I put the Era 100 on the bookshelf in my office on a Tuesday and have not moved it since. That is the highest compliment I give a speaker. Most things on my desk get rearranged, returned, or quietly retired within a month; this one earned its square foot and kept it.
The headline change from the old Sonos One is that there are now two tweeters instead of one, which means actual stereo separation out of a single cabinet. It's not going to fool anyone into thinking they're hearing a pair of bookshelf speakers, but for a podcast in the morning and an album in the afternoon it is convincingly wide, and voices sit in the middle of the soundstage instead of smearing across it. Bass is the other surprise. There's a real low end here for the size, enough that I stopped reaching for a subwoofer in a room I never thought I'd be happy in.
The app is the reason to buy a Sonos and the reason to hate one. Setup took four minutes, AirPlay 2 works, Bluetooth works, the line-in works with an adapter, and the multi-room handoff between this and the speaker in my kitchen is seamless. That same app, however, had a calamitous redesign in 2024 that the company has spent a year and a half walking back, and even now there are days where I open it and a speaker has gone missing for no reason I can identify. A reboot fixes it. A reboot shouldn't be necessary.
The other catch is the ecosystem tax. You're not really buying a speaker; you're buying the first or fifth node in a Sonos house. Once you have three of these the lock-in is real, and Sonos knows it. There's no Chromecast support, no Google Assistant anymore (they cut it), and the line-in requires a $20 dongle Sonos sells separately because of course it does.
Sound-quality-per-dollar, you can do better. A pair of Edifier R1280Ts and a cheap DAC will embarrass this at lower money if all you care about is listening to music in one room while sitting still. But that is not what this speaker is for. This is for the kitchen, the bedroom, the office, the porch — places where you want music to start the second you walk in, from whatever phone happens to be in your pocket, without thinking about it.
I've had mine almost a year. The thing I keep coming back to is how rarely I think about it. It plays music when I ask it to and shuts up when I don't, which sounds like a low bar until you've owned a Bluetooth speaker that drops out every fourth song.
Verdict: Buy this if you want one good small speaker per room and you've already made peace with living inside the Sonos app.