The wireless home-audio specialist Sonos has unveiled the Roam, its smaller, cheaper portable speaker with Bluetooth and wifi that works as well at home as it does outdoors.
The rugged triangular Roam weighs 430g and is about the size of a water bottle. The aim is that it will avoid ending up stuck in a drawer collecting dust like most portable speakers by sounding good enough and working well enough to warrant being used at home too, connecting to Sonos’ smart multi-room wifi system.
That means it will work like any other non-battery powered Sonos speaker able to stream music directly via wifi from more than 100 different music services, including Spotify and Apple Music, and be grouped with other speakers to play music all over the home. It also supports Apple’s AirPlay 2 and smart speaker functionality with either Google Assistant and Amazon’s Alexa.
The Roam has separate woofer and tweeter speakers with Sonos’s Trueplay technology, which automatically tunes the sound accounting for acoustics, obstacles and position to sound its best at all times.
The speaker can share music being streamed to it via Bluetooth to others and will seamlessly switch between Bluetooth and wifi when you return home.
It is water resistant with an IP67 rating (one-metre depths for 30 minutes) and lasts up to 10 hours between charges via USB-C or standard Qi wireless charging. Sonos is also selling an optional wireless charging stand that magnetically attaches to the base.
The Roam follows the successful introduction of the Move at the start of 2020, which is a battery powered version of the firm’s popular One speaker. Weighing 3kg and costing £399, it was less a portable speaker and more one you could move around the house or into the garden.
Sonos intends the Roam to be both an addition to existing Sonos setups to take the experience outdoors as well as a cheaper introduction to the firm’s market-leading systems
The Roam costs £159 in the UK and $169 in the US and will start shipping on 20 April.
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