The latest update to the Sonos multiroom line-up brings another audio format to the home theatre and more battery life to the portables.
It’s always nice when you get something for nothing, especially when that something for nothing comes in the form of an unexpected product update, the sort of thing that can happen in this modern world of ours.
And if you’re the owner of a Sonos product, that may well be happening for you, provided you have a home theatre breed of Sonos or something made to be portable.
This week, Sonos has released another update to its Sonos S2 gear, delivering support for DTS to home theatre products including this year’s Sonos Beam Gen 2 and last year’s Sonos Arc, as well as the Beam Gen 1, and older Playbase and Playbar — essentially the range of home theatre products from Sonos that are still supported.
The obvious competitor to Dolby, DTS is used in some movie soundtracks over Dolby, delivering what is essentially a higher bitrate, even though Dolby tends to be more widely used. You may find you can pick between Dolby and DTS in movies and services, and now that Sonos supports the latter, means you’ll get the signal properly through its home theatre products.
However, the catch is that you’ll only find the surround sound version of DTS, not the 3D spatial variant in DTS:X. While Dolby Atmos is supported by Sonos’ home theatre products, the 3D spatial equivalent in the DTS world hasn’t arrived yet, but could be coming later.
Support for DTS is just one of the additions in the latest Sonos update, mind you, with a new “battery saver” mode for both the Sonos Roam and the Sonos Move portable speakers arriving as well.
The feature should see Sonos’ portable speakers handle their battery issues a little better, and when switched on (because it’s optional), the mode will turn the speakers off after 30 minutes, requiring the physical power button to be pushed to turn the speakers back on. That’s good news if you yearned for more battery life from either the Sonos Roam or Sonos Move, and should be something you can switch on the moment you grab that update, which is available now.
