

The Sonos Amp is music to the ears of busy people

What's better than an amp that still has all the latest features 14 years after it was launched? Only its replacement, the Sonos Amp.

Sonos Amp

Sonos Amp lats you attach your record player and beam its music around your house Supplied

John DavidsonColumnist

This review has been 14 years in the making. It was that long ago, in 2005, when we first reviewed the Sonos ZonePlayer 100 multi-room audio amplifier, gave it our Product of the Year award, and bought as much Sonos equipment as we could afford. (It was more expensive back then, costing $2399 for the two-room starter pack, plus the cost of whatever speakers you added.)

Since then, we've been listening to that same Sonos equipment (and more that we have acquired) daily here in the Digital Life Labs, watching in awe as month after month, year after year, Sonos has added more and more features via firmware and software updates, so that each of our 14-year-old ZP100s is better today than pretty well any other multi-room product now on the market.

Better, that is, except for the new Sonos Amp which now replaces it.

Sonos Amp

The new Sonos Amp lets you attach local audio components, such as record players, and stream them to other Sonos speakers around the house. Supplied

The new Amp, like the original ZP100, is a "bring your own speaker" audio amplifier that connects to your home network (via WiFi or ethernet) to allow you to play music, radio, podcasts and spoken-word audio streaming over the internet.

Like the ZP100, the Amp also has an analog audio input that lets you attach a record or CD player, and play it on the Amp and/or on any other Sonos speaker in any room in your house.

And, like the ZP100, it has an output for direct connection to a sub-woofer, a feature which we didn't review, because in the intervening years we've also bought a Sonos Sub sub-woofer, and we paired the Amp with that for purposes of this review.

Unlike the ZP100, however, the Amp has an HDMI input that lets it double as a stereo or surround-sound system for your TV. You can attach just two speakers to it, to dramatically improve your TV's sound, or you can pair it with other Sonos equipment, such as a couple of Sonos One speakers, to create a 4.1 surround-sound system, with the Amp speakers as the front left and right, and the Sonos One speakers as the rear left and right.

Sonons ZP100

The original ZonePlayer 100 amp (rear) still gets firmware updates, 14 years later.  Supplied

If you're a purist, you probably won't be adding a Sonos system to your TV. It lacks support for a front centre speaker (it's only 4.1, remember, not 5.1), not to mention it lacks support for fancy new 5.1.4 systems such as Dolby Atmos.


Purists might also not like the fact that, as with all previous products these past 14 years, Sonos still refuses to add high-resolution audio support to its streaming system. CD-quality is as good as Sonos gets.

What Sonos may lack in terms of high-end audio features, it more than makes up for in features designed to appeal to ordinary humans with ordinary budgets.

The Sonos system supports by far the widest array of online audio sources. You can stream anything from YouTube Music and Apple Music to iHeartRadio and Audible – with a user experience that is the best by far on the market.

I can't think of a single company other than Sonos that continues to support its customers like that.

If you like to have all your audio sources in the one app so that searching for, say, "Parquet Courts" finds them on Google Play Music, Spotify and iHeartRadio (each of which will create different playlists), the brilliant Sonos app will let you do it seamlessly.

The Amp doesn't have a built-in microphone the way the Sonos One speaker does, but you can still use Amazon's Alexa voice control system to control it from some other Alexa device. Google Assistant voice control, which was supposed to be added to all Sonos devices last year but was delayed, is expected to be available for all Sonos devices including the Amp some time in 2019.

Sonos Amp

The Amp fits into what's turned out to be a broad range of Sonos devices. Supplied

Yes, all of them, even the very first ones. I just said, "Alexa, play X&Y in the back office" to an Amazon Echo Dot microphone, and the 2005 Coldplay album is now playing, courtesy of Spotify, on a Sonos ZP100 we bought that same year.

I can't think of a single company other than Sonos that continues to support its customers like that. Neither Spotify nor Alexa were even dreamt of in 2005, much less in existence, and yet here they are both working together, seamlessly and effortlessly, on a product that came out in 2005.

It doesn't sound quite as good on the ZP100 as it does on the Amp, though. The sound you get out of an Amp will very much depend on which speakers you attach to it, so we can't tell you very much about the sound quality you should expect.

But as part of our review, we did put an Amp side by side with an old ZP100, and attached them both to the same pair of speakers. The Amp definitely has a cleaner sound, but neither of them offer the sort of subtlety and precision that more demanding listeners might require.

Like I said, Sonos products aren't for audiophiles, who will sit down in front of a pair of speakers and try to hear every instrument in every track. They're for people who have a life to lead. A life that they perhaps hope they will still be leading 14 or even 20 years from now, when their Sonos system might still be going strong.

Brilliant support for internet streaming services. Brilliant app
Dislikes No hi-res audio
Price $999 (plus whatever speakers you add)

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John Davidson