Voices come through beautifully, speckled with warmth and full of life that I didn't expect from a speaker this size. What really struck me, though, was the clarity in the highs and mids. Speaking of, how does this little thing perform? Well, it won't change your life, but the two drivers, a tweeter and a midwoofer combine to create a fairly robust sound, a little boomy in the low-end but nothing too egregious. While the Move needed to be explicitly connected to either Wi-Fi or Bluetooth, the Roam makes no distinction, which is just as nice as it sounds. That same part enables the Roam to maintain a Bluetooth connection to a phone while it's connected to a Wi-Fi network, allowing seamless handoffs and enabling a neat passthrough feature I'll talk about later. The Roam sounds fantastic for its size, but the speaker struggles to fill larger rooms or big outdoor spaces. I actually found the Roam to have the strongest Wi-Fi signal of any Sonos speaker to date, likely due to the upgraded 802.11ac-compatible chip inside it. There's also AirPlay 2 support for iPhone users too. I generally eschew the Sonos app entirely to control the half-dozen speakers strewn about my house instead, I use Spotify Connect, which detects each individual speaker or grouping as long as they're on the same Wi-Fi network. The only thing you can't do is use a pair of Roams as rear channels in a home theater setup, which is completely understandable. Like other Sonos speakers, you can choose to play audio through the Roam alone or grouped in any combination you so which, including a stereo pair with another Roam speaker. After charging and following some prompts, you're able to connect it to various streaming services, including Spotify, Apple Music, and dozens of other options, along with Sonos's own underrated hosted radio product that runs some excellent programming hosted by musicians like Thom Yorke and Brittany Howard. The Roam is the ideal portable speaker - it's easy to use, easy to charge, durable without looking overtly rugged, and, most importantly, it sounds pretty good.Įven if you don't have existing Sonos speakers at home - and the company hopes the Roam will be a gateway of sorts - the Roam is easy to set up with the new S2 app. Why is this important? Because the company appears to have a knack for releasing products at just the right time. The Roam feels like the right product for Sonos to release right now. In June, it launched the $699 Sonos Arc, timed perfectly for lockdowns and Hamilton on Disney+. After successfully launching the not-so-portable portable Move speaker at the end of 2019, it hit a rough patch at the beginning of 2020 that involved obsoleting some of its aging products, awkwardly moving to a new software platform, suing Google for a second time, and hitting an all-time stock low.Īs people were forced to stay home throughout the spring and summer of last year, Sonos saw its products - especially that newly launched Move - sell in huge numbers as people discovered the benefits of connecting speakers over a mesh Wi-Fi network. Source: Daniel Bader / Android Central (Image credit: Source: Daniel Bader / Android Central) As expected, the hardy little thing survived her torment and continues playing on my desk next to me as I write this. To test this new achievement, I took the Roam with me to the local playground, encouraged my daughter to throw the speaker into the muddy sandbox, and then helped her wash it in the sink when we got home. This is also Sonos's first IP67-certified speaker, which means you can fully submerge it in water or blight it with dust without risking its internals. Even the promo images can't prepare you for how portable this thing actually is. Sonos told me that the Roam's primary purpose is to act like a real Wi-Fi speaker in any housebound situation while quickly converting to a Bluetooth one when the backpack comes out. The company's other Bluetooth-enabled speaker, the Move, dwarfs this one in every dimension, and it even comes in smaller than many of the long-neglected Bluetooth speakers have scattered around my house. I was genuinely surprised at the Roam's diminutive size when I first saw it. (Image credit: Source: Daniel Bader / Android Central) Source: Daniel Bader / Android Central The Sonos Roam next to the UE Boom 3.
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