I’ve never left the house with theSonos Move. Despite the best of intentions, it’s an admission I expect Sonos may not appreciate, especially in the first paragraph of a review for its latest product. But after spending a good four years with Sonos’s original portable speaker, a hybrid Wi-Fi/Bluetooth behemoth that sounds about as good as a battery-powered speaker can (and it had better for $399), I never entered into a situation that justified walking with the speaker beyond my backyard.
Perhaps that’s OK, because I suspect Sonos would have changed more about its follow-up, the Move 2, if the original hadn’t found its place in the company’s line-up. The extent Sonos changed the Move 2 — and most of the updates are internal — reinforces just how assured the company was with its initial approach to a full-sized speaker that could, with a bit of exertion, be moved wherever you wanted it.
The Move 2 is a worthwhile successor, sawing down the proverbial rough edges, both physically and digitially, that occasionally marred the experience of using the original. But, for better or worse, the Move 2 nestles into the same slim niche, and with a $50 price bump, makes it even more difficult to justify buying over the newly-releasedEra 300at the same price.
Still — different strokes and all that. So let’s dig into whether the $449 Move 2 is worth your time.
Sonos Move 2
The Sonos Move 2 is the best Wi-Fi portable speaker you’re able to buy. It’s big — perhaps too big — and heavy, but its 24-hour battery and simultaneous Wi-Fi/Bluetooth support makes it a significant upgrade over its predecessor, and a truly flexible speaker that sounds excellent indoors and out.
Price and availability
The Sonos Move 2 is pricey; at $449, it’s a $50 jump over its predecessor, and that speaker was already a big ask. However, this time around the price increase comes with a bunch of improvements (plus, you know,inflation) that largely justify the bump, as well as two new colors that are actually pretty great. I’m particularly fond of the new olive color, but the white one, which matches the recently-launched Era 100 and Era 300 speakers, is particularly clean and modern-looking, and replaces the greyer Lunar White of the previous generation.
The Move 2 is shipping now in Black, White, and Olive colorways.
Design and hardware
When the Move was originally announced in August 2019, Sonos invited a gaggle of media to New York for a showcase not just of the finished product, but the painstakingly iterative process of designing it. The Move that we saw bore little resemblance to the many,manyprototypes the company built as it explored how it could fashion a portable speaker that met the scrupulous expectations of its loyal customer base.
The built-in handle, which in its final form is more of an absence than an addition, was particularly difficult to get right: too shallow and it wouldn’t be comfortable; too expansive and it would force the chassis larger in the final product. But when I first picked up and walked around with the Move, its handle — its overall design — was revelatory. At Android Central, where Ireviewed the Move, I called the handle’s design “a work of pure engineering genius,” and I stand by those words.
I bring this up because the Move 2 does not change much about the original’s looks, but makes meaningful improvements to the button and microphone layouts on the top and rear of the device. From the front, color aside, the Move 2 looks largely unchanged — you’d have to peer between the fine mesh grill to notice a modification to the speaker arrangement, which blossoms from one tweeter to two. Up top, the Move 2 benefits from the Era series' overhauled touch controls, including a concave volume slider that replaces the Move’s vexingly unmarked volume buttons. Now there are dedicated previous/next track tap areas on either side of the play/pause button, and above it is one that disables the voice assistant (if activated) even if the dedicated microphone switch around back is switched on.
The back has also been considerably cleaned up: gone is the sync button, which is no longer needed thanks to updates to Sonos’s fast pairing abilities, replaced by the aforementioned microphone switch. The hybrid Bluetooth/Wi-Fi button is also now just a Bluetooth toggle — yet another indication that the Move, when it was released back in 2019, didn’t quite have the connectivity bona fides it required to avoid debilitating connection idiosyncracies.
The Move 2 just works: it supports simultaneous connections to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, which negates the need to pick one over the other, in addition to allowing owners to blast whatever’s playing on a phone, over Bluetooth, to any Sonos-connected speaker in the house. The USB-C port still allows for charging from a capable cable, though Sonos recommends a 45W charger to get the job done quickly.
The company also bundles a sort-of dockthingin the box, too, and even had the wherewithall to disconnect the USB-C charger from it this time, allowing you to repurpose it for straight cord-charging if you don’t have the dock handy. That, plus the twice-as-long battery life of the Move 2, means you may pretty comfortably pack this in a trunk or (large) suitcase for a trip without worrying you’re going to need to top it up every day or so. Unfortunately, the thing can’t be used as a speaker for phone calls, which feels odd given all the pieces are in place for it to do so, but you can’t win ‘em all.
I also just want to shout out Sonos for color-matching the speaker with the dock and charging brick, particularly on the olive unit they sent me for review. It’s a nice touch that makes the thing feel a little closer to its $449 price tag.
Sound quality
Don’t expect much from the addition of a second tweeter to the Move 2. The minor redesign, which repurposes the internals to position the tweeters facing at roughly 45-degree angles from the listener if facing the speaker head-on. Even when listening to tracks with marked left-right separation in their mixes I had a hard time distinguishing the individual channels, and this was particularly notable when comparing the speaker with the original Move, which only has a single forward-facing tweeter.
That said, the sound profile of the Move 2 is slightly cleaner than the original; the addition of an extra tweeter allows the mids and highs to mellow a bit, taking the pressure off that one enclosure to produce everything above a few hundred hertz. Sonos has also managed to tamp down some of the boominess I experienced with the Move, and comparing the same songs — Justice’s classic dance track,D.A.N.C.E.,and selections from Mitski’s new album,The Land Is Inhospitable and So Are We, among others — finds the Move 2 better able to control its worst sonic tendencies.
This is a very fine-sounding speaker, but aurally far more akin to the $249 Era 100 than the $449 Era 300. Its strength is in its power: the Move 2, likely to be able to accommodate an outdoor setting where the gale of the real world impinges upon the ebbs and flows of casual conversation, can getloud. It doesn’t sound particularly good above 75% volume, but you’re sure going to hear it struggle to do justice to your favorite tunes, even at a distance.
Who is this for?
At the start of this review, I admitted that I’ve still yet to leave the house with the Sonos Move; over the past four years, it’s quietly become a workhorse stationary speaker in my bedroom. That’s all well and good, but likely not what Sonos intended for it, and had I chosen to spend the $399 asking price back then, I’d likely have regretted its eventual circumstance. But this time, armed with the fortune of hindsight, I made a concerted effort to treat the Move 2 as portable as its 6.5 pounds would allow; I carried it around the house on a regular basis, putting it in places that other speakers couldn’t, or shouldn’t go.
It went close to the sink as I washed dishes (this was my favorite), completely obliterating the nearby Nest Hub Max playing the latest Explosions in the Sky album, thanks to its IP56 water ingress rating. It regularly came with me into the back yard as I worked on this review. It even acted as a Bluetooth party speaker for a friend’s birthday party (with permission) to great acclaim. It wound up in my bathroom, my basement, and practically everywhere else a full-sized speaker has no business being.
The battery never quite let up — I can confirm that the speaker can play for around 24 hours, though it largely depends on the volume and the state of connectivity, but either way it’s a huge improvement over the 10 hours of the original. That it can berelatively easily replacedis a testament to Sonos’s feelings on the longevity of its products; I have a Sonos One from 2013 that’s still going strong, pumping out music and white noise in my son’s room every day and night.
But the original Move could also do all of those things, too. The main advantages of the Move 2 over its predecessor can be summed up neatly: over double the battery life; and the ability to use its USB-C port with the $19Aux Line-in Adapter, which lets the speaker connect to a turntable or any other speaker that audio source that can be converted to terminate in a 3.5mm jack. It’s a considerable piece of versatility that was absent in the original Move (despite the presence of a USB-C port for charging). The Move 2’s USB-C port can also slowly charge a phone or tablet, albeit slowly at just 7.5 watts.
Competition, and the Sonos advantage
The fact that the Move 2 is aSonosspeakeris, to me, a huge advantage over practically any other connected speaker on the market. While there are companies that allow you to connect disparate speakers together — Google and Amazon are the more affordable options, with names like Bose, Denon, and Bluesound among the more premium options — none bring together the breadth of audio services Sonos supports, the high-quality components it uses, the straightforward setup experience, the presence of AirPlay 2 and other always-listening assistants (barring Google Assistant), and the excellent Sonos S2 app.
Sonos’s app wasn’t always good — prior to launching the S2 platform in 2020, it was a bit of a mess — and even today still has the occasional quirk, but it generally just works, whether you’re listening to the company’s own Sonos Radio HD station, Spotify, or something far more obscure.
Until recently, Sonos supported both Google AssistantandAlexa, along with its own Sonos Voice Control, which is less an assistant than just a way to use your voice to play particular tracks, but since theescalation of its lawsuitwith the Mountain View-based giant, that’sgone the way of Stadia. Hopefully we’ll get it back in a future update, but for now that’s really the main disadvantage to choosing Sonos over, say, the newJBL Authentics, which supports simultaneous Assistant/Alexa, along with AirPlay 2 and Chromecast built-in.
Should you buy it?
The Move 2 is a better product than the original Move, though the original’s compromises are still present, just less acute. The increased battery life is particularly welcome, as is the streamlined way Wi-Fi and Bluetooth now coexist. Sound isn’t much better but benefits slightly from a second tweeter, and the USB-C port’s additional functionality makes the Move 2 considerably more flexible than before, especially given its portability.
And it’s that inherent portability, even limited somewhat by its size and weight, that distinguishes the Move 2 from all other Sonos speakers, and from practically every other Bluetooth-only speaker out there. There’s just nothing else like it, not in the whole-package sort of way that Sonos has ended up pulling off here. You can even replace the battery if its charge capacity dims over time, ensuring that the Move 2 will last as long as the Sonos platform supports it — likely another decade or more.
By any standards, this is an expensive speaker. But it’s also Sonos’s most interesting, and definitely its most compelling for anyone with peripatetic tendencies. You’re still paying an enormous premium for the privilege — if judged by sound quality alone, by an Era 300 or two Era 100s and you’ll be much happier — but thankfully fidelity is only half the story. It’s one of thebest smart speakersyou can buy.
