Sonos is wading into budget speaker waters with the new Era 100 SL speaker
The new Era 100 SL is the company’s latest compact wireless speaker, and it’s actually the silent child of the Era 100: the same stellar audio DNA, without the built-in voice control.
No voice assistant means we won’t accidentally order a pizza playlist, which depending on your capabilities may be a bug or a feature. Which will make it sit quietly on the shelf – at 182.5 × 120 × 130.5 mm, it really disappears in the room – and completely contradicts its size when you hit the game. Under two pounds, it looks like nothing, it feels like a lot more.
A non-responsive speaker
The hardware spec reads like Sonos means business: three Class-D amplifiers, a mid-woofer, and tweeters that sit at an angle rather than pointing straight ahead. That last detail is more important than it sounds – music from a speaker directed at one point in the room behaves very differently from music pushed out in two directions.
Rooms are awkward, awkward spaces, and the Era 100 SL at least tries to work with that rather than against it. The woofer keeps the low end from falling off, which in a speaker this little can be the difference between the bass you hear and the bass you read about on the spec sheet.
Wireless works with WiFi 6 or Bluetooth 5.3 — your choice, moment by moment. Anyone want to attach their phone directly to it? Bluetooth button on the back, done. Want clean, uninterrupted streaming? WiFi. Both live on the same speaker without fighting for dominance.
AirPlay 2 is available for Apple devices, and the USB-C port on the back handles wired sources – turntable, laptop, whatever – via Sonos’s Line-In or Combo Adapter. Those are sold separately, which will come as no surprise to anyone who has bought Sonos gear before. Specifically: there is a quad-core 4xA55 processor clocked at 1.4GHz running the show, supported by 1GB DDR4 RAM and 4GB of storage.
Simple on the outside, smarter than it looks on the inside
The touch controls sit on top — volume, play, pause, skip, collect — and are the kind of thing you use without thinking about it, which is exactly the point. There’s also a small LED on the front, easy to ignore until midnight and you’re whistling trying to figure out why the speaker is silent.
Deep control resides in the Sonos app: EQ adjustment for bass, treble and loudness, and Trueplay, which navigates your room acoustically, detects what your sofa and bookshelves are doing to the sound, and adjusts it quietly. It requires an iOS device to run properly, which will annoy some people, and rightfully so.
Getting it right won’t ruin your evening. Plug in the 6-meter power cable, open the app, tap a few screens. That’s really it. Take a second and pair in a suitable stereo setup, or push them to work as rear surrounds in a home theater – they handle that job well.
