The new Era 100 SL is the company’s latest compact wireless speaker, and it’s essentially the Era 100’s quieter sibling: same stellar audio DNA, just without built-in voice control.
No voice assistant means it won’t accidentally order you a pizza mid-playlist, which depending on your willpower is either a bug or a feature. What it will do is sit quietly on a shelf — at 182.5 × 120 × 130.5 mm, it genuinely disappears into a room — and then completely contradict its size the moment you hit play. Under two kilograms, looks like nothing, sounds like considerably more.
The speaker that doesn’t talk back
The hardware spec reads like Sonos meant business: three Class-D amplifiers, a mid-woofer, and a pair of tweeters that sit at an angle rather than pointing straight out front. That last detail matters more than it sounds — music from a speaker aimed at one spot in a room behaves very differently from music that’s being pushed outward in two directions.
Rooms are awkward, irregular spaces, and the Era 100 SL is at least trying to work with that rather than against it. The woofer keeps the low end from collapsing, which on a speaker this small is the difference between bass you feel and bass you merely read about on the spec sheet.
Wireless works over WiFi 6 or Bluetooth 5.3 — your choice, moment to moment. Someone wants to stick their phone on it directly? Bluetooth button on the back, done. You want the cleaner, uninterrupted stream? WiFi. Both live on the same speaker without fighting each other for dominance.
AirPlay 2 is there for Apple households, and a USB-C port on the back handles wired sources — turntable, laptop, whatever — through Sonos’s Line-In or Combo Adapter. Those are sold separately, which won’t surprise anyone who’s bought Sonos gear before. For the spec-curious: there’s a quad-core 4xA55 processor clocked at 1.4GHz running the show, backed 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, grouping — and they’re the kind of thing you use without thinking about, which is exactly the point. There’s a small LED on the front too, easy to ignore right up until it’s midnight and you’re squinting at it trying to work out why the speaker’s gone silent.
Deeper control lives in the Sonos app: EQ adjustments for bass, treble and loudness, plus Trueplay, which wanders around your room acoustically, figures out what your sofa and bookshelves are doing to the sound, and quietly corrects for it. It does need an iOS device to run properly, which will irritate some people, and fairly so.
Getting it set up won’t ruin your evening. Plug in the 6-foot power cable, open the app, tap through a handful of screens. That’s genuinely it. Pick up a second one and they pair into a proper stereo setup, or press them into service as rear surrounds in a home theatre — they handle that job well too.
