Why we chose this
Spatial audio has been a marketing claim for five years. The Era 300 is the first speaker where we sat down with a familiar album, heard things in the mix we'd never noticed, and didn't immediately suspect the format was just adding reverb. It's a real upgrade for music — not just movies.
The review
The Era 300 is the first Sonos that genuinely sells the idea of spatial audio for music. The driver arrangement is the trick: six drivers firing forward, up, and sideways create a soundstage that places instruments outside the physical box, and Atmos-mixed albums on Apple Music and Amazon Music HD finally have a speaker that delivers the format properly. The Era 300 also fixes Sonos's long-running setup-hell complaint with a built-in mic for room correction (no phone walk-around required), USB-C line-in for turntables, and Bluetooth that actually works for guests. Pair two of them as rears with an Arc and you have a 5.1.4 Atmos system without running a single speaker wire. The voice control is local now (Sonos Voice) and the cloud lock-in is finally optional rather than a one-way door. Build quality is what you expect from Sonos: heavy, premium, and worth touching.
