STEREO GUIDE verdict
+ natural to warm, pleasing sound
+ powerful, rich bass
+ ultimately flexible and versatile
- Ambience and imaging require 2 units
- somewhat heavy for outdoor use
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Sound: Tonal balance / transparency7
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Price / Performance8.5
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Tone: Bass / Dynamics7.8
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Eas of use / Connectivity9.7
It is just slightly bigger and heavier than the best-selling Sonos One, has similar specs, and yet is almost twice as expensive. So what speaks for the Sonos Move?
A lot, as it is a hybrid between multiroom zone speaker in your home and a battery-powered mobile bluetooth speaker. It might really fill a gap in the market for all those who want to use one and the same speaker sometimes in their home network with the Sonos app, sometimes on the beach or in the garden. And as it is easily replacing two speakers at once, it also offers adequate added value and is in best price company in its class with the similarly designed Bose Portable Smart Speaker.
At 3 kilograms, the Move is slightly exceeding the limits of what one might be wanting to carrying around in a handbag. It offers either Bluetooth connection as well as home Wi-Fi network integration with full multiroom functionality. And it remains self-sufficient for a correspondingly long period of time thanks to its battery offering a reasonable 11 hours of runtime. Outdoor operation is absolutely possible. Sonos specifies water and dust protection as meeting ingress protection class IP56. In addition, the manufacturer promises that the Move is also shock-resistant. As a precaution, we refrained from doing some field testing so you have to believe them or not.
Plenty of features and applications
At 14 x 24 centimetres, it’s still subtle enough for placing it into a luxurious living room, and its compact depth of 12.5 cm does not require too much space on a shelf either. Thanks to a rubber base it is standing pretty solidly.
Sonos does not even try to squeeze a full stereo arrangement into this narrow encolure. The Move, like its little brother Roam, is a monaural concept offering a 2way crossover. So we expect to find a bass-midrange driver plus a tweeter dome inside. The latter being equipped with some kind of horn-like waveguide, which should be of particular advantage when being placed in sparsely furnished and correspondingly reverberant rooms.
It might even be the best-in-class for such environment as the excellent acoustic (self-)calibration called Trueplay is built in. In this case, you don’t even need an Apple smartphone (as it is mandatory for most Sonos products). The Move offers an automatic self-calibration taking advantage of its built-in mic. It is kind of permanently monitoring and comparing input and acoustic output signals as soon as the speaker notices a change in position. Fidgeting with the smartphone in the surrounding air is no longer necessary. This gives it an advantage over other Sonos speakers for Android users. They could not use Trueplay on their smart devices.
In normal WiFi operation, the Move is part of a home multi-room environment together with other Sonos components. However, it can also be put into standalone Bluetooth mode with just pressing a button on the back. In this case connection to the Sonos S2 app is abandoned automatically. A battery runtime of 11 hours should be more than enough for a barbecue or a garden party.
No analogue inputs on the Sonos Move
You won’t find an analogue or classic wired digital input. Google Chromecast is also not included, but Airplay 2 is. And so is roon! As usual with Sonos, the Move only accepts data streams up to a resolution of PCM 48/24. Connected to your local network, the most important streaming services from Spotify to Amazon to Apple Music are all available.
However, the integrated mic array in the hexagon on the top is not just serving self-calibration purposes. It also enables voice assistant control. Those who use Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa can command it directly.
Setup and integration of a Sonos Move
The Sonos system including the S2 app is sophisticated and, as always, quite easy to connect to your local WiFi. This is solely possible wirelessly via a temporary Bluetooth connection; there is no Ethernet connection on the Move.
Sonos Move sound quality
The Move showed managed to gain considerable advantage of its weight and volume in the listening test: we found its bass to be juicy to fatm extremely confident and seemed to only loose some dynamic power at significantly unhealthy SPL.
Voices and acoustic instruments sounded a bit on the rather warm side offering subtle timbres, but without lacking any transparency or fine detail. With recordings of classical music or jazz offering fat bass, this could be too much of a good thing, especially in smaller rooms, despite the acoustic calibration. In this case, it is recommended to deactivate the loudness mode that is activated by default. However, this might result in loosing some refinement and treble brilliance. The loudness can otherwise remain activated. We found the Move to play pretty confidently offering a somewhat dominant foundation, never leading to any bloated bass on the other hand but being really fun to listen to even at lower levels.
In rooms, the sound image focused quite noticeably on the point where the Move was located, which in turn resulted in a good clarity and relaxed dynamics at larger listening distances.
Alternatives to the Sonos Move
Those who already use the Sonos system at home because of the exemplary app might anyways stay with Sonos and care little about alternatives. They are also practically non-existent if you are looking for a battery-powered WiFi zone speaker plus an additional Bluetooth connectivity for mobile use. Few might count the Bose Portable smart speaker as an alternative but in terms of sound quality it is not, sounding rather diffuse. Those who only value the flexibility, not the richness of sound nor higher SPLs, might consider the ultra-compact Sonos Roam an alternative.
Specifications Sonos Move
- Retail price: approx. 400 dollars/pounds/euros
- Dimensions (W x H x D): 14 x 24 x 12.5 cm
- Weight: 3 kg
- Features: 2-way, Stereo Pairing, Bluetooth, WiFi, Airplay 2, Roon, Sonos 2 app compatible, standalone Trueplay room calibration, Alexa and Google Assistant voice control .
- More at www.sonos.com
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