HOT FIVE #2
BLINDED BY THE HEIGHT
Sonos Era 300
It’s been nearly a century since a trip to Alan Blumlein’s local cinema gave the English engineer the idea for stereo sound – and while most of us have moved on from playing thick shellac records on the Edison phonographs of the early 20th century, two-channel audio remains the dominant format for playing back tunes. But maybe not for much longer. The six drivers inside the new Sonos Era 300 all point in different directions – two woofers and two tweeters are angled left and right, another tweeter points forwards, and a fourth aims upwards to reflect sound off the ceiling – meaning you can use it to listen to spatial audio. Right now, it only supports Dolby Atmos via Amazon Music Unlimited, but you can also pair two Eras with a Sonos Arc or Beam (Gen 2) for full-on Atmos surround sound. Six class-D digital amplifiers should give each Era 300 enough oomph to fill a room on its own, though, and Sonos has finally extended its Trueplay customisation tech to Android owners (although it doesn’t use the phone’s microphones for fine-tuning like on iOS). If only Alan were still around to hear it – it’d blow his socks off. As hot as… a new Bing Crosby single in 1932 £449 / sonos.com