The Sonos Era 300 is one of the newest Sonos speakers released on 28 March 2023 and delivers really nice sound performance with Dolby Atmos sound effects. This speaker comes with a unique hour glass shape design which allows the sound to be distributed effectively from its six drivers. The speaker is relatively compact, measuring 6.3 inches in height, 10.2 inches in width, and 7.2 inches in depth, but it’s advised to place it in an open area for optimal sound dispersion.
The Sonos Era 300 is designed primarily for surround sound and features custom waveguide technology which disperses the sound around you to create a spacious stereo soundstage. The Era 300 is also compatible with the Sonos Arc or Beam (Generation 2) and you can get two Era 300 speakers to complete a Dolby Atmos surround sound setup in your living room for a full cinematic experience. The Sonos Era 300 supports both wireless Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connections (or an auxiliary cable with the Sonos Line-in adapter).
The Sonos Era 300 also supports Sonos Radio and Sonos Voice control for easy voice commands and comes with an on-board microphone for this purpose.
Sound Performance
When we first tested the Sonos Era 300 speaker, we found the sound performance to be really expansive and room-filling, even more so than the Sonos Era 100 speakers. The speaker can get really loud and still keep the bass in check with great depth and gravitas (especially if you listen to live jazz performances from Dusty Springfield or Tony Bennett). These speakers have a really refined sound and great timbre ranges, making vocals sound crisp and pristine. While it may not match the Sonos Five in terms of bass presence and detail, it still provides a a really immersive audio experience.
We tested out the Sonos Era 300’s spatial audio with a couple of movies including Batman: The Dark Night Rises and we have to say that we were overwhelmed by how good the sound effects felt on the Sonos Era 300. Movie sound effects sound really spacious and directional, and you can literally hear projectiles flying across your room with superb imaging (they sound almost too real). Footsteps walking behind you can be heard with a level of realism that you rarely get with any speaker. Cinematic bass effects sounded tremendous and it felt as though we were sitting inside a real-life IMAX theater with incredible bass effects.
The 3D spatial imaging gets even better when paired with the Sonos Arc soundbar – the frontal and side sound effects are synced with really good spatial differentiation. The Sonos Era 300 and Sonos Arc combo is a really good home theater system with surround sound effects, although you will need two Era 300 speakers to achieve this effect. In our view, the Sonos Era 300 works best in a home theater setup rather than just a standalone home speaker, but they still deliver some serious bass notes with really good spatial sound effects if you intend to use them as a standalone home speaker for music.
Design
The Era 300 is equipped with Sonos’ newly redesigned touch controls for ease of use, and features separate track skipping and volume functions. Additionally, there is a grooved volume slider for an analog feel to loudness adjustments. The speaker also includes a quick tap-to-mute control and a microphone kill switch for privacy.
One of the key features of the Era 300 is its Trueplay tuning, which optimizes speaker output based on its placement in a room. This feature, previously available only for iPhone users, can now be used with Android devices as well due to the built-in microphones in the speaker. While the automatic Trueplay tuning is convenient, you might find that manually tuning with an iPhone yields slightly better results.
As for its smart capabilities, the Era 300 supports Amazon’s Alexa and Sonos’ own music-focused assistant, though it no longer works with Google Assistant due to changes in technical requirements from Google. This might be a downside for those who prefer Google Assistant, although we would still recommend this speaker for its sound performance.
Specs
The Sonos Era 300 provides several specs and performance upgrades over the Sonos Era 100 speakers. The Era 300 comes equipped with six class-D digital amplifiers which are precision-tuned to match the speaker’s acoustic architecture. It is also equipped with four tweeters that deliver really nice highs and midrange frequencies (it includes a forward-angled mid tweeter for a smooth center image, and two side-angled mid-tweeters for stereo separation, and an upward angled tweeter for directional sounds with Dolby Atmos. The speaker also features two woofers that maximize bass performance and are strategically angled at the back of the speaker to support stereo playback.
One of the things that we liked about the Sonos Era 300 is that it comes with a built-in far-field microphone array for voice control and Trueplay tuning – this system automatically calibrates the sound according to your room acoustics and optimizes the sound output.
The Era 300 measures 6.3 x 10.24 x 7.28” and weighs approximately 9.85 lbs. The speaker is compatible with Wi-Fi 6 and supports most network routers. It also supports Bluetooth 5.0 and you can adjust the EQ settings through the Sonos app which we found to be really intuitive and helpful to adjust the sound output.
The Verdict?
The Sonos Era 300 wireless speaker is a really good surround sound speaker designed to deliver Dolby Atmos sound and immersive music performance. We really enjoyed listening to the Sonos Era 300 – they deliver superb bass quality and crystal clear highs with pristine vocals. They are very enjoyable to listen to and also come with all the smart features (including voice command support) that you would expect from a smart speaker, and you can also stream music from all your favorite services over Wi-Fi.
Having said that, we felt that the Sonos Era 300 truly shines when it is paired with the Sonos Arc soundbar to create a full Dolby Atmos home theater experience. While it’s great as a standalone speaker, the Era 300 truly shines when it is in a home theater setup and you get to appreciate the 3D spatial imaging and separation in its full glory. We highly recommend pairing the Sonos Era 300 with the Sonos Arc soundbar to achieve this full cinematic effect, otherwise it performs reasonably well as a home Bluetooth speaker with really nice sound performance.