Sonos S2 Mobile App (Android, iOS, FireOS)

The excellent Sonos S2 mobile app (Android, iOS, FireOS) lets you play music from all supported music services (Apple Music, Tidal, Spotify, YouTube Music, Deezer, TuneIn Radio, Sonos Radio, Bandcamp, SoundCloud, and many more), or your local Plex server or shared music folder. The screenshot above shows a scenario with six available Sonos speakers, where two are grouped together (Living Room and Gallery) and each speaker/group plays music from a different source—TuneIn on the Living Room/Gallery group, Spotify on the bedroom speaker, and Tidal on my office speaker (the Five in this exact case). Selecting what plays where boils down to tapping the "cast" button next to any of the speakers/groups and putting check marks next to appropriate speakers/groups. There are also buttons to quickly play the selected tune on all speakers or create speaker group presets, which is great if you happen to often group the same speakers. Whatever you want to do in the Sonos S2 app, it will always be no more than two or three taps away, and that's one of the main reasons for the global popularity of Sonos products.


You may always check what's playing on each speaker by clicking on the desired speaker and expanding the "now playing" window. The window looks like it would in any music service app, along with the play, pause, next song, and previous song controls, a queue, and some useful additional options hidden behind a three-dot menu (start radio, add a song to playlist, and save to your music). Of course, the speaker selection menu is accessible on this screen as well, so feel free to quickly send the current song or album to other Sonos speakers you own.


Your recently played music and favorite radio stations are always available in the My Sonos tab. You can quickly access them and play them on the Five, or any other Sonos speaker in your home. The currently selected speaker or speaker group is always displayed at the bottom of the window, so you never have to wonder which speaker will start playing whatever you choose from the My Sonos menu.


After adding your music streaming service accounts to Sonos, you can access them through the Browse menu. While most other multiroom systems require you to use Spotify through Spotify's official app, Sonos offers full Spotify integration. You can browse and listen to its entire catalog, play radio stations, and create playlists without leaving the Sonos S2 app. Should you prefer to use the official Spotify app, that's possible too; simply play whatever you want and select the Sonos Five, or any other Sonos speaker in your home, as the playback device. This is made possible by Spotify Connect support, of course.


The integrated search feature works globally, meaning it will show you the results from all music streaming services you've connected to your Sonos system. This is a great feature if you use more than one because you won't have to hop between them to get to the music you're looking for.


The System menu is where you'll configure your Sonos system, including the Five speaker. There are many general options to go through, including speaker group setup, media servers, alarms, network settings, system updates, and so on.


Diving into the settings specific to the Sonos Five, you can change the name of the speaker or the room it's in, but that's only a good idea if it's the only speaker in that room, pair it up with a secondary Five unit, adjust its volume limit and equalizer, fine-tune the line-in source if you're using one (level and delay adjustment), and enable or disable its status light and touch controls. The EQ menu lets you adjust the bass and treble on a ±10 dB scale, and you can also turn on the Loudness option here, which boosts the bass and makes the sound livelier at low listening volumes.

If you're using the Sonos S2 app on an iOS device, you'll see a Trueplay option in the Five's settings. The Trueplay technology aims to calibrate the speaker according to the space in which it is located. The process consists of walking around the room and waving the iPhone/iPad around while the speaker fires test signals. The Trueplay technology analyzes sound reflections from the walls, furniture, and other surfaces in your room and creates a modified frequency curve adapted to the Five and your particular environment. Trueplay is completely unavailable on Android devices, which can be explained by the fact that it needs to know the characteristics of the microphone used for calibration, which is infinitely easier in Apple's mobile ecosystem. Sonos recently updated the list of supported iPhones/iPads, so now only the iPod touch (7th generation), iPad Pro 11-inch (2nd generation), and iPad Pro 12.9-inch (4th generation) aren't supported. Trueplay currently also isn't available on the recently released iPad Air (5th generation) and iPhone SE (3rd generation), but both are on the "coming soon" list. It could take a while—my iPad Air 2020 was on that list for ages—but the support will eventually come.

Sonos S2 Desktop App (Windows, macOS)

The Sonos desktop application (Windows, macOS) doesn't look nearly as sleek as its mobile counterpart. Design-wise, it feels almost like an afterthought, something that needed to be made but hardly had any real focus put into it. On the other hand, it doesn't fall behind in terms of functionality. The interface is split into three vertical columns, where you see a list of your Sonos speakers/speaker groups, what's playing on each of them, and what sources of music are available for use. You can use the built-in search function for every music streaming service you've connected to Sonos and even apply equalization to either of your Sonos speakers, activate alarms and sleep timers, and add or remove music sources.

Although I use the mobile app to access my Sonos system 95% of the time, for the remaining 5%, the Sonos desktop app serves its purpose.