Sonos dont change models very often, and not without going forward
Expectations were high then when we were told that the Play5 was going to be replaced
Over the years we have sold many many of these to delighted customer s
Whether its your main music player or an add-on for an extra room the Play5's performance and simplicity have been key factors in it's incredible success
With the market overcrowded with me-too wireless music systems it's easy to forget that when Sonos first introduced the Play5 most people in the hifi trade didnt know what it was, let alone consumers. It was Sonos's original all-in-one box music streamer/amplifier/speaker
It really was that ground-breaking!
Replacing this 7 year old design was never going to be easy and an experienced (cynical?) hifi geek like me is notoriously difficult to impress
I'm impressed!
Yes it sounds much clearer,
yes the larger cabinet gives more bass ,
and yes the wifi is even more stable,
however there is even more..
While Linn's space optimisation has been the first such system to really work with no downsides the new Play5 has a feature called TruePlay which gives a simplified ver sion
Sure the limited frequency range compared to a Linn speaker means that the improvement isn't in the same league but what it does do it does very well
It really works, and it's great to see a mainstream company giving real actual improvements!
That's the cynic in me, most products in this range have no new design, copy everything else around and are plain boring
This isn't boring, it's really clever, it will sell extremely well
