Sonos Era 100 review: the one speaker I would tell most people to buy

The Era 100 replaced the Sonos One, and the change that matters is inside. Two angled tweeters instead of one give you real stereo separation from a single unit, and the midwoofer is a quarter larger than the One's. Sonos also says the processor is 47 percent faster, which you notice as the speaker responding to the app without the pause the old one had.

Mine lives on the kitchen counter, which is a hard test for a speaker. Tiles, a hard floor and a lot of background noise. It fills the room without sounding strained, and at low volume for radio in the morning it still sounds full rather than tinny.

Sound

Bass is the surprise. For something this size it goes low enough that I turned it down a notch in the app's EQ. Vocals are clear and forward. The stereo effect from a single box is real if you are within a couple of metres, and fades to a wide mono further away, which is what you would expect from two tweeters a few centimetres apart.

Trueplay tuning, which uses your phone's microphone to adjust the sound to the room, now works from the speaker's own mics on Android as well as iPhone. Run it. The difference on a counter against a wall was obvious.

Connections

This is the first small Sonos with Bluetooth, and it makes the speaker useful for guests who do not want to install an app. WiFi streaming from Spotify, Apple Music, BBC Sounds and the rest runs through the Sonos app or AirPlay 2. There is a USB-C port on the back that takes the Sonos line-in adapter, sold separately, if you want to plug in a turntable. There is no Ethernet port without another adapter, which annoyed me until I realised I had never needed it.

Voice control is Alexa or Sonos Voice Control. There is no Google Assistant on this generation. A physical switch on the back cuts the microphones, which I appreciate.

The app

This is the part every Sonos owner wants to talk about. The 2024 app redesign broke a lot of things for a lot of people, and I lost alarms and the queue for a few months. It is much better now. Most of what I use works, and the speaker itself never stopped working when driven from Spotify directly. But if you are the sort of person who wants a product to be finished on day one, know that Sonos has form for shipping software early.

Who should not buy it

If you want a speaker for the TV, this is not it. It has no HDMI and Bluetooth from a TV will lag. Sonos sells the Beam and Arc for that. If you only ever want one speaker and never plan to add another, a good Bluetooth speaker will cost less. The Era 100 makes most sense as the first piece of a multi-room setup, or as the kitchen or bedroom speaker for a house that already has a Sonos soundbar.