Sonos Play:3 review

Although there’s no doubt that Sonos is the best multi-room audio system you can buy, the downside has always been price. It’s something that the company has tried to address over the years, and now with the Play:3 you can get Sonos for less than £300.

The Play:3 is a standalone player with integrated speakers, which looks like a smaller Sonos Play:5 (renamed from its original ZonePlayer S5 to match the company’s new branding).

As well as being £100 cheaper than its bigger brother, the Play:3’s smaller size also makes it a good choice for those parts of your house where you don’t have much room, such as a kitchen or bedroom; the Play:5 is a rather hefty beast that you need a good amount of room for.

It connects to your network via a wired connection (there’s only one 10/100 Ethernet port, and no pass-through, as on previous players), although it can connect wirelessly using the proprietary Sonos wireless mesh network if you’re adding this player to an existing system. If the Play:3 is your first purchase and you want to put it away from your router, you’ll need the optional Bridge, which has had a hefty price drop to £39.

Provided you’ve got an Android smartphone, iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, you can use the free app to wirelessly control your music. If you can afford it, the touchscreen Sonos Control (expensive at £279) is a great extra, as it remains constantly connected to the Sonos network, making it quicker to respond. Plus, it has the advantage that if your phone is the only controller, you can go out and other people in your home can still play music.

For a first purchase, if you stick with a free app for control and buy the Play:3 and Bridge for £298, it may sound rather expensive, and an iPod dock probably looks like a better deal. However, that’s ignoring the true advantage of Sonos.

The strength of the system is that you simply plug in new players as and when you can afford them. As a true multi-room audio system, you can choose to play the same music in multiple rooms, or have different music in each room. It’s incredibly flexible and, what’s more, incredibly clever with music played in multiple rooms being exactly synchronised.

As it streams music from a network share or even iTunes using AirPlay, you’re not limited to the amount of music that you can store on an iPod. Nor are you betting that Apple won’t change the universal dock connector again, making your iPod or iPhone incompatible with your dock.

Then there’s the real genius of the system: it can stream content from the internet. For music our favourite is the Spotify integration, because the stream is high-quality 320Kbit/s. Then, there’s internet radio with all of the popular stations available, podcasts and Last.fm support to name but a few. Put all of this together and Sonos is a system that you start today and continue building later – worriers should know that even the oldest players support the latest streaming services and there’s never been a move to force people to upgrade existing components.

Of course, all this is well and good, but with audio equipment it’s sound quality that’s really important. Fortunately, with the Play:3 there’s nothing to worry about at all. As with all other Sonos components, the Play:3 is reassuringly heavy, backing up the gorgeous exterior (available in black or white) that shouts this is a well-made product.

We like the way that it can be placed horizontally or vertically, giving a good degree of flexibility in where you place it.

Inside there are three digital amps, one each for the two mid-range drivers and tweeter. On top of that, there’s also a bass radiator. It’s a slightly cut-down version of the Play:5, which has five digital amplifiers for the two tweeters, two mid-range drivers and dedicate bass driver.

Despite that, sound quality is fantastic and incredibly well balanced. Bass is loud and crunching, but doesn’t dominate, while the tweeter and mid-range drivers make sure all of the delicate detail and vocals in a track come out to the full. Volume is impressive, too, and we’re pleased to say that the heavy case means you can listen loudly without any creaking or distortion.

Listening to the Play:3 side-by-side with the Play:5, we found that the sound quality was similar. The Play:5 has the slight edge, with deeper bass and a better high-end (as you’d expect from its extra drivers), but the Play:3 certainly holds its own. Again, the benefits of buying Sonos are that you can mix and match components to suit the location of the player.

Stereo separation isn’t well defined on this player, but that’s to be expected because its speakers are so close together. However, if you buy two Play:3s you can put them in a stereo pair, where one player becomes the output for the left channel and the other the right channel. Sound quality at this point is pretty incredible and you get as much stereo separation as you could want. Most people won’t want to spend more than £500 for this, but it’s a useful feature if you have two players in separate rooms and want to put them together for a party, say.

The Play:5 also has this feature, but it’s important to note that you can’t mix and match a Play:5 and Play:3 for a stereo pair. There are some things missing from the Play:5, though, including the headphone input and line-in; however, we doubt that many people will miss or care about these and the threaded socket for a wall-mounting bracket is a much better addition.

In terms of controls, the Play:3 follows the standard Sonos convention that it has just volume and mute buttons on the top; everything else is managed by a controller. Trust us, it all makes perfect sense when you start using it.

So, the real question is, is the Play:3 worth buying. The answer is, yes, but it depends on what you want to do. If you’ve got the budget and room, the Play:5 has better sound quality; if you’re on a tighter budget or don’t have much room the Play:3 is both a great introduction to Sonos and an excellent way to expand an existing system into new parts of your home.