Breaking New Ground

The leader in smart speaker systems branches out with a new amplifier. CliffJoseph hooks up his loudspeakers

- Cliff Joseph

Best known for its popular range of multi-room speakers and soundbars, Sonos hasn’t really made much of an impact on the world of networked audio components so far. The new Sonos Amp aims to change this, though, and could prove to be a tempting solution for those wanting to bring multi-room to an existing favourite pair of passive loudspeakers.

The Amp has a somewhat innocuous design, consisting of a plain black box with the only visible details being the touch-sensitive Volume and Play/ Pause controls on the front and a large circular groove located on the top to circulate air for cooling. The compact design is very much intended for homes where space is a premium. Sonos also has an eye on the custom-install market, and the slimline Amp is intended to be stackable or rack-mounted, so that more ambitious users or installers can connect multiple Amps to a series of speakers in different rooms and can even be set to output in dual-mono – Sonos is working with specialists such as Sonance to provide complete systems for in-ceiling and wall speaker installations.

Compared with a conventional integrated amplifi er or receiver, the Amp might not seem particularly well equipped with connectivity options. Rated at 2x 125W into 8ohm, there’s a set of 4mm speaker plugs/binding posts to drive a pair of passive wired speakers and an RCA output for a wired subwoofer, plus a stereo line-level RCA input.

Like all Sonos devices, the Amp connects to your home network, either via wi-fi or one of the two Ethernet ports around the back to enable you to stream music from any networked device, as well as music services such as Spotify, Tidal and Qobuz to a pair of traditional wired speakers of your own choosing.