The new Sonos Play has become a sounding board for the office and kitchen

I work from home, so I usually listen to audio through headphones or AirPods. But I’ve always wanted a desktop speaker that wouldn’t take up a lot of space, which made the new Sonos Play the first suitable Sonos product for review.

The Play, which launched in March, is Sonos’ first new device in more than a year. The $299 speaker is a hybrid speaker: part home speaker, part portable. It sits on your desk in a pill-shaped dock, but at 1.3kg, with a “helper loop” on the back, it’s easy to carry around the house or take outside.

While testing it, I would often start a podcast at my desk and carry the play into the kitchen while I cooked or made coffee. The advantage over wearing AirPods is that you stay aware of your surroundings, so you no longer miss what someone in the room is saying. You don’t need to rely on voice commands to control playback; Sonos Assistant and Alexa are both integrated.

Physical controls are another advantage. Skipping tracks or adjusting the volume with greasy hands is alien to the AirPods; The operating buttons are more forgiving. However, the controls themselves are easy to miss – they’re the same color as the silicone top and barely rise above the surface. After a few days I had memorized their locations, but the learning curve was a minor frustration that could have been avoided with better contrast or more tactile buttons.

The speaker is sturdy and IP67-rated, which means it can withstand rain and brief submersion – I ran it under the tap without a problem. It can also charge your phone in a pinch, and doubles as a power bank, which is a welcome feature for outdoor use.

For audio, the Play relies on dual-angle woofers, a midrange tweeter, and three digital tweeters, with two passive radiators to boost bass outdoors. The result is balanced and detailed at moderate volumes – instrument separation is particularly good. However, the soundstage is narrow, meaning the music can sound somewhat contained rather than expansive, and at higher levels, the mix loses some of its clarity.

The Play is a perfect fit for the office or patio; It’s not trying to fill the room. Therefore, Sonos’s Era 100 SL – launched alongside the Play – is the better option. Two playback units can be paired in a stereo configuration, either through the app, or, more intelligently, by pressing the play/pause button on both speakers simultaneously. It’s a useful feature that makes a noticeable difference to music, though less of a difference to TV sound – which these soundbars weren’t designed for anyway.

Sonos has also built in Trueplay, which uses the speaker’s microphones to automatically calibrate sound based on the room. Previous versions of this feature required waving your phone around the space to adjust the volume, a weird workaround that didn’t make any sense on a portable speaker. The new implementation handles it automatically.

It was Sonos Well-publicized struggles With its implementation — disappearing speakers, faulty volume controls — and while the company has made meaningful improvements, there are still some rough edges. For example, syncing between the Play and my MacBook was sometimes slow, and playing or pausing audio on YouTube sometimes resulted in a noticeable delay before the speaker responded.

Switching audio between speakers worked reliably through AirPlay but failed repeatedly in the Sonos app until I installed the Apple Music integration — and even then, the process was more complicated than it needed to be.

The Apply button in the Sonos app, required to confirm speaker changes, feels like an unnecessary extra step. AirPlay handles the same procedure with a single click.

The Pocket Casts integration has a resume bug: podcasts restart from the beginning instead of continuing where you left off.

Overall, the Sonos Play is a solid speaker that largely lives up to its premise. The app issues are real but not deal-breakers, and Sonos has shown it’s willing to repeat. If portability isn’t a priority, the Era 100 ($219) or Era 100 SL ($189) offer more volume for less money. If you want something more powerful and truly portable, the Sonos Roam 2 or JBL Charge 6 are worth considering. But if you want a speaker that works well on the desk and the back porch, the Play makes a compelling case for itself.