Review: Sonos Five Wireless Speaker

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Tuned by renowned producer Giles Martin, the Sonos Five Wireless Speaker is a high-fidelity speaker for superior sound. Five's unrivaled acoustic design features three high-excursion woofers and two precisely-angled side tweeters for an ultra-wide soundstage, and a center tweeter that optimizes vocal playback. Control it with Apple AirPlay2 or the Sonos app.

But how is the Sonos Five different than its predecessor, the Play:5? To start, it's got a chic new monochromatic look and new technology focused on increasing memory and processing power to provide improved performance. Enhanced TruePlay, Sonos' proprietary tuning technology, optimizes the sound for the unique acoustics of your room, calibrating the height channels for precise localization.

One of our go-to ways to use the Five: Pair two of them in stereo and connect them to a turntable (with built-in preamp) via the in-line port for a competitive 2-channel setup that doesn't take up much space and that gives you the flexibility of going right from your favorite record, to your favorite digital streaming service. If your turntable doesn't have a built-in preamp, just add an in-line phono preamp.

 

The Basics:

What is the Sonos Five? A high-fidelity music streaming speaker with room-filling sound for streaming, vinyl, and more.
Control it with your the Sonos app or Apple AirPlay 2
Connect it to your turntable, CD player, projector, or other device directly to Five using the 3.5 mm jack.
Place it
horizontally, and it will automatically separate the left and right channels for stereo playback, or position the speaker vertically on its end and pair two speakers together while it adjusts to mono for more details stereo separation and an even wider soundstage.

Sonos Five Specs:

  • Size: H x W x D: 8.03 x 14.33 x 6.06 in (203 x 364 x 154 mm)
  • Wireless: 2.4/5 GHz, Bluetooth
  • Speakers: Six Class-D digital amplifiers, Three midwoofers, Three tweeters
  • Ports: Ethernet
  • Analog line-in with 3.5 mm jack
  • Weight: 14 pounds

 

Sonos Five Wireless Speaker

Available in Black or White.

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Video Transcript

"Hey, everybody, it's Adam with World Wide Stereo. In today's video, I'm going to show you a speaker from Sonos called the Five. The Sonos Five is a newer speaker to the Sonos Play:5 Gen 2, and they kept a lot of things the same. There are a couple of differences here, so I want to go over those with you, and let you know what the new changes are as compared to the Sonos Play:5 Gen 2. When you purchase a Sonos Five and you get it home, If you're like me, you'll first notice how awesome the packaging is.

I love the lock tabs on the side. I just think they're doing a great job with the packaging and the presentation. You feel really good about the product once you get it home and start unboxing this. Not many accessories here. So inside the box, you'll find the Sonos Five, you'll find a power cord and just a quick getting started kind of guide. At first appearance, you'll see it looks very similar, except you'll see how the color is now all of the same.

So whatever color you pick, you're now going to get the same color grill and the same color logo. They wanted to do that, so it doesn't get in the way of you listening to music. They want it to kind of disappear, and just have it be all about the music, and not have any of the cosmetics distract you from listening. Some other features that are also the same is, on the back, this was one of the only speakers in the lineup that had that auxiliary-in which is something that a lot of people use.

You can use that aux-in on the back here for connecting a turntable, if you wanted to, or an external CD player, or maybe taking the sound out of your main system and bringing it into here. So just a versatile, versatile input to have on here, so they certainly didn't want to get rid of that. That input on the back is a 3.5-millimeter stereo jack. Another similar feature to the Play:5 Gen 2 is the AirPlay 2 accessibility that is also offered here.

And the controls on the top. You have your play and pause, your volume up, your volume down, and you can swipe forward or swipe back to go through, like, track forward and track back if you're inside of a playlist. You will need to also download the latest version of the Sonos app called Sonos S2. It will not work on the original Sonos S1 app. You will need to make sure that you have that new one, the S2 app, in order to make this work.

The upgrade to this unit really was all about the internals, okay? This product has their newer processor, and all their new computers and everything, all like that, all built in. That does allow for, now, a greater distance between another Sonos speaker. So you can kind of spread out your Sonos system a little bit more because the antennas are better and can reach further in this product. You can set up the Sonos Five horizontally or vertically.

As you see on the sides here, you get these rubber tabs to, kind of, separate it from the furniture that you're putting it on. So those are on the side, and those are also on the bottom. I highly recommend that you do the Trueplay tuning. When you do the Trueplay tuning, I would decide prior to that whether you're going to set it up horizontally or vertically. If you do change your mind, when you change the orientation of this, it'll actually change its sound characteristics.

So after you're done your Trueplay tuning, then you can leave it this way. But if you decide to turn it this way, again, you'll actually hear the sound change as you do that. That was something neat that I noticed when I was playing around with this, that when you change its orientation, you can actually hear it change its sound. All of the speaker systems and the amplifier systems are all the same. You have your three woofers, and you have your three tweeters.

The ones on the outside are kind of angled to give you a really nice, widespread sound staging. And they use that phase delay to make sure that things sound really wide. I mentioned, you can set these up as a stereo pair. If you do set them up as a stereo pair, I would recommend that you set them up vertically. That'll give you your best overall stereo imaging. If you're going to stereo pair this, it has to be another Sonos Five.

You will not be able to stereo pair a Sonos Five with a Play:5 Gen 2. You can also set this up as rears with a Beam or an Arc. Another neat feature for this product is that it has some humidity resistance. So if you put it into, maybe, a shower area or something like that, it's not going to damage the product because it does have that humidity resistance built in.

When I received this product, I set it up in my kitchen. I did the Trueplay tuning with my iPhone, and I set it up on my kitchen counter which is a pretty wide open space. And I have to say it did not disappoint. Sounds great. I think that it almost sounds like it has a subwoofer attached to it. It plays nice and loud. This is a wonderful speaker.

Would love to set it up with another one and do stereo pairing, but I wasn't able to do that, I just had this one unit right here. So my experiences was great with it. I played a lot of stuff. I'm a big fan of the service called Qobuz. I also AirPlayed to it just from my music library on my iPhone. So everything sounded great to me. Again, the bass response was awesome.

And if you do the Trueplay tuning, do what I did to really hear the difference. You can go into the settings and turn Trueplay tuning on and off, and it's amazing how much better it sounds when you do that Trueplay tuning. So I highly suggest that you do that. This is the Sonos Five speaker. It'll be available online at worldwidestereo.com, or if you happen to be in the area, if you can stop by our Ardmore or Montgomeryville, Pennsylvania, showrooms.

We offer a 60-day return policy, free shipping, and we're authorized dealers for everything that we sell here. If you have any questions or comments, you can please leave those in the comment section below, or call or email us at any time. Please remember to subscribe to our YouTube channel. This is Adam with World Wide Stereo, reminding you to listen to music every day. So long."

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