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 at the discretion of these partners. I spoke to Jeff Gosselin of Cloud 9 AV in Toronto and he says he expects to sell the Era 100 Pro for $409 CAD each (about $284), or $499 CAD ($346) with the available wall mount. Gosselin points out that you’ll also need a powered (PoE) Ethernet connection for each speaker, since the Era 100 Pro isn’t compatible with typical wired home networks.
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.
One of the benefits is that zones can be grouped — with other zones or with other individual Sonos components. 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:
- Ability to snooze an alarm within the app
- Updates to System Settings management to visibly showcase high-touch settings
- Battery charge percentage in System view
- Improvements to parental control in iOS
