The new Era 100 SL is the company’s latest compact wireless speaker and is essentially the quieter brother of the Era 100: the same excellent audio DNA, just without built-in voice control.
No voice assistant means you won’t accidentally order a pizza in the middle of the playlist, which is either a bug or a feature depending on your willpower. What it will do is sit quietly on a shelf – at 182.5 x 120 x 130.5mm it truly disappears into a room – and then, as soon as you press play, completely defy its size. It doesn’t look like anything under two kilograms, but it sounds like a lot more.
The speaker who doesn’t answer anything
The hardware spec reads like Sonos means business: three Class D amplifiers, a midrange driver, and a pair of tweeters that sit at an angle instead of pointing directly forward. This last detail is more important than it sounds – music from a speaker aimed at one point in the room behaves very differently than music pushed out in two directions.
Rooms are awkward, irregular spaces, and the Era 100 SL at least tries to work with it rather than against it. The woofer prevents the low end from collapsing, which in such a small speaker is the difference between the bass you feel and the bass you just read about on the spec sheet.
Wireless works via WiFi 6 or Bluetooth 5.3 – the choice is always yours. Does anyone want to stick their phone directly on it? Bluetooth button on the back, done. Want a cleaner, uninterrupted stream? WiFi. Both live from the same speaker without fighting each other for dominance.
AirPlay 2 is available for Apple homes, and a USB-C port on the back manages wired sources – turntable, laptop, whatever – via Sonos’ line-in or combo adapter. These are sold separately, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has bought Sonos devices before. For those interested in specs, the show runs a quad-core 4xA55 processor clocked at 1.4GHz, supported by 1GB of DDR4 RAM and 4GB of storage.
Simple on the outside, smarter on the inside than it looks
The touch controls are at the top – volume, play, pause, skip, group – and are the kind of things you use without thinking about it, which is exactly what it’s all about. There’s also a small LED on the front that’s easy to ignore until it’s midnight and you’re squinting at it, trying to figure out why the speaker is silent.
The Sonos app offers more comprehensive control: EQ adjustments for bass, treble, and volume, as well as Trueplay, which acoustically travels through your room, figures out what your sofa and bookshelves are doing to the sound, and corrects it quietly. It requires an iOS device to function properly, which will irritate some people, and rightly so.
The decor won’t ruin your evening. Plug in the 6-foot power cord, open the app, and tap through a handful of screens. That’s it really. Grab a second device and pair it into a proper stereo setup or use it as rear surround speakers in a home theater – they handle this task well too.
