The joy started when the box arrived. The packaging has some plastic sliders built into it, used to unlock the lid. The box is such good quality that you’ll want to keep it for transportation.
Lifting out the speaker reavealed it was reassuringly heavy. It also comes with an ethernet cable and it’s fitted with a tactile rubber plug.
It didn’t take long to set up. Once I’d plugged it in, I downloaded the iPhone app which then helped me connect to the new Sonos. After this, the app stepped me through the calibration procedure. I needed to remove the cover from my iPhone to do this so that it didn’t affect the microphone. I was then instructed to move around the room, waving my iPhone up and down. I’m pretty glad that we have net curtains, because if the neighbours saw me doing this, it would have looked like I was doing an impression of a wounded seagull. It was worth it in the end, however, as the speaker had calibrated itself to my kitchen and taken into account background noises such as the fridge freezer and the gas boiler.
Once I had set up the device to work with my Spotify account, I was good to go. The first track I tried was “Hotline Bling” by Drake. I knew it has some deep bass on it, having listened previously to the track on my stereo HiFi with some bookshelf speakers and an old Yamaha subwoofer.
I was shocked to find that the bass track to Hotline Bling had even more richness and bass than I’d heard before. You can feel the deep bass radiate through the room. Not only that, the sound is clean, crisp and you can hear every layer of the music. The stereo projection of the unit does depend on good placement; I have mine in the middle of the kitchen, so when I’m sitting near one side of the room, I don’t hear the stereo sound so well. This is not the fault of the speaker, but the place I chose to host it. You can resolve this kind of situation by buying 2 x Sonos PLAY:5 speakers, which automatically reconfigure themselves as a stereo pair. It does do a very good job however of firing out the sound into the far corners of the room.
I was also very pleased to see a 3.5mm jack on the back of the Sonos. You need to select the “Line-In” option from the PC app (downloadable from the Sonos website) or the iPhone app. This means that you can connect it to an Echo Input or other third party device.
I did in the past have some issues connecting to the Sonos from my iPhone app. I later found this to be an issue with my iPhone, and it all worked again when I restarted my iPhone. I’ve also noticed stability has improved somewhat, after various software updates from Sonos which can be introduced via the iPhone app. The best software upgrade was when I received the new Version 9.0 update, which enabled AirPlay on my iPhone to select the Sonos as an output device. I can now pipe any sound from my iPhone straight to the Sonos. For example, sound from a BBC News website video, or YouTube.
I am now using the Sonos:5 with Google Assistant. It links to Spotify, so I can ask it to play tracks using my Spotify account, via my iPhone; in case you were wondering if there was a workaround to using it like an Amazon Echo.
I haven’t covered all the features here, but this is a great speaker. The most important feature is the sound, and this does sound very well. The bass, for its size, has to be heard to be believed.