Sonos Play Review: A Home Speaker That Likes to Travel

The Sonos Play is technically a portable speaker, but after using it for around two weeks, I don’t think that’s the best way to describe it.

At AED 1,499, this isn’t the sort of Bluetooth speaker you would casually toss into a backpack and carry everywhere. It weighs 1.3kg, which is light enough to move around the house easily, but substantial enough that you will certainly notice it if you plan to lug it around all day. Instead, the Play feels more like a proper home speaker that happens to have a built-in battery.

This becomes clear once you start using it. The Play can permanently live on your desktop, bookshelf, or kitchen counter, connected over WiFi and sitting on its charging base, and then be picked up and taken to another room whenever you want. If you are heading out for a picnic, a party, or to visit someone, it’s portable enough to throw into the car without much thought. I just wouldn’t want to hike around with it strapped to my back.

Sonos has equipped the Play accordingly. It supports both WiFi and Bluetooth, has IP67 water and dust resistance, Automatic Trueplay room tuning, voice control, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, multi-room audio support and a replaceable battery rated for up to 24 hours of playback. There is also a charging dock included in the box, allowing the speaker to behave much like a permanently installed home unit until you decide to take it somewhere.

After two weeks of regular use, I have come away quite impressed. The Play is superbly built, ridiculously easy to connect and use across different devices, and the audio quality is excellent across the board. Whether all of that is enough to justify AED 1,499 is something we will come back to later.

How Is the Sonos Play Designed and Built?

The Sonos Play isn’t going to win any awards for being visually adventurous, but I don’t think it needs to. It follows the same understated design language as most Sonos products, with an oval-shaped body, rounded edges and a large grille covering most of the speaker.

I received the black version, and the simple aesthetics make it easy to slot into almost any setup without drawing too much attention to itself. Put it on a desktop, a bookshelf, or somewhere in the living room, and it largely disappears into the surroundings, which is probably exactly what you would want from a speaker designed to live permanently in the house.

The build quality, however, is immediately noticeable. The Play measures around 192 x 113 x 77 mm and weighs 1.3kg, giving it a reassuring heft when you pick it up. The wraparound grille has a slightly soft, textured finish that provides good grip, while the top and bottom use a smooth, rubberised material.

Thankfully, the rubber doesn’t have that overly tacky texture that feels like it will collect every strand of hair and piece of dust in the room. It does pick up some fingerprints and debris over time, particularly on the black model, but it is easy enough to wipe clean.

On top are the volume down, play/pause, volume up and Sonos buttons, all of which have a satisfying amount of resistance. They aren’t overly soft, so you won’t accidentally activate anything, nor do they require so much pressure that they become annoying. Double-pressing play/pause skips forward, while a triple press goes back to the previous track.

Around the rear are the power button, a physical microphone switch, Bluetooth pairing button and the USB-C port. I do wish Sonos had moved the Bluetooth button somewhere on the top of the speaker, though. If you mostly use WiFi, this probably won’t matter, but I regularly switched between the two modes during testing and having to reach behind the Play every time became mildly inconvenient.

It becomes even more noticeable if you have the speaker tucked inside a shelf or a cabinet where there isn’t much room behind it. You may have to pull the Play forward just to hit the Bluetooth button. It’s hardly a major design flaw, but considering how much emphasis Sonos puts on using the Play both at home and away, Bluetooth probably deserved a more accessible button.

There is also a detachable rubber loop on the back, which can be used to carry or hang the speaker. I never had much reason to use it, but I like that it is there, especially if you intend to take the Play outdoors regularly.

The speaker is primarily designed to stand vertically, and that is how I used it throughout most of my testing. I briefly tried laying it down, but the rear loop makes it slightly unstable, and I noticed no meaningful difference to the sound anyway, so there was little reason to keep it that way. 

How Portable Is the Sonos Play?

Despite its size, moving the Play around the house is effortless. You can pick it up with one hand and carry it from the desktop to the kitchen, bedroom, or balcony without thinking. This is where I think the Play’s definition of “portable” makes the most sense.

For anything beyond that, the weight becomes more noticeable. Taking it to a picnic, throwing it in the car for a party or carrying it to a friend’s place is perfectly reasonable, but putting a 1.3kg speaker inside a backpack for an entire day doesn’t sound particularly appealing. There are considerably lighter Bluetooth speakers if that is what you are after. 

The included charging base also plays a surprisingly important role in how the Play is designed to be used. Instead of plugging a USB-C cable into the speaker every time, you can leave the base permanently connected somewhere and simply drop the Play onto it when you are done. 

Strangely, however, Sonos does not include the USB-C power adapter required to actually power the charging base. You get the dock and cable, but have to provide your own USB-C PD charger rated at a minimum of 18W. A 45W adapter is required for faster charging.

This feels a little stingy for something that costs AED 1,499. You could obviously use a modern phone or laptop charger, but chances are you already have one for the device it came with. If the entire idea behind the dock is to leave it permanently plugged in and ready to go, you will most likely end up buying another power adapter anyway.

The Play is also IP67-rated for dust and water, and Sonos says it can survive submersion in up to 1 metre of water for 30 minutes. I did not intentionally throw my review unit into a swimming pool to verify this claim, but the rating should at least provide some peace of mind if you plan to use it by the pool, at the beach, or anywhere an accidental splash is possible.

Connectivity is one of the Play’s biggest strengths. There is WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, Apple AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect, while the USB-C port can also be used with optional Sonos adapters for analogue line-in or Ethernet connectivity. You can pair two Plays for stereo playback, add them to a larger Sonos multi-room setup over WiFi, and use Automatic Trueplay to continuously adjust the sound depending on where the speaker is placed. It can also act as a surround speaker to your Sonos soundbar.

I only had a single Play for testing, so I wasn’t able to test the stereo or multi-room features, but switching between devices worked without much trouble. Once the Play was configured, it appeared as an available audio device across almost everything I tried, and Bluetooth reconnecting was equally reliable.

How Good Are the Sonos App and Sonos Voice Control?

This is my first time using a Sonos product, so I don’t know anything about the issues that plagued the app and Sonos products much of the last couple of years.

The Sonos app acts as both the control centre for the Play and a music player in its own right. There are quite a few options inside it, but with only one Sonos device connected, I never found the interface particularly complicated to navigate.

The main screen gives you access to Sonos Radio and any supported streaming services you have connected to your account. I added Spotify, which integrates its front page directly into the Sonos app, allowing me to browse playlists, albums, and recommendations without opening Spotify separately.

There are some limitations to this integration. Selecting an album through the Sonos integration would start playing through the album rather than letting me easily jump to one particular track, so I still found myself opening Spotify whenever I wanted something specific. But for throwing on a playlist or continuing something you were already listening to, having everything inside a single app is convenient. 

Speaker settings are laid out reasonably well too. You can manage Automatic Trueplay, configure battery behaviour, control the status lights, add voice assistants and manage how the Play interacts with other Sonos devices. You can also tweak the sound with bass and treble adjustments but surprisingly, there is no 8 or 10-band equaliser which is a bit disappointing.

The Play supports Amazon Alexa and Sonos’ own Voice Control, although I spent most of my time with the latter. The far-field microphones are quite good at picking up commands, and basic functions worked almost perfectly. Asking it to increase or decrease the volume, pause music or resume playback rarely required me to repeat myself.

Asking it to actually find music, however, was another story.

For example, asking, “Hey Sonos, play Speak to Me by Pink Floyd on Spotify,” would result in the speaker announcing that it was playing Speak to Me Radio before playing a completely different song. Asking for Michael Jackson’s Billie Jean gave me Billie Jean Radio, but it started playing Human Nature instead. 

I even set Spotify as the default music service in Sonos Voice Control to make sure the assistant wasn’t confused about where to look, but the behaviour remained exactly the same.

So while Sonos Voice Control works very well as a hands-free remote, I wouldn’t rely on it to find a particular song. The microphones hear you perfectly fine; the assistant just occasionally decides that it knows what you want better than you do.

How Does the Sonos Play Sound?

The Sonos Play packs a surprising amount of audio hardware into its relatively compact frame. Inside are two angled tweeters, a midwoofer and two passive bass radiators, all powered by three Class-H digital amplifiers. The tweeters are positioned to provide some stereo separation from a single enclosure, while the midwoofer and passive radiators handle the mids and low-end.

Sonos doesn’t provide a frequency response range or amplifier wattage, so there aren’t any numbers to obsess over here. Over Bluetooth, the Play supports the standard SBC and AAC codecs, while WiFi is the preferred option for higher-quality streaming. Automatic Trueplay also continuously adjusts the tuning based on where the speaker is placed, while the Sonos app provides basic bass and treble controls for further adjustments.

I left the EQ completely at its default settings throughout testing because, frankly, I never felt the need to touch it. The Play is tuned with a fairly generous amount of bass, but thankfully it never becomes muddy or overpowering. There is plenty of weight and body to the sound, yet the vocals and instruments remain clear enough that the low end never feels like it is swallowing the rest of the track.

Tool’s Chocolate Chip Trip is an excellent showcase of this. The bass kicks land with a solid, punchy thump that gives the track plenty of impact without turning everything around it into mush. There is an almost physical quality to the low end when the volume is pushed, and given the speaker’s size, the amount of bass it can produce is quite impressive.

Taal Se Taal Mila – Western was equally enjoyable, particularly with how well the Play handles busy arrangements. There is no real positional audio or convincing left-to-right separation from a single speaker this size, despite the angled tweeters, but individual instruments remain distinct within the mix. Everything occupies the same general soundstage in front of you, yet it never becomes congested or difficult to pick apart.

Vocals are another strong point. On Ramta Jodi from Taal, the vocals come through slightly forward, clear and smooth, without sounding detached from the rest of the track. The midrange has enough presence to carry voices naturally while the bass underneath provides weight without pushing them backwards.

The treble follows the same relaxed tuning. It isn’t particularly sharp or aggressive, which I personally prefer, but there is still enough detail in cymbals, percussion, and smaller background elements to keep the sound lively. You aren’t getting the kind of micro-detail or stereo imaging that you would from a proper pair of speakers, but for a single portable unit, there is little to complain about.

Volume certainly isn’t an issue, either. The Play gets loud enough to comfortably fill a room, and even at maximum volume, I didn’t notice any obvious distortion or the sound falling apart. It sounds its best once you get somewhere around the 40% mark and above, where the bass and overall presentation gain more body. Below that, it loses some of its fullness, but for background music or ambient listening, the lower volume levels work perfectly fine.

I also switched between WiFi and Bluetooth with the same tracks and couldn’t hear any meaningful difference between them. WiFi technically gives the Play access to higher-quality streaming and the wider Sonos ecosystem, but from a pure listening perspective, Bluetooth sounded just as enjoyable to me.

More than anything, the Play sounds much larger and more confident than its size suggests. It has plenty of bass, smooth highs, clear vocals and enough separation to keep complicated tracks from turning into a mess. It may not create a convincing stereo image on its own, but as a single-speaker solution, the overall tuning is difficult to fault.

Should You Buy the Sonos Play?

The Sonos Play is an excellent all-round speaker that makes the most sense when you treat it as a home speaker that can occasionally go wherever you go, rather than something designed to live permanently in a backpack

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