But as we showed with GooglesNest Audio, theres no reason wireless speakers cant bring serious sound quality.
You should watch that:
But sometimes we like to do get different perspectives here at TNW.
Its main limitation is that it wont get crazy loud, but the sound thatisthere has remarkable tonal balance.
It’s free, every week, in your inbox.
The following represents the speaker playing back music in its purest form.
Thats about as loud as an old-school vacuum cleaner if you want some, umm, perspective.
Okay, I realize the above probably just looks like a bunch of squiggly lines to you.
I wrotea whole guideon how to interpret these charts, and why theyre so useful to know.
The above graph is called a spinorama.
The speaker was measured in its vertical orientation, standing on its end.
The white curve above is the listening window.
We generally want this to be a flat line.
Basically, its what youll hear when youre positioned somewhere roughly in front of the speaker.
This is whats going to matter the most when youre listening to the speaker outdoors.
We want this to be roughly a flat line, especially from roughly 200 Hz to 10kHz.
The Sonos Roam gives us just that for the most part.
In fact, up to about 5kHz, the Roam is actually one of the flattest speakers Ive measured!
Better than some multi-thousand-dollar speakers.
Thereissome excess treble energy above 6kHz that later dips above 15kHz.
But hey, you cant win them all.
Heres how the bass changes at 10% volume increments, going from 100% volume to 50%.
I measure this by getting the microphone as close to the woofer as possible.
you might see how after 60 percent, Sonos starts limiting the bass.
So if your concern is maximum sound quality, you dont want to go much louder than that.
Next, were going to look at the purple line in the spinoramas.
If the reflected sound is too different from the direct sound, the speaker sounds sucky.
We see the Roam also does this well.
The relationship between the direct sound and off-axis sound tells us the speakers directivity.
That said, it also shows that the sound changes when youre somewhere in front of the speake.
Its also worth noting the speaker performs differently in different orientations.
Perhaps there are better values out there.
But within its comfort zone, the Sonos Roam performs extremely well.
Also tagged with
