Sonos unveils redesigned Play:5 and dead-simple audio calibration

In audio, the quality of sound is not only defined by the quality of your speakers. Location and environment count. You do your best to position your speakers and then the audio bounces off some wall, gets absorbed into others and generally doesn’t always do what you want it to do. Moving the speakers around until everything sounds good is one option, but Sonos believes its new app-based room analyzer is the best one.

Called Trueplay, the Sonos audio set-up experience lets you use your the Sonos app and your iPhone to walk around the room and adapt your Play:1, Play:3 and Play:5 speakers audio output to the environment. Trueplay works by using both your iPhone’s speakers to emit tones and microphones to pick up the audio response (how the sounds bounce off your furniture, walls, etc.). Sonos executives told me that an early version of Trueplay included a tone that made dogs bark. They have since removed that tone from the test suite. Read more...