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Sonos is a leading American audio technology company that is best known for pioneering wireless multi-room audio systems, which make it easy for listeners to stream music and other content throughout their homes. The company continues to innovate, creating wireless speakers, home theatre systems, headphones, architectural components, and integrated home audio solutions that revolutionise how people listen and connect to sound.

Guest Writer

With SYMFONISK WiFi speakers, Sonos and IKEA challenged themselves to find new ways of bringing sound into the home. Find out how the two brands worked together to design speakers that double as adaptable pieces of IKEA furniture.

At first thought, bringing the sound of a full orchestra into a dining room—without a speaker—doesn’t even seem like a challenge. It seems impossible.

Or so you might think. Meet SYMFONISK, a new collection of wireless speakers from Sonos and IKEA that double as a lamp or a multipurpose shelf—but with the premium sound you expect from Sonos. To create SYMFONISK WiFi speakers, the two companies worked together to introduce sound into the home in a more subtle way, integrating speakers into functional, beautiful pieces of furniture.

It may feel a little like magic. And in a way, it is. Except this magic wasn’t the kind from storybooks, but the kind that comes from teamwork, negotiation, prototyping, and repeated testing. And some knitting.

The first hurdle was figuring out how to best work together. Sonos brought to the table what it does best—creating great sound. IKEA, in turn, brought the expertise of home furnishing, as well as the spontaneity of trial-and-error design. Hilmar Lehnert, Audio Technology Manager at Sonos, describes both teams’ creation strategy as “an iterative process,” with new and unexpected directions arising the more they worked together and learned from each other. This process, Lehnert says, was made more complex by the number of collaborators involved. On one hand, there was IKEA, spearheading the products’ outward design, and on the other hand, there was Sonos, overseeing their sound and performance. Rounding out the team was the manufacturer responsible for bringing Sonos and IKEA designs into being.

“It was an intricate three-way dance. With three teams in the mix, we had to be aware of what each one was working on at any given time,” Lehnert says.

However familiar it was with creating great sound, Sonos still had a lot to learn about how to apply those methods to the less familiar field of home furnishing.

One example of this dance can be found in the brands’ working communication. Sonos discovered that it was difficult for the audio team to speak about sound with the industrial designers at IKEA, whose expertise applied to an entirely different field. In order to ensure the creation of the best product, Sonos’s industrial designers had to translate what their audio team needed in a way that made sense to their counterparts at IKEA.

“Lehnert had to explain how acoustics work. Then our industrial design team, which shares the same language and perspective as IKEA’s industrial design team, would say, ‘Here’s what that means for you’,” Sara Morris, Senior Product Manager at Sonos, says of the experience. She continues, “When Lehnert’s talking about bass response, this is how it affects the design. And when he’s talking about acoustic transparency, this is what it means for the material choices.”

However familiar it was with creating great sound, Sonos still had a lot to learn about how to apply those methods to the less familiar field of home furnishing. Lehnert describes his experience at a knitting manufacturer in Austria with both bemusement and awe.

“I’ve learnt more about knitting than I was ever planning to, but it was fascinating,” he says. “What types of threads you use, thread patterns, thread tensions, warp and weft. That all needs to be understood—what they can do and what they can’t do, what affects the sound.”

The team wound up going through hundreds of different fabrics, few of which would have been considered for a traditional speaker, to find the one that worked best as a cover for the speaker and design element of the table lamp with WiFi speaker.

When people think of making a house a home, they usually default to thoughts of the aesthetics. But sound can serve just as important of a role in defining the atmosphere of your home.

The result of this collaboration is a range of speakers that don’t read as speakers at all but as adaptable pieces of furniture for your home. On your nightstand, the table lamp can simultaneously provide light for bedtime reading and an ambient soundtrack for falling asleep. Likewise, there are seven different ways to incorporate the WiFi bookshelf speaker into your home—all of which will sound great due to Sonos’s Trueplay™ tuning technology. And, like all Sonos products, SYMFONISK WiFi speakers are designed to seamlessly integrate with the rest of your Sonos system.

When people think of making a house a home, they usually default to thoughts of the aesthetics. But sound can serve just as important of a role in defining the atmosphere of your home. With SYMFONISK WiFi speakers, you can enhance both, simultaneously.

“When people visit your home, they see your art. They relax on your furniture. And layered into this experience is the way your house sounds,” says Morris. “You can show them, audibly, ‘This is who I am.’”

Bright Ideas: How Sonos and IKEA Made Furniture with Brilliant Sound

The new Sonos brand identity puts a fresh spin on the look and feel of the brand with a new approach to using color, illustration, typography, and some new design tools built with the future in mind. Here’s the inside story.

There’s something almost unreal about the landscape in Santa Barbara. From the pristine sky that bleeds seamlessly into the ocean, to the watercolor mountain backdrops, there’s a surprising scenic diversity in this Southern California town—all of it peppered with palm trees and an eclectic floral arrangement. It’s the sort of scene most would expect to find on an inspirational poster or computer desktop wallpaper, rather than in their own backyards.

The unique shape and color of the scenery is why people flock to Santa Barbara for vacation. It’s also one of the reasons that the founders of Sonos decided to set up shop there in 2002— opting to reimagine home audio against the backdrop of a sleepy paradise, rather than a bustling tech hub. Today, Sonos is a global brand with offices around the world, but Santa Barbara is the place that helped inspire the early inventions, designs, and decisions that made Sonos what it is today.

So when it came time for the Brand Design team at Sonos to refresh the visual look and feel of the brand this year, it was only fitting that they would look to that very same landscape for inspiration.

The new Sonos brand identity, which was crafted by the company’s internal creative team in collaboration with the agencies Anomaly (New York) and Instrument (Portland), consists of several revised design elements, such as the introduction of a seasonal color palette, a new illustration style, and some changes to typography and the rules governing things like layout and the orientation of the company’s logo.

Sonos has also updated its brand voice, leaning into simpler, more enduring language that prioritizes sound and the empowerment of listeners, while backing away from music-inspired metaphors and cliches.

“We approached this rebrand with a rigorous design process, system thinking, and most of all, a passion for the listener and their needs,” says Dmitri Siegel, VP of Brand at Sonos. “Through that process we stripped away the fluff and the metaphor and found the power in who we really are and what we do: the enduring beauty of our products, the magical simplicity of our software, and our signature commitment to quality and design.”

In early May, Sonos began rolling out this new brand identity and voice, starting with a new global brand campaign with ads in Times Square, Rolling Stone magazine and other prominent placements around the world–as well a design refresh of key digital touch points like the brand’s global 

“We had a unique opportunity to update our brand strategy, brand identity, and do a full website redesign at the same time,” says Siegel. “That almost never happens. The level of collaboration is a big part of what makes this ID so strong. We made sure it would work well on our website which is our most complex brand experience.”

Perhaps the most noticeable change within the brand’s new look is the introduction of color. Rather than hinge the brand to a single, everlasting brand color, the team decided to create a new seasonal palette of colors designed to adapt and scale as the company and its line of products—which themselves are typically designed in black or white—evolve and expand.

“We organically rejected the notion of permanent brand color,” says Michael Leon, Global Creative Director at Sonos. “It felt like a dated concept”. “Once we freed ourselves of that, we were able to open our minds to more timely influences. As soon as you etch something in stone, it instantly feels dated. The world just moves too fast.”

The first iteration of this seasonal palette—consisting of colors named Sky, Rose, Sand, Rust, and Pine—was inspired, quite naturally, by some of the local scenery outside the company’s Santa Barbara headquarters.

“These colors are definitely a nod to our surroundings,” says Julia Jeanguenat, Art Director on the Sonos Brand Design team. “From the landscape, to the ocean, to the plantlife, the palette is really inspired by the environment here.”

The color selection process wasn’t driven solely by hometown pride, of course. “We did our research and were influenced by current trends to ensure the colors we picked for this first seasonal palette felt very of-the-moment,” says Jeanguenat.

Just as Sonos has grown and expanded to other offices, territories and product categories, the colors utilized by the brand will evolve over time as well. Maintaining that flexibility was key in ensuring that the brand and its products retain a fresh look, including ones that were released years ago.

Over the last few years, the image of a sleek-looking black or white smart speaker sitting heroically on a shiny, clean surface has become ubiquitous in consumer tech. Even much of the language used to market such devices has become redundant. For Sonos, the shift to more colorful, flexible branding lets the company and its products stand out, Jeanguenat explains.

“We knew we needed to cut through the sea of sameness that you get when you’re walking through a place like a big box retailer,” she says. “Everything begins to look similar.”

To help the company make decisions about how color gets used, Sonos formed what it calls the Color Committee—a small panel of internal stakeholders from across the brand, hardware, software and experience teams. Each month, this cross-functional group gets together to explore and understand how the brand is using color in various places, discussing any potential conflicts or inconsistencies, and ultimately deciding what the next color palette will look like.

“We have the ability to change the tone of the brand based on the emotion the palette delivers,” explains Leon. “That’s our way to keep the brand relevant without having to rebrand every three years.”

Illustrating Sound Experience, Line for Line

Sonos prides itself on delivering an effortlessly easy listening experience through a mix of hardware and software—a system of products that all work effortlessly together. But just because something is simple to use doesn’t mean it’s always easy to explain, especially in 2D visual mediums like photography—and especially when the most important detail, sound, is invisible to the naked eye.

For designers trying to visually articulate the Sonos product experience, concepts like multi-room audio, voice control, Airplay 2—and much of the magic that happens between software and hardware to make the Sonos listening experience possible—is much easier to explain verbally (or better yet, through using the product itself) than it is with flat pictures. That’s where creative uses of illustration come into play.

Under its new brand identity, Sonos makes heavier and more deliberate use of hand-drawn elements, having partnered with illustrator James Graham to develop a new house illustration style. Armed with this new illustration toolkit, Graham and other designers creating work for the Sonos brand can communicate some of the detail and nuance of the Sonos product experience in a succinct, digestible way without relying as much on written copy or other mediums like animation and video.

“Illustration helps us show what Sonos is, in a way,” Leon says. “We’re not trying to decorate the brand with illustration, you know what I mean? It’s really a tool, a utilitarian thing.”

Illustration can also help paint a more holistic picture of the Sonos experience when paired with other types of imagery. For instance, designers can more easily draw the connection between the hardware and software elements of the experience, thanks to a new, simple method of illustrating the Sonos app interface, which can be paired with other imagery, such as photography that depicts real life listening scenarios.

“Adding illustration to showcase the app was a breakthrough in sharing the total experience of listening on Sonos,” says Leon. “Speakers are only one part of it, but up till now we’ve been attempting to share the experience with only images of hardware. The software is integral.”

Flipping the Logo and Building a Flexible Brand

Alongside the addition of a new color palette and illustration style, Sonos is also making some changes to the way words show up in brand creative—most notably, through a new typeface. After years of using Helvetica Neue as its primary font, the brand is transitioning to a new one called Aktiv Grotesk. It’s a fairly subtle shift from one sans-serif typeface to another, rather than a radical departure.

“It’s a little bit more interesting,” says Jeanguenat of the new typeface. “It has unique qualities to it that feel more contemporary and ownable for us.”

One thing that isn’t changing is the design of the Sonos wordmark, which was last revised by Bruce Mau in 2015. The logo, which happens to be an ambigram—meaning it’s readable when displayed horizontally, vertically, upside down, or backwards—will stay the same, but guided by new rules about its orientation.

Under the brand’s new design rules, the Sonos logo (which can now include color) may be oriented vertically, in addition to its traditional horizontal orientation.

This flexibility opens up more layout options for designers working with the brand, who will be free to place the Sonos logo onto a given canvas in either orientation and let other elements fall into place accordingly.

“We’re really embracing the modular and flexible qualities of our wordmark,” says Jeanguenat. “That’s influenced by the freedom and versatility of our system of products.”

It won’t be the first time customers have seen the wordmark in this vertical orientation; Products like the Play:5 and Playbase have displayed the logo that way for some time. It’s just one of the ways that the brand’s new visual identity plays creative homage to the Sonos products themselves—not just by mimicking details like the vertical logo, but by creating a design system that strives to be flexible, modular, and easy to scale.

That creative scalability is expected to come in handy over the next few years, especially when it comes to expanding the company’s system of products–and designing new creative to help support those expansions. In the meantime, the brand has a whole new set of creative tools to play with.

“We know that as a company, our vision of Sonos is so much bigger than what it is today,” says Leon. “The design of our brand needs to be scalable to reflect that. This refresh is really about future-proofing our look and voice for what’s ahead.”

Fresh Look, Same Brilliant Sound: Inside the New Sonos Brand Identity

Listening is the world’s most versatile drug. Administered in the right quantities—and at the right quality—music, podcasts and other forms of culture can supercharge our mood, productivity, fitness routine, and personal relationships—yes, even our sex lives. That’s not just marketing hype from a speaker company. It’s backed by data.

Imagine, if you dare, a week without listening. No music, no podcasts or audiobooks, no dinnertime chatter with loved ones—Not even a movie or your nightly TV binge. If that sounds cringeworthy, the reasons may run deeper than you realize. As a growing body of scientific research suggests, consuming culture with our ears is an essential element of the human experience—one that naturally enhances many aspects of our daily lives.

Put another way, listening is the world’s most versatile drug. Not only does it help us feel less stressed and more productive, but the sound of music, podcasts, and other types of culture can motivate us to exercise more, supercharge our sex lives, spark new ideas, and even strengthen our bonds with family and friends. This isn’t just hype of the sort you might expect from a sound experience brand. It’s backed by science.

“Scientists have found evidence that we are wired to perceive and enjoy music as well as to bond with each other through music,” says Daniel Müllensiefen, a professor of music psychology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. “This explains why music is a ubiquitous part of the human experience, supporting the theory that music has a special, important function in our lives.”

The Brilliant Sound Survey is a new round of research that helps bolster the case for better living through listening. In an online survey of 12,000 listeners in 12 countries around the world, Sonos and its research partners found that listening, particularly to music, is reported by participants to have a significant positive effect on four key areas of life: mood, fitness, relationships, and productivity.

“Music is unique in that it appeals to different psychological functions,” says Dr. Müllensiefen. “It can trigger exactly the same areas in the brain that food and sex and other recreational activities and drugs can trigger. It can also be physical in terms of participating, like dancing along or playing drums.”

If sound matters, so too does its fidelity. According to some research, the transformative effects of listening may well be amplified when the sound quality is higher.

“It’s perfectly plausible that sound quality makes a difference, because it’s often small and subtle cues that trigger emotions, like the breath of the singer or the squeak of the guitar strings,” explains Dr. Müllensiefen. “If the sound is blurred or muffled, then it doesn’t have the same effect.”

Of Sound Mind: Listen Better to Feel Better

It hardly comes as a shock that listening has an impact on our moods. But the Brilliant Sound Survey results illustrate just how deep and multifaceted that connection between music and mood is perceived to be by listeners. Seventy-four percent of participants said listening to music helps reduce stress. Another 42% said that podcasts had a relaxing effect. Of course, the genre makes a difference. More than half (55%) of comedy podcast listeners said that those more humor-oriented shows helped relax them.

In the survey, majorities of listeners said they’re happier when listening to a favorite song (52%) and that music helps boost their mood at work (58%). More on that below.

Well sure, you might say, of course listening to one’s favorite music makes them feel happy. The connection between mood and music isn’t always predictable, however. In the survey, 36% of respondents said music has made them laugh unexpectedly. Even more (40%) said it’s made them cry unexpectedly.

“Many people probably aren’t aware of how much they rely on music to regulate their moods throughout the day,” says Dr. Müllensiefen. “We take it for granted because music is so much more available than it used to be. You can virtually listen to anything at any point in time these days.”

Once again, the quality of the sound appears to make a difference. A large majority (82%) of listeners said that a great sound system can make a party more fun.

Fitness Tune-up: The Power of Performance-enhancing Sound

Does getting yourself to the gym turn into an epic internal struggle? Next time, try putting on an uptempo playlist. According to the Brilliant Sound Survey, 68% of respondents say that music helps motivate them to workout when they’re tempted to skip it. The motivational role of sound and listening doesn’t stop when the workout gets going. Majorities of listeners say that music helps encourage them to workout longer (52%), push themselves further (55%) and exercise with greater intensity (51%).

When we’re exercising, music seems to play at least two distinct and important roles, according to Dr. Mullenfiesen: Distraction and stimulation.

“It basically distracts you from how hard you’re working out and takes your mind off how many more miles you have to run,” he says. “But you focus on something else, which is really important.”

Music also helps to stimulate us while we’re working out. “High paced, dynamic, loud music would cue to your physiology that you need to be in an alert state, keep going, and to keep the adrenaline flowing,” he says. “And if strong emotions are expressed, this can also boost your physiological system because strong emotions signal that there’s something important going on.”

If music operates somewhat like a drug when it comes to physical fitness and motivation, it appears to be a potent one. Three quarters of listeners say that music has a bigger impact on their workout regimen than any supplement does.

Sound quality can boost the impact of listening on fitness performance, according to one recent experiment conducted in the United States by Sonos and its research partners. The three-day experiment measured the physical and mental responses people had while working out in a high-intensity interval training in three scenarios: Listening on low-quality wireless speakers, listening on a pair of Sonos Ones, and working out in silence. When exposed to high-quality sound, participants reported a 26% increase in positive feelings about their workout and 34% increase in feelings of connection with their workout partners (despite a 3.5% increase in average heart rate and 2% rise in energy exerted). In other words, great sound enabled people to work out harder without feeling like they were doing extra work.

Sound & Relationships: Listen, Live, Laugh, Love

Listening also has a major effect on our connections with other people, from friends and family to lovers and long-term partners. Indeed, scientific research over the years has shown that musical taste and ability can play a role in our sexual attraction to one another. That finding is backed up by the Brilliant Sound Survey, in which 70% of respondents said they find others more attractive when they have similar taste in music. Even more people (76%) said they feel an instant connection with others when they realize the have similar taste in music.

“We seem to be hardwired to music,” says Dr. Müllensiefen. “It’s part of our evolution as a species that music has played a part of in social bonding, as a function of grooming within larger groups. It might have been useful for sexual mating as well, for example.”

The lust-fueling characteristics of music don’t just dissolve once that initial connection is made. According to the survey, most people say that music makes sex much better (59%) and that it can even make them more adventurous in bed (56%). It may come as a surprise, given how sexually-charged our relationship with music can be, that only 20% of listeners said they have a dedicated playlist for having sex.

Listening doesn’t just tighten our bonds with others in the bedroom. As the 2016 Music Makes It Home study commissioned by Sonos and Apple Music helped demonstrate, it can have all kinds of effects on our interactions with the people in our lives. In this new survey, 64% of people said that music helps them feel connected with family, while 69% said it can ease tensions at home.

“Listening to music and singing together has been shown in several studies to directly impact neuro-chemicals in the brain, many of which play a role in pleasure, closeness, and connection,” says Dr. Müllensiefen.

Your Brain on Listening: Productivity and Creativity

The notion that listening to music can help us focus and be more productive isn’t exactly breaking news. But would you believe that music is more potent than coffee? Sixty-seven percent of listeners say exactly that, according to the Brilliant Sound Survey. And just as many say music helps spark new ideas when they’re feeling stuck.

When it comes to listening and work performance, the survey results offer some pretty glowing endorsements. More than half (52%) of listeners say they wouldn’t be successful at work if they didn’t listen to music. Aiming for a promotion? Curating a playlist of your favorite focus-friendly music isn’t a bad place to start; A staggering 76% of respondents to the survey said that listening to music helps them produce their best work.

“Generally, music can have a strong stimulating effect that makes us alert and focused,” says Mullensiefen. But as with any other mind-altering substance, the results may vary based on the person and their circumstances. “There are several studies in the scientific literature that show that the right kind of music can enhance the performance on the right kind of task for the right kind of people.”

The Science of Listening: How Brilliant Sound Makes for Better Living

Sonos uses a unique blend of science and art to ensure your favorite music, movies, and TV shows sound the way their creators intended.

When Giles Martin wanted to track down the film industry’s most credible sound experts, he did what most of us do when in need of professional assistance: He Googled it.

Having practically grown up in recording studios, Martin already had his share of friends in the music world. As the Sound Experience Leader for Sonos, he routinely consults other record producers, mixing engineers, and musicians to get their perspective on how accurately Sonos reproduces the music they create in the studio. Top tier music producers like Nigel Godrich (Radiohead), Manny Marroquin (Rhianna, John Mayer), Tom Elmhirst (Adele), and Noah Goldstein (Kanye West) have become more involved in this work, recently forming the core of what Sonos calls its Soundboard, a panel of industry sound creators who lend their time and ears to Sonos in an effort to inject the artist’s perspective into the product development process.

“The sound of music or the sound of a great movie should be transmitted into your home as pure and honest as it can be.”

“There isn’t such a thing as a ‘Sonos sound,’” Martin explains. “Like a clear window that lets the light shine through, Sonos is a portal to the world of sonic culture in your home.”

To keep this metaphorical window free of the dust that could disrupt that clarity, Martin works closely with the Soundboard and a wider network of sound creators to critique and fine-tune the sound experience of the Sonos system.

For years, this approach has worked well for music. Thanks to the combined roots of Martin (who produces and remixes the Beatles albums originally recorded by his late father, Sir George Martin) and Sonos (which pioneered wireless home listening over 15 years ago), it wasn’t hard to cover the bases when it came to the music experience on Sonos. But when Martin first learned about the company’s latest endeavor—

, a TV soundbar tasked with defying its compact size with room-filling sound for movies, shows, and music alike—he knew he would need to find some creative expertise from the world of cinema sound as well.

“The sound of music or the sound of a great movie should be transmitted into your home as pure and honest as it can be,” says Martin. “While developing Beam, we treated music and home theater equally.”

Martin’s inquiry led him to the name of Chris Jenkins, a film re-recording mixer whose Academy Award for his work on 

 is just the shiniest, newest golden statue in his collection of accolades. The name looked familiar to Martin because, as luck would have it, the two were already slated to work together on the sound for Ron Howard’s documentary project 

Eight Days A Week: The Beatles’ Touring Years

. Martin and Jenkins became fast friends and it didn’t take long for their conversations to steer toward home theater and the bumpy journey that sound often makes from the mixing board to the living room.

“We had built a great team that knew about music,” says Martin. “Chris Jenkins is an expert on movies. He’s worked on some of the greatest movies ever made, and he knows how they should sound.”

With Jenkins’ addition to the Soundboard, the sound experience team at Sonos was ready to take on the unique challenge of building Beam to fill a room with clear, immersive sound that does creative justice to chart-topping albums and Hollywood blockbusters alike.

“If you’re going to have a speaker under your television, it shouldn’t just be a home theater product,” says Martin. “The challenge is to make a speaker that’s great for home theater so dialogue is great, car chases wiz through your home, but also the music is great so the honesty of a track comes through.”

Academy Award-winning re-recording engineer Chris Jenkins (Mad Max: Fury Road) is one of the sound creators on the Sonos Soundboard, a panel of creative advisors that helps Sonos fine-tune the sound of speakers like Beam.

For Sonos, perfecting the sound experience of Beam would require a refined version of the process the company has used for the last few years: First, start with world class talent in engineering, acoustics, and design to build a speaker with clear, room-filling sound. Then pressure-test that hard work with the critical, creative input of the people who crafted the sound of the content in the first place; In short, blend the science with art.

Sonos has no shortage of left-brained expertise when it comes to sound. With five PhDs, an arsenal of patents, and a team with more than a century of combined experience building world-class speakers, the sound team is well equipped to achieve engineering feats like getting deeper bass out of small speakers, designing super-flat transducers like the ones found in Playbase, and developing spatially-aware tuning technology like Trueplay. Each new product is put through its paces in Sonos’s state-of-the-art acoustic measurement and testing facilities, including four large sound-tight anechoic chambers. Team members like Director of Audio Systems Engineering Hilmar Lehnert are frequently found on the conference speaking circuit, and Sonos engineers actively participate in the scientific community and have published work in academic journals.

“The central nervous system of a movie is dialogue.”

Grammy Award-winning music producer and Sonos Soundboard member Manny Marroquin.

In 2014, Martin was brought on as the Sound Experience Leader to help Sonos balance out the hard science with input from the artistic community. Starting with Playbar, Martin and his team began seeking the input of creators through informal, Sonos-hosted listening sessions in which the sound of each product can be tweaked in real time. Over the years, creators like Hans Zimmer, Rick Rubin, Nigel Godrich and dozens of others have sat down with Sonos engineers to hear how their work sounds on Sonos devices and share their honest feedback.

These sessions, which take place in listening rooms at Sonos headquarters or in the creators’ homes, give the artists (along with Sonos engineers) a chance to lean back, listen intently, and discuss what they hear in a casual, laid back environment. In one such listening session in 2015, Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich reportedly tested out the Play:5 for more than seven hours. In most cases, these creators watch and 

listen to the music, movies, or TV shows that they’ve worked on

 in order to judge how accurately the Sonos system retains the original emotion and overall impact of the content’s carefully crafted sound. If it doesn’t sound quite right, they say so.

“When we sit down with these people we ask them for criticism,” says Martin. “Are they disappointed with what they hear from Sonos? How can we tweak the sound to make them happy?”

Soundboard member Manny Marroquin is one of several music industry sound professionals who participate in these listening sessions. For Marroquin, a Grammy-winning mixing engineer and music producer who has worked with Rihanna, Kanye West, Linkin Park, and John Mayer, these sessions are more about listening for emotion than getting overly technical about sound engineering.

“I just listen to how it makes me feel,” says Marroquin. “The moment I start to think about it, then I know something’s off. But if I get lost in that moment, then I know I’ve got my right brain engaged.”

This listening-and-tuning work has continued with Play:1, Play:5, Playbase, Sonos One, and, most recently, Sonos Beam.

The new Sonos Beam in one of the anechoic chambers in Sonos’s headquarters in Santa Barbara, California.

As a sound engineer working in Hollywood, Chris Jenkins knows all too well the limitations of the home theater listening experience. As televisions get thinner and thinner, the sound typically gets worse. Home theater speakers designed to fix that problem may amplify the sound effects and movie scores just fine, but they often overlook what Jenkins believes is the most crucial ingredient: the sound of the human voice.

“The most important part of movies is storytelling,” says Jenkins. “I’ve found that the experience of what the actors were saying—the performance and the storytelling part of it—is often really lacking. The central nervous system of a movie is dialogue.”

Sonos Beam tackles this dialogue clarity problem first through design and engineering. As a three-channel speaker, Beam keeps dialogue centralized in the center channel, so the detail of what people are saying on screen doesn’t get lost amidst the sounds emanating from the left and right channels. Beam also comes with a speech enhancement feature that further improves vocal clarity.

“When we sit down with these people we ask them for criticism. Are they disappointed with what they hear from Sonos? How can we tweak the sound to make them happy?”

Getting the dialogue performance of Beam just right is one of several things that was aided by input from sound creators like the team behind HBO’s Westworld, Baby Driver sound designer Julian Slater, and, of course, Jenkins himself.

“One of the things that we listened to was the opening of Mad Max: Fury Road, which has a lot of crazy loud cars and chases,” says Jenkins. “But the very opening of it is super subtle and very atmospheric, and there’s lots a little voices and lots of delays and reverbs. It’s what Max is hearing in his head before he sets off on his journey.”

This balancing act between explosive and subtle sounds is, in many ways, emblematic of the whole Beam creation story: music vs. film, dialogue vs. sound effects, design vs. acoustics, engineering vs. art. In order for Sonos Beam to fit into people’s lives and sound just right, the team working on it needed to thoughtfully echolocate the sweet spot between each of these competing factors.

“The fun thing for me about Sonos is working with teams that have different interests,” says Martin. “Design wants to make a speaker that looks great in the home. Audio wants to make a speaker that sounds great. It’s difficult to make that compromise of fit, form, and function. We all have to be happy by the end of it. It’s like recording and writing a song. You all have to be happy with the end result.”

How Sonos Works With Creators to Fine-Tune the Home Sound Experience

Academy Award-winning film sound engineer Chris Jenkins spends his days crafting sonic landscapes for movies like Mad Max: Fury Road and The Fifth Element. The studio headphones may come off by the time he gets home, but the listening is just getting started.

Despite its name, the motion picture would be nothing without the other half of its creative equation: Sound. Behind every booming explosion, whispered line of dialogue, and iconic score is a team of sound engineers helping to orchestrate the cinematic experience. Few do so as masterfully as Chris Jenkins.

As a film sound re-recording engineer, Jenkins uses his discerning ear to propel stories off of screens and immerse audiences in the worlds of such films as 

. In his nearly 40 years of experience, he’s amassed over 180 mixing credits and won three Academy Awards.

When he’s not helping to craft multi-sensory storytelling experiences for movie theaters, Jenkins is busy doing his part to make sure movies and music sound amazing at home as well. As a member of the Sonos Soundboard—an advisory panel of entertainment industry sound creators enlisted by Sonos–Jenkins works closely with the company’s engineers and product team, offering his professional feedback on the sound of speakers like the new Sonos Beam as they’re being developed. Through a series of hands-on listening sessions, creative advisors like Jenkins have a simple aim: To help Sonos ensure that the original emotion and sonic clarity of films, music, and other content are retained as this work makes its way from the studio mixing board to the living room.

Because he spends all day working with sound, it wouldn’t be all that surprising if he wanted to come home to complete silence, but Jenkins’s passion spans both his professional and personal lives. We visited him at his home on the outskirts of Los Angeles, where he lives with his wife, Jeanne, and two dogs, Daisy and Moose, to talk about sound and learn how he listens off the clock.

How do you transition from listening at work to listening at home? What role does sound play here as opposed to in the studio?

We always have music on here. If I work late in the studio, sometimes a quiet drive home is necessary just to help me reset, but that quiet time makes the listening experience here at home even better.

We live in this beautiful canyon. I love the sounds of nature and how still it can be sometimes, but great music is just a requirement for home. Otherwise, it feels naked in a way. I grew up in a house with music, so it’s always been a rich part of my life, including in my work on movies.

Living out here must be great for decompressing from work and finding inspiration.

I listen to the way things sound out here, and sound comes from everywhere. Nature is everywhere sonically. We have an incredible gift with our ears and our minds to be able to process that. So I keep listening to music and thinking about ways to improve that experience, whether it’s a singer-songwriter with an acoustic guitar or Luciano Pavarotti with an 80-piece orchestra. There should be no difference in the quality of listening.

"We have an incredible gift with our ears and minds. I keep listening to music and thinking about ways to improve that experience."

A Play: 5 fills the Jenkins' living room with deep rich sound.

You probably wear headphones a lot at work. How does that compare to listening out loud?

I find them incredibly intrusive. I was a second engineer for many years for a lot of great mixers, so I had to wear headphones every day, and I hated them. They’re not comfortable. It’s not a natural way for me to listen to music. Headphones today are intended to shut the rest of the world away. They isolate people, so they have their experience with their phone or tablet and don’t have to engage with other people. When I listen to music or watch movies, I want it to be a shared experience.

My goal is to get people to take off the headphones. There’s nothing greater than watching a room full of people who respond positively to listening to the same thing. There’s so much joy in the room from that shared experience. Even with total strangers.

But headphones are a reality. A lot of artists I’ve worked with have just handed me a pair of earbuds and said, “Make it sound good on these.” People you think would be huge sound fanatics know that we live in the real world. We have to make something sound great for earbuds and 7.1 systems alike.

When you’re mixing, most of the time you’re focused on the listening experience in the cinema. How do you make sure people get that kind of listening experience at home?

We want people to have that same experience. More and more, shows that we work on and soundtracks that we create have much more sophisticated immersive audio. As the technology keeps advancing, people are closer to having that kind of experience without needing a bunch of huge speakers at home. The technology we have now makes it easier to reproduce those soundtracks and make immersive audio so much more accessible.

The Jenkins enjoy some music in the kitchen.

It was actually my wife! We have this incredible home that we’ve worked really hard on. Every little piece of wood and all the furniture is an important part of our style and who we are as people. We didn’t want to cut holes in walls or run cables and wires and have all this clunky gear around. That’s a part of my world at the studio, but we don’t want to make it part of our home. We bumped up against that time and time again with different gear and different ways of playing back music and movies at home.

My wife has a super keen eye for detail and design. When I first brought Playbase home to test, she didn’t say anything about it at first. I put it on and after about an hour, she came in and said, “What is that underneath the TV?” It sounded great, but for us, the design aesthetic was equally important.

Not everybody is used to having sound gear in their home, and the technology can’t interfere with your ability to enjoy it. And now with voice control, it’s easier for kids to use.

You seem to have a speaker in every room, even the bathrooms.

It’s amazing to have a single mono speaker that can produce such great sounding music in a place you don’t really expect. The living room is the most experiential. We take it for granted now that things are supposed to sound great because our TVs don’t produce good sound. I love being able to stream music from my office and listen off the Playbase in the living room. When we have guests over, we can have every speaker on and put the house in party mode and have that experience in as many places as possible.

"When I listen to music or watch movies, I want it to be a shared experience. My goal is to get people to take off the headphones."

Oh, everything. At any time I could be listening to country, bluegrass, classical, Hans Zimmer, or Junkie XL. You should see what my playlists look like. My wife loves Willie Nelson, so we’ll listen to Willie Nelson on our Sonos One in the kitchen while cooking. There’s always something on in any given room. Lately, it’s a lot of The Beatles, Jackson Brown, and Bruno Mars.

We did a movie with Father John Misty this year. It was part of the album that came out. We listen to everything. Music plays a huge part in our life.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Chris Jenkins: How an Acclaimed Hollywood Sound Creator Listens at Home

For generations of music lovers, vinyl remains the ultimate audiophile format. From the nostalgia-inducing crackle of the needle hitting the groove, to its warm analogue sound and the tactile pleasure of a beautiful 12” gatefold sleeve, the ritual of putting a record on a turntable and letting it carry you away retains a charm and romance all its own.

Nearly a century since its introduction, the beloved vinyl record still remains in fine health. In 2022, record sales in the US saw their 

Clearly, our love for vinyl isn’t going away anytime soon, even as the immediacy and choice of streaming has revolutionised how we listen to music.

But why should we have to choose one format over the other? With Sonos, not only can you access hundreds of music streaming services, but you can also seamlessly integrate a turntable into your home sound system.

If you’re looking to make the most of your record collection, then this quick guide will help you connect a turntable to your Sonos system in minutes so you can start enjoying the rich, unmistakable sound of your favourite vinyl all around your home.

There are a number of ways to do this. First, you’ll need one of the following Sonos products:

Of course, you’ll also need a turntable, like the 

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Chris Jenkins: How an Acclaimed Hollywood Sound Creator Listens at Home

How to Listen to Vinyl With Sonos

Philip Glass on Listening (and Composing) at 80

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The Science of Listening: How Brilliant Sound Makes for Better Living