Sonos Era 100 and Era 300 Are Here: See the Next Gen of Wireless Streaming Speakers

Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ty Pan Brief from cnet.com and I'm here at the Sonos launch of the New Era products, two new products for Sonos, which include the 100 and the 300, and they're coming later this month. Speaker 1: So here we have the two speakers, starting with the Sonos ERA 100. This is a $249 smart speaker. At launch, it will have both Amazon Alexa and Sonos voice. And here we move up to the $449 Smart speaker, the ERA [00:00:30] 300. Now what this has and this doesn't, is Dolby Atmos. This will work with Apple Music as well as Amazon HD audio to give you immersive in a standard living room. This one is a $249 speaker. So said, but this one is designed to replace the existing Sonos one, so the one sl and the one will be going away. So it's probably a good time to go out and get one of those. Um, but this will also work, uh, in stereo. Now it [00:01:00] has dedicated speakers on each side. It's now a stereo speaker instead of a mono speaker. So if you're sitting in front or you know around, you'll get a stereo effect. Speaker 1: What it does have now is Bluetooth. Both of these speakers have Bluetooth in a, in addition to the wifi system that uses before, uh, it's also USB charging. And the form factor is very similar to the, the one, apparently it's an inch taller. We don't have the one to compare this to. Whereas the ERA 300, very, very different. Looking [00:01:30] from what's come from them before looks very similar to the five or the three. Uh, the play three, which came out probably 10 to 15 years ago. Now, this very, very strange looking speaker. Um, so you have stereo and you have height as well. We've heard some demos of this. This is compared to some of the other speakers on the market now, such as the, uh, apple, uh, HomePod and as well as the Amazon Echo Studio. Um, this is priced a little [00:02:00] higher than those cause it's a much bigger speaker capable of pretty, uh, deep base that I've heard. Speaker 1: Um, looking forward to getting these in the studio. So we can have a, a test of these. And basically this is a way to bring Atmos into the home for less than the sound, the price of a surround sound system. So you just stick this in a corner or on a table like this and you'll get height, you'll get width and it'll sound much bigger than something like this is capable of. One of the biggest changes [00:02:30] to the hands-on interface of this thing is this thing. It's now called the volume trough on previous. So speakers, you were able to swipe the top, but it wasn't always obvious. That's what you could do. So now they've made a little indentation where you can swipe tracks or you can plus or minus the volume. So it makes it a bit more visually easy for people who haven't used the Sonos before. Speaker 1: Obviously there's a part of the Sonos ecosystem. They can be used as part of a Sonos arc or beam system as rears. These are obviously, if [00:03:00] you can use one of these that's a stereo system, put it behind you and it'll have height. So you can get Atmos effects in your movies. They use the Sonos app so you can dial up all your favorite speakers. You can join 'em as pears. These will actually work into stereo pair as a pair of 300 s or a pair of 100 s. Uh, so if you're looking for a cheap stereo system, a pair of these for 500 bucks. These are being announced today, but they're coming out on the 28th of March, $249 for this one. $449 [00:03:30] for the ERA 300.