Sonos officially launched its new Amp in Australia yesterday, letting you wire up your whole house with super powerful, high quality Sonos audio.
The new Amp is more compact and, Sonos says, twice as powerful as the older Connect Amp bringing 125W power to your home. It’s also sporting a HDMI/ARC input like the Sonos Beam, allowing you to connect it directly to your TV.
The updated design allows it to be placed into rack units, and there’s a new waffle housing underneath to draw in cool air and prevent overheating. Like most Sonos products, there are also physical volume, play and pause controls on the front.
Sonos says they consulted interior designers and home audio installers and users to find out what they wanted from the product and how it would be used within the home, an interesting step, and am important one – the company says they found consumers had installed and used the older Connect Amp in inventive ways, so they’d definitely want to harness and support that community ingenuity.
Sonos CEO Patrick Spence:
“The growth of the Sonic Internet – the convergence of paid streaming, the smart home, and artificial intelligence through voice technologies drives everything we do at Sonos,” and that “While plug – and – play options like Sonos Beam and Sonos One are an important part of the equation, architectural sound and making it even easier to integrate with lighting and home control are equally as important. We’ve listened to custom installers and dealers to create Amp, a versatile product designed to be at the centre of the smart home sound experience.”
The feature Sonos is drawing a lot of attention to is the ability to connect the amp directly into your existing TV Via HDMI, something the company says consumers wanted all along from the older product.
The company is also making a thing of beyond able to connect the Amp directly to a vinyl record turntable player – a funny aside in the streaming generation (an ecosystem on which Sonos’ software offerings are built), but it shows that they’re serious about the Amp’s place in your home.
Of course, you can also connect Amp to their own Sonos One or Sonos Beam speakers to enable you to control the amp with voice commands, or it can be plugged directly into any existing home theatre or surround sound systems.
Sonos has a great reputation for supporting their products for the long haul, so it’s no surprise to know that Amp will be updated with new features, APIs and deeper integrations with Sonos platform partners over time.
The new Sonos Amp is available now direct from Sonos for $999, and from a number of audio distributors and installation specialists (it does pay to shop around a bit as you might find a nice discount on that along price as well).
Quote from article: “Sonos has a great reputation for supporting their products for the long haul.”
Huh? In my books, the most important support a company could offer is to provide updates and implement features that have already been promised.
Anyone who has followed Sonos would well know that its promised implementation of the Google Assistant into its products has been an absolute farce.