The Lure of Sonos (Premium)

We were sitting in the sunroom late one Friday night in mid-2020, so still early in the pandemic, listening to a YouTube Music playlist via a pair of thunderous Sonos Play:5 smart speakers, when my wife suddenly announced, “We should get more speakers in here.” We jokingly refer to such sudden exclamations as “pronouncements,” as if they were edicts handed down by the queen. Which, when you think about it, they kind of are.

To be clear, we do not need another pair of speakers in the sunroom.

I’ll get to that bit in a moment. But first, I think it’s important to note that adding more speakers to the sunroom was a topic that had never come up when we were listening to music in that room with $99 Edifier R1280T powered speakers connected to a $30 Chromecast Audio dongle. We’ve held music nights as a sort of evening ritual or traditional almost once each week since we moved to Pennsylvania about three and a half years ago. And adding more speakers, or even getting better speakers, just never come up. The sound was incredible.

But I have a theory about how successful experiences with premium or luxury products spur the acquisition of more premium or luxury products. And I’m convinced that that’s what happened with the speakers in the sunroom. When Brad offered me a pair of Sonos Play:5 smart speakers last February at half price—$500, the normal cost of a single Play:5 speaker—I knew I had to say yes. But I also knew that we were stepping into familiar but uncomfortable territory: My wife would grow to love the quality of the sound. And she’d want more.

I knew this because I’ve seen it happen before. When my wife’s beloved VW Jetta TDI Turbo Diesel wagon was found to be singlehandedly causing global warming, it was purchased back by Volkswagen for an astronomical $25,000 as part of the diesel scandal. So she obviously had to buy another car. And we faced the standard choices: Whatever $25,000 buys in a new car, or a used BMW or Mercedes of the same price. We went the latter route, with a used BMW X1, but I cautioned my wife that it was a one-way street: Her brain wouldn’t want her to go back to a lesser vehicle once you’ve taken that step.

And that’s fine: Buying premium products that you know are going to last is a reasonable strategy. I’m a frequent customer of Apple’s refurbished store, for example, and I often buy hardware there for my own use and recommend doing so to all of you. It makes these premium/luxury products more affordable.

But the Sonos thing escalated quickly. I just realized that over the course of 2020, I purchased seven—seven!—Sonos speakers, including two IKEA Symfonisk Wi-Fi bookshelf speakers, the two Sonos Play:5s, a Sonos Beam soundbar, a Sonos Sub (subwoofer), and a Sonos Move portable speaker—and then we added a turntable, which connects to one of the Play:5s, in January. (I will write bout vinyl separately soon.)

If you’re familiar with Sonos pricing, you can do the math: That’s thousands of dollars of equipment. But the Play:5s, as noted, were used and half-off. I purchased the Move as a Christmas gift for my wife during Black Friday, and it was $100 off, the first time it had ever been discounted. The Sonos Sub costs an astonishing $700, but it was paid for entirely with Amazon gift cards, so we paid nothing. And, come on, the IKEA speakers are only $100 each.

Once you go further and further down this kind of rabbit hole, it becomes harder to stop. This is the bet any platform maker makes, whether it’s Apple, or Google, or Microsoft, or smaller companies like Sonos. They want to be sticky. And the promise from Sonos is that you get years of high-quality service and interconnectivity via a premium whole-house system that just works. And we’ve pretty much experienced that. (We also have other Sonos speakers elsewhere in the house, including three older Play:1s and one newer Play One.)

We’ve also had weird discussions about where some of the newer speakers should be. For example, I think the Sub would make more sense in the living room, where it could form part of a basic home theater system along with the Beam and, in the future, two rears (probably those IKEAs for cost reasons). My thinking is purely logical: We spend more time watching movies and TV shows on the TV than we do listening to music in a typical week. And besides, where the Play:5s are muscular and powerful, the Beam would benefit more from offloading the bass.

Nope. My wife wanted them in the sunroom, and since making that happen, I’m pretty sure I could push the house off its foundation with the volume turned up high enough. It’s astonishingly loud, crisp, and clear at volume, with no distortion. It’s also pointlessly loud since we’ll almost never use more than a fraction of its power. And … you know, no one asked me what I thought. So the Sub is in the sunroom.

The Move is another interesting problem. But it also requires a bit of explanation. If you’re familiar the Sonos product line, you know that they used to have three basic speaker models, Play:1, Play:3, and Play:5, with getting more powerful and expensive as you move up the model list. Today, Sonos offers Play One (and One SL and IKEA) at the low-end and the Play Five at the high-end, but nothing in the middle. There’s no Play Three.

Well, now there is. Sort of. The Move does nicely fill that space between the One and the Five. It’s pretty much that ideal “Goldilocks” size, and the sound quality is, of course, excellent. Not quite Play Five level, but a lot punchier than any One. Price-wise, it’s probably about $100 too expensive at $400 (remember, I got it for $300), with the extra cost related to the battery—it’s a portable speaker—its weather resistance, and other additions. But a non-portable version of this speaker can and should be marketed as a Sonos Three.

Anyhoo. I didn’t buy the Move for indoor user per se, though I figured we’d eventually settle on something. Instead, my wife had been asking about the possibility of bringing our Sonos-based music outside when we sit out on the patio at night in good weather. I resisted this, literally for years, but I figured we could put a little L-shaped privacy fence around one outside corner of the patio to protect the neighbors from the music. And what the heck, it was a Christmas present. And on sale.

On that note, my wife recently made another pronouncement about the Sonos Move one night while we were listening to music in the sunroom, by then with the two Play:5s and the new Sub. “Can’t we add that speaker,” she asked, pointing to the Move over on its charging dock in the corner, “to the sunroom music?”

Looking over at the Move, I’m sure I stammered something about how the Sub was already calibrated for the Play:5 stereo pair, and blah blah blah whatever. But I was met with a blank stare. So what the heck: Most nights, I now just position the Move off-center towards the 5s and use the Sonos app to adjust the volume of each until its reached some semblance of audio balance, and … yeah, of course it does. It sounds great.

I’m waiting for it to dawn on my wife that another Move could create a second stereo pair and maybe we could position them in the back corners of the room and…

Resist. I must resist.