Why the Sonos Era 100 is more than you think

when I first heard about the Sonos era 100 I considered it as simply an upgrade to the Sonos 1 or play one series I have two 1sls in my home theater and for a while I used an old play one we had in my office these are great speakers but they're no match for Apple's homepod too then I went out and bought a Sonos era 100. [Music] my name is Eric wielander welcome to my Channel all about creating an effective Apple smart home so you might buy a speaker or any piece of Smart Home Tech for that matter for one purpose now but it's important to also consider the options it gives you down the road ideally you can use a product like this for five or even 10 years and it can move to different rooms in your home depending on your needs the Sonos air 100 gives you these kinds of options zooming in specifically to Smart speakers one of the key features of any Smart Home music platform is multi-room audio this means speakers in MO multiple rooms across your home are all playing the same music perfectly in sync Sonos has been doing this for longer than anyone in the business and it's the most reliable in my experience the Sonos one is a great speaker to add to another room in your multi-room setup you can use it with Sonos for this or with apple AirPlay grouped with home pods or other speakers it's also pretty flexible where you put it well the Sonos era 100 is about an inch taller than the homepod 2. it's not as wide of a diameter given this size difference and the fact that these speakers have their speaker Parts toward the front of the device they're more suitable for being placed in smaller spaces the homepod tweeters are all around the speaker which kind of Demands that you place it away from the wall you can pair two Arrow 100s together now or in the future to create a stereo pair I got a second Arrow 100 and I paired them in my office and it sounds amazing the difference between it and a stereo pair of homepods is really down to stylistic preference but I think Sonos has edged out Apple's homepod 2 here and it's up to Apple to come back with some software or Hardware updates to make it better a pair of Sonos Aero 100s is also a hundred dollars cheaper than a pair of homepod 2s spend that hundred dollars on a homepod mini and you have everything musically that homepod offers and more features with the Sonos side albeit losing the Elegance of two speakers with Siri built in and the ability to pair home pods with an Apple TV for Dolby Atmos spatial audio and TV audio speaking of Sonos TV audio you can alternatively move this stereo pair of Arrow 100s to be rear Channels with a Sono Soundbar for a TV setup I haven't done this but I bet it would sound great I currently use older Sonos 1sl speakers for this you can also add a 20 dongle to the USBC port on the back of these speakers to connect anything that uses a headphone jack like computer speakers Sonos really intends this auxin to be used is with a turntable for records but more on the computer performance in a minute don't let the 100 in the name fool you into thinking there's a single Tweeter the air 100 has two tweeters that are angled to the left and the right sides this technically gives stereo sound out of one speaker while the stereo separation is okay it's still from a single speaker I just think the extra Tweeter helps add some more detail to the sound the woofer is also 25 percent larger than the Sonos 1 Gen 2 which turns out means you get more bass response you can actually hear it it's obviously no match for something like a Sono sub mini but it gives a noticeable addition to the bass sound for a speaker of this size Sonos has also redone the touch controls on the top of the speaker just like on their new era 300 you can swipe the sunken in track to persist and adjust the volume as well as the usual tapping on capacitive button areas to adjust volume and other settings I don't tend to use the physical controls on my Sonos speakers but these do seem like a nice upgrade one of the key features on Sonos speakers including the Aero 100 is you can completely disable the top controls if like me you have small children who might touch them when they aren't supposed to like the Sonos 1 this ships with a microphone that supports Sonos voice assistant and Amazon Alexa but not Google assistant at least at this point I find Sonos Voice Assistant to be a great way to control Sonos speakers and play Apple music I made a whole video about it previously on my channel the request for Sonos Voice Assistant are processed on your Sonos devices and it seems to have the same emphasis on privacy that Apple has with Siri if voice assistants aren't your thing you can flip the physical switch on the back to mute the microphone you also don't have to enable Amazon Alexa at all so if you don't like Amazon's Smart Home Tech don't consider this equivalent to getting another Amazon on speaker in your home there's also Bluetooth 5.0 in these speakers for quick pairing to a phone just hold down the button on the back to connect it this isn't going to give you the audio quality of using the Sonos app but it's very convenient with the Aero 100 and 300 Sonos has left off the ethernet port that's included with most of their past speakers but these speakers do boast Wi-Fi 6 for connectivity which is nice to help with wireless range and reliability if you have a Wi-Fi network that supports the newer standard as an alternative to the 20 USBC audio and adapter I mentioned earlier you can get a 40 adapter that goes into the same USBC port and includes audio in and ethernet so the Sonos USBC line in adapters are hard to find right now they're sold out a lot of places and the one I had on order was delayed a little bit so I actually was able to get the ethernet plus audio in adapter and try that for this video and I was very impressed with just that you plug the adapter into the speaker plug the audio in and in this case my Mac and it just works but I noticed that the audio levels were very low too low to really use the adapter for day-to-day use there are actually a couple settings you want to change in the Sonos app to get this to work properly the first is your Source level and this means how much is the Sonos speaker going to amplify or set the volume for the audio coming into the speaker from this adapter and in my case it was set to the minimum setting by default and there's a recommended setting for Mac computers as well as PCS I ended up opting for the highest output which is called high level 10 and that worked great great for me because I like to have my Sonos speakers a little bit on the quieter side for day-to-day use so I didn't want to have to turn the volume way up on those to get it to work well with my Mac the other thing you want to change is the audio delay mine was set to the maximum setting of 2 000 milliseconds by default and I change it down to the low setting which is 75 milliseconds and with that it seemed to sync up perfectly with any kind of video on the Mac or video conferencing but one exception to that is that every so often I would say about once every five minutes you'd hear the stereo pair just kind of get out of sync for just a second and then get back in sync and it was generally not that big of a deal like I could live with that but it's just something that would gradually drive me crazy and I hope Sonos can maybe fix that in software updates I also imagine that if I hardwired both of my stereo pair to ethernet maybe that would help address some of the latency issues I don't have enough ethernet ports and adapt chapters down here to actually try that but that said it made all the audio on my Mac sound great using it with a video conference with lots of different people in lots of different settings on their end everybody sounded clear and I could hear them well of course the microphones on the Sonos air 100s are used for The Voice assistance and they're not sent in through this adapter so you'll need to use whatever microphones you have on your display or your computer for that well I liked the performance of this and I think it's great that Sonos adds this as it gives you more versatility in using the speaker in more places like let's say with a turntable or other audio in it's not a solution with my Mac that I'd want to use day to day for my computer sound so I'm going to stick to using the speakers built into my Apple Studio display for day-to-day sound for my Mac for things like video conferencing but at the same time I'm going to keep my Sonos air 100s here on my desk for listening to music or podcasts or whatever other kind of audio I might light while I'm doing work and I think if you have a Mac and you're trying to play audio to your Sonos speakers always keep in mind that you can also use airplay to do that if in a pinch you wanted to let's say live stream a concert and play the audio on your Sonos speakers you can always use airplay there the one other advantage of the line in adapter is it gives you the option to pipe that audio from the line into other Sonos speakers in your home and you can even set it up to automatically do that when you set the line in as the input source so that's a really cool feature especially if you have something like a turntable where you might want to play some music Across different Sonos speakers in your home but that said that's a totally different use case in my opinion than what I was looking at with using it as my computer speakers thank you if you've seen any of my videos on the Lutron caseta lighting system you've probably heard me talk about how handy Pico remotes can be Lutron actually makes a Pico remote just for controlling Sonos speakers you just pair it in the Lutron app with the speakers in Sonos that you want it to control it's a little slow to make adjustments compared to other ways to control the speakers in my experience but it looks very classy and almost anyone can use it one key feature is that the center button on a Sonos speaker remote Cycles through playing your Sonos favorites on the speaker favorites are any playlist album or radio station or other music Source you choose as a favorite in the Sonos app this can be a great way to quickly put on music for a specific situation like working or a dinner party foreign brings detail to lead vocals and instruments that you don't find in many speakers its size in my experience many smaller speakers struggle with Brahms cello sonatas it's easy to muddy the low sounds of the cello and lose all the detail or to cut out all the booming base of both the cello and the piano a pair of Sonos Aero 100s bring the roster poets and second recordings to life in just the right EQ for rock and pop music well it has strong bass for the speaker size the sheer physics mean it's not going to thump the bass and drum like a larger speaker you can always pair it with a Sonos sub mini to add bass if you need it but that's a hefty addition to the price tag of the setup the speakers also don't separate out all instruments in a recording in the same way that a homepod 2 or a bigger Sonos Aero 300 will the Aero 100 also lacks spatial audio support with two main tweeters facing forward though the era 100 speakers bring the detail of the music right to you in a way that I don't often hear well a homepod 2 separates out the instruments it also makes the music feel more distant and not as loud at similar volume level ultimately sound is a personal preference but I don't think you would be disappointed by the performance of the era 100 for its price foreign is an incredibly versatile speaker and it sounds just as good as the 50 more expensive homepod 2s for sound quality and gives you the flexibility of using the Sonos system for playing music or Apple's AirPlay 2 with homekit getting one or two eras along with the homepod mini gives you almost everything you want on the Apple smart home side well gaining the options of Sonos with different music Services Lutron caseta remote Sonos voice assistant and many other smart home Integrations that Sonos has I would love to see Sonos add support for Siri as ecobee did with their thermostats but I don't know if that's ever going to happen I would also love to see what Apple could make in more Speaker sizes and options Apple clearly has a talented audio team and while the homepod 2 is exceptional I think Apple could provide alternatives to challenge Sonos in more home audio configurations if you live in a Syrian Apple based smart home you can't beat the convenience of speaking to a homepod but if you listen to lots of music as we do Sonos speakers are well worth the investment as they play well with the rest of your Apple home on top of that era 100s give you lots of options for where you can put them as your smart home needs inevitably evolve over time links to the products mentioned today as well as following me on social media can be found in the description below the like button subscribe to the channel if you aren't already thanks again so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one foreign [Music]

Channel: Eric Welander

Views: 73,744

Keywords: Eric Welander, Windy Tech, apple, apple ecosystem, HomeKit, sonos era 100 review, sonos era 100 vs homepod 2, sonos era 100 atmos, sonos era 100 vs one sl, sonos era 100 line in, sonos era 100 ethernet, sonos era 100, sonos, era 100, homepod 2, smart speaker, apple smart home, apple home

Id: UsTAIHZys1o

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 09 2023