![]() Volume didn’t get loud enough to drive me out of the room while listening to the two-way Q Acoustics bookshelf (1-inch tweeters and 5-inch woofers) or the three-way B&W tower speakers (1-inch tweeters, 6-inch mid-range, and dual 6.5-inch woofers), but both combinations easily filled my home theater without the need to crank the volume to the max. The Amp performed like a champ with each set of speakers. The first step of the Sonos Sub tuning process plays a rapid-fire bass line in an A/B listening test that lets you evaluate the Sub’s phase. For the tests with the M-1 Mini Theatre (the smallest of the three sets of speakers by far), I paired the Amp with a Sonos Sub. I used Q Acoustics’ Concept 20 bookshelf speakers (6 ohms nominal impedance) in my home theater Bowers & Wilkins’ 603 tower speakers (8 ohms nominal impedance, also in my home theater) B&W’s M-1 Mini Theatre satellite speakers (8 ohms nominal impedance) mounted high on a wall in my great room and Focal’s Custom OD 108 outdoor speakers (8 ohms nominal impedance) mounted high on a wall in my enclosed patio. I first tested the amplifier with four very different stereo speaker pairs, one pair at a time. Sonosĭespite being passively cooled, you can stack multiple Amps on top of each other (active cooling is recommended for dense rack installations). At a press event at Sonos’ Boston headquarters late last year, Sonos Amp product manager Benji Rappoport showed me an actively cooled rack cabinet holding 32 Amps. The Amp doesn’t have rack-mount ears, but it is outfitted with a standard M5 thread mount on its bottom. Sonos didn’t build a phono preamp into the Amp because it assumed vinyl veterans would already have a phono pre-amp they like, while LP neophytes would start out with a turntable that has a built-in phono pre-amp. The Amp has left and right analog RCA audio inputs and a subwoofer output, but I suspect most people will use the wireless Sonos Sub with the Amp. You can also use banana plugs in place of the binding posts. Sonos engineered the Amp’s binding posts so that you can remove them to thread bare wire through the holes, cinch the wires down, and then plug them back in. When driving Sonos by Sonance speakers (in-wall, in-ceiling, and outdoor models are available), the Amp can handle up to three pairs of speakers wired in parallel. If you’re using banana plugs, you won’t need the binding posts at all because you’ll insert the banana plugs straight into the Amp. That’s much easier than having to reach around to the back of the amp to do everything. The Amp’s binding posts are ingeniously designed so that you can pull them out of the Amp, thread bare wires through the posts, cinch them down, and then plug them back in. In the latter configuration, you can wire two pairs of speakers to the Amp in parallel to deliver the same music to two stereo pairs (with speakers in the same or in different rooms), provided the impedance presented to the amp doesn’t drop below 4 ohms. The Amp can accept standard banana plugs or you can use its robust binding posts with bare wire (between 10 and 18 AWG). The Sonos Amp can also handle wired speakers that present less than 8 ohms of impedance, producing up to 187.5 watts per channel while driving a 6-ohm load and a whopping 250 watts with 4-ohm speakers. If your TV is equipped only with an optical output and not HDMI, Sonos sells an adapter you can use. In this scenario, the Amp can drive wired front left and right channels, any other pair of Sonos wireless speakers (apart from Sonos soundbars) as surround channels, and a wireless Sonos Sub (or any wired powered sub connected to the Amp) for low-frequency effects. The new Sonos Amp not only delivers more power-125 watts per channel into an 8-ohm load-but it’s also outfitted with HDMI (with ARC), so that it can connect directly to your TV. The Sonos Amp is designed for critical listening in stereo, and for movie soundtrack experiences that are a cut above what you’ll get from the typical soundbar. The Sonos Amp is designed for audio enthusiasts who want to blend the music-streaming convenience and multi-room audio capabilities that Sonos is so well known for with a high-end amplifier and conventional high-performance loudspeakers. That market is better served by Sonos’s wireless speaker lineup: The Sonos One smart speaker, the simpler Play:1, and their big sibling, the Play:5. The Sonos Amp isn’t aimed at casual music listeners.
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