Sonos adds zones to manage rooms with multiple speakers

Sonos says the Era 100 Pro — its first speaker aimed specifically at the professional installation market — is officially available for order and shipping today. The speaker, which gets both its power and network connection via an Ethernet cable, is only sold in pairs and has to be purchased through select Sonos partners specializing in professional installation. Pricing on the Era 100 Pro is being left up to these partners and Sonos hasn’t provided any guidance on how much they’ll cost. I’ve reached out to a few professional installers to see if I can get a ballpark range.

Its worth pointing out that the Era 100 Pro needs a powered (PoE) Ethernet connection, which means it won’t work with a typical wired home network without some additional components.

To support the launch of the Era 100 Pro, which is designed to be used in commercial locations like restaurants that could have many individual speakers in a single room, Sonos has also updated its app with a new feature called zones.

Zones are similar to the existing Groups feature: You can add up to 16 compatible Sonos devices to a single zone, to create what the company calls a “semi-permanent” collection of speakers. Each device in a zone will play the same content and play at the same volume level — unless you adjust the “volume trim” on an individual speaker to be higher or lower than the zone level. You can also adjust EQ on a speaker-by-speaker basis.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

One of the benefits to zones is that zones can be grouped with other zones or with other individual Sonos speakers. Since you can’t put groups inside groups, this lets you keep specific collections of speakers coordinated as a single entity and move them in and out of groups without having to create new groups each time.

Zones can be added, edited, or removed in the Sonos app. There’s also a chime feature you can select that helps you identify a specific speaker within a zone when the speaker’s name may not be enough to determine its location.

There are some limitations on how zones are used. Unlike groups, they’re only compatible with select Sonos components: Era 100 Pro, Era 100, Era 300, Sonos One SL, Sonos One (all generations), and Sonos Five. Sonos soundbars, portables, headphones, and components like the Port and Amp aren’t currently zone-compatible.

Sonos also notes that an Ethernet connection is strongly recommended for every speaker in a zone. If that’s not possible, it says to limit zones to a maximum of six Wi-Fi-connected devices for the best results.

Along with support for the Era 100 Pro and the addition of zones, the Sonos app has also received more fixes and updates as the company continues to rectify the problems caused by the ill conceived launch of a redesign in May 2024.

These changes include: