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, Amazon Music, 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 three available Sonos speakers, where each is playing music from a different source—a local radio station via TuneIn Radio on the Sonos Arc, Deezer on my bedroom speaker (Sonos One), and a song via Spotify on the Ray. Selecting what plays where boils down to tapping the "cast" button next to any of the speakers or groups and putting checkmarks next to appropriate speakers or groups. There are also buttons to quickly play the selected tune on all speakers or create speaker group presets if you 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 Sonos' global popularity.


You can always check what's playing on each speaker by clicking on the desired speaker and expanding the "now playing" window. This window looks like 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 from this screen as well, so you can 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. Here you can quickly access and play them on the Ray 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 select 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 (Spotify Connect), meaning 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 Ray (or any other Sonos speaker in your home) as the playback device. You can do the same in Tidal's official app as Tidal Connect is also supported by Sonos products. Finally, as far as I'm aware, Sonos has the exclusive right to full Apple Music integration. You can add and use Apple Music just like you would any other music or radio service.


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 Ray soundbar. 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 Ray, 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), adjust its volume limit and equalizer, add an audio delay if the sound is not perfectly synchronized with the picture on your TV, adjust the volume controls if pairing it with your TV's infrared remote, add a voice server (Sonos Voice, Google Assistant, or Amazon Alexa), enable or disable its status light and touch controls, and so on. The EQ menu lets you adjust the bass and treble on a ±10 dB scale, and turn on the Loudness option, which boosts the bass and makes the sound livelier at low listening volumes. Finally, if you own the Sonos One or Sonos One SL speakers, or the IKEA SYMFONISK picture frames with wireless speakers, you can wirelessly pair them up with the Sonos Ray and turn them into rear surround sound channels. The Sonos Ray can also be wirelessly paired up with the Sonos Sub subwoofer. If you're using the Sonos S2 app on an iOS device, you'll see a Trueplay option in the Ray's settings. More on it in the sound quality section of this review.

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 had 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 can 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.