One of the biggest problems with setting up a stereo or home theater system is calibrating it to your room. Inputting speaker sizes, measuring distances, and setting volumes just isn’t fun, which is why Sonos released TruePlay, which aims to do all of that for you, no matter where your speakers are located. Now, the company has brought that same technology to its home theater offerings, creating cinema-quality sound as easily as holding up your phone in the right place.
Sonos introduced Trueplay last year, and it was immediately a hit with users, but it didn’t work across the company’s entire product line. Immediately, the company knew that it wanted to bring Trueplay to its home theater-focused products like the Playbar, but that entailed a separate set of challenges. The original iteration of Trueplay only adjusted equalization, which worked fine for individual speakers spread across rooms, but wasn’t quite sophisticated enough for a home theater setup.
While the earlier version of Trueplay only used spectral correction — adjusting the volume across various frequencies — multiple speakers working in concert means that a new type of correction was needed. Spatial correction ensures that the sound waves from various speakers are all hitting the ideal listening location in a room at the same time, and that is what Sonos is using for home theater setups.
Like the earlier version of Trueplay, listeners use the Sonos app on an iOS device and walk around the room to measure frequency response in different areas. For home theater use, another step has been added that asks the listener to sit where they would normally watch TV and measure from there. This makes for a “sweet spot” in the room for movies and TV, while also ensuring music sounds good throughout the entire space.
This new calibration isn’t limited to just the Playbar. Both 3.0 (Playbar only) and 3.1 (Playbar and a Sonos Sub) configurations are supported, and it doesn’t end there. Users can also use Sonos speakers like the Play:1 or Play:3 as rear-channel speakers, making for a fully calibrated 5.1 surround setup without all the work. With this latest Sonos update, all of the company’s speakers support Trueplay calibration.
This isn’t the only new feature arriving in the latest Sonos firmware update. Spotify Connect support, which entered beta over the summer, is now available to all. Sonos and Spotify have partnered to make sure that not only is normal Spotify Connect functionality supported, but users can even group Sonos speakers together without leaving the app.
All of those features are available in the free Sonos 7.0 update, which is available starting today. For more information on the update, see the Sonos website.
