, especially when your Wi-Fi is acting up.

The speaker has touch-sensitive controls on the top (Image credit: Nandagopal Rajan/The Indian Express)

The Sonos Era 300’s objective is to offer immersive music and in the setup itself, the speaker scans where it is placed and how it needs to fire its drivers and tweeters to get the best out of the situation. And in this aspect, I have to say the Era 300 has achieved mind-blowing success, especially when you consider the size of the device. This is in many ways the most convincing Dolby Atmos product I have heard in a long time. Mind you, this is against when you consider this is a single-unit speaker system.

And it takes just one song for you to realise how good the Era 300 is at what it does. For me, for some strange reason, the song was Ramta Jogi from Taal, one of the last songs of my student days. Sukhwinder’s voice and A R Rahman’s wonderful composition came together in my living room in early December morning, one of the coldest ones this year. And the room suddenly felt like it had been filled with warm fluffy clouds of audio bliss.

It is as if the Era 300 creates a pulsating audio bubble around it, one you can almost feel, walk into and maybe even touch. You don’t need to ramp up the volume to feel the music, it happens at whatever the level is and it is not limited to when there is a bass-heavy composition. Even with just vocals, like with Ankita Joshi’s Lat Ulajhi, you feel a presence in the room, like the music is floating around the room like in an animation movie. Across different songs I got the sense the Era 300 just loves percussion instruments — maybe because it is designed to look like one — and the tabla, mridangam and everything else sound so full of life.

Listening to Palnilavin Poykayil, one of my favourite songs of 2023 by Ranjin Raj and Sithara Krishna Kumar, these vocals are in the middle of the room as the rhythmic percussions are felt a notch below. The drivers create the kind of space inside the speaker that gives even these lows a life of their own.

he drivers create the kind of space inside the speaker that gives even these lows a life of their own (Image credit: Nandagopal Rajan/The Indian Express)

It is almost as if Era 300 has been made to bring the baritone of Leonard Cohen back to life. This one gave me one of the most impressive renditions of Hallelujah I have heard, and I have heard that song hundreds of times on audio devices of all capabilities.

I linked the Sonos Era 300 with the Apple TV and watched Monarch with the Dolby Atmos effects kicking in so well. In fact, I would recommend this as a good replacement for a sound bar and this does the job really well. Actually, you could yoke two of these and get a superb surround sound effect at home, if you have the appetite for that kind of spending.

At Rs 54,999, the Sonos Era 300 is one of the best audio devices you can bring home. While it is pricey if you look at this as just a Bluetooth speaker, that is exactly what it is not. The Era 300 is a complete audio solution, one that covers your entertainment requirements with Dolby Atmos and surround sound, offers immersive 360-degree audio scapes while streaming music directly from platforms like Apple Music and Spotify, and, of course, takes care of all your Bluetooth streaming needs. This is clearly one of the best speakers I have tested in a long time and is fully worth the investment.