As part of a news release celebrating IKEA’s Red-Dot Design Award accomplishments for 2019, the Swedish furniture designer has published two new photos of its upcoming Symfonisk speaker, a whole-home Wi-Fi speaker built by Sonos. The photos give us yet another glimpse at what IKEA has promised will be a speaker that’s priced to make it accessible to many.
The official unveiling of the Symfonisk is slated for April 9, 2019, in Milan. The new photos don’t add much to what we know about Symfonisk, but given that there are only days until the unveiling, it’s clear that what we’re seeing is indeed the final product — or extremely close to it — and that earlier photos were also very representative of what we can expect in-store.
The one speaker that has been repeatedly shown (it’s possible there will be a range of Symfonisk models to choose from) looks to occupy the ground between a Sonos One (or Play:1) and a Play:5 — in other words, it’s likely going to exhibit similar power and sound quality to a Play:3, which is now the oldest product in Sonos’s line of powered, wireless speakers.
The photos also indicate that the Symfonisk will be wall-mountable, and the bracket used to mount it will let the speaker sit flush to the wall. This would be consistent with the wall mounting options for both the Sonos Beam and Sonos Playbar. We can also see that the speaker’s controls will be physical buttons, a system that Sonos has been abandoning in favor of touch controls on its products since the introduction of the new Play: 5. It’s interesting to see that the two companies have chosen a front-mounted location of these controls — something Sonos has never done with its speakers — instead of keeping the speaker grille area free of any non-acoustic features as has been Sonos’s tendency so far.
Plenty is still unknown about Symfonisk, such as:
- Price
- Compatibility with existing Sonos products
- Whether it will have AirPlay 2 built-in like all of Sonos’s recent products
- Will it be a smart speaker?
- Whether it will still be controlled by the Sonos app for smartphones, tablets, and computers, or use its own app
- Whether you’ll be able to use Sonos’s customized TruePlay tuning system to adjust the EQ of the Symfonisk speakers using a mic-equipped smartphone or tablet.
