Sonos Era 300 guide for PC

With its huge scale of engaging sound, wide range of features and seamless Sonos experience, the Era 300 is an impressive speaker that can do it all

"The goal with Era 300 was really to create the best standalone spatial audio experience of any single speaker." As far as intentions go, it’s a bold statement from Sonos.

Sonos's Era 300 is a wireless smart speaker that comes packing all the goodness and seamlessness of a Sonos system, with a key stand-out feature that Sonos believes is the next generation of sound: spatial audio.

Spatial audio has been in the spotlight in recent years, featuring in Dolby Atmos-soundtracked movies, TV shows and now music. Spearheaded by Apple, ‘spatial audio’ has turned into a catch-all term that covers any music that uses the Dolby Atmos format to create multiple channels of audio (beyond the standard two) to deliver a greater sense of immersion. For music, which has been in good ol’ stereo for many decades, that’s quite a big change.
Apple led the charge this year with its spatial audio-toting HomePod 2 smart speaker, which impressed us with its musical talents across the board. Will the bigger, more expensive Sonos Era 300 beat Apple at its own game? And more importantly, will the Era 300 deliver an enjoyable sonic experience beyond just spatial audio?

Sonos Era 300 review: Room to breathe
Sonos takes some risks that pay off with its latest speaker

My first few days with the Sonos Era 300 were frustrating, and it had nothing to do with the matte black speaker failing to blend in with my living room's messy decor. My right ear was blocked and everything sounded muddled, including the Dolby Atmos-mastered tracks I desperately wanted to find as compelling and straight-up better than whatever stereo mixes Spotify had been spitting out of various connected speakers for years. My first impressions of the Era 300 (and the smaller Era 100), in a small crowded Manhattan office officiated by the Giles Martin, made me hopeful that spatial audio — nascent, but not an entirely new concept to me at the time — was as transformative as Sonos wants it to be.

Back at home, in my capacious and oddly-shaped living room, and even up in my more aurally-friendly office, I'm not so sure. The Era 300, even at $449 USD, is definitely the best bang-for-your-buck connected speaker you can buy today — it unsurprisingly trounces the fidelity of the $299 HomePod 2 and now-$199 Amazon Echo Studio — and fits into Sonos's expanding speaker lineup as both a standalone speaker and part of an existing system.

But its success hinges on a few key things: your embrace of a new music format that, right now, is limited to two streaming services; and how willing you are to tolerate Sonos's many quirks, even if you're already embedded in the ecosystem as I am.
Review: Sonos Era 300
Yes, it has looks only a mother could love—but shut your eyes and wait till you hear how mind-blowingly good this new speaker is.
NO, OF COURSE you don’t buy a speaker to look at it. But should your gaze fall upon your speaker while you’re enjoying its sound, ideally the sight of it shouldn’t make you wince. So it’s just as well that Era 300, the latest Sonos wireless speaker and the company’s first foray into spatial audio (except for its Dolby Atmos–enabled soundbars, of course), is such an impressive and accomplished performer—its physical appearance is easy to overlook. Unless you somehow find it in your field of vision unexpectedly, anyhow, in which case it never ceases to be startling.

It’s fair to say Sonos’ ubiquity has, until now, been established as much on its utterly painless ownership experience as on the sound its products actually make. “Reasonably competitive” sound quality is plenty good enough for many listeners if it’s accompanied by class-leading ergonomics, an impeccable control app, and the simplest, most straightforward multi-room audio ecosystem around.