A big complaint from music buffs is that music doesn’t sound as rich and full today as it’s supposed to; that it doesn’t sound as the musician meant it to. After all, once it’s recorded, it’s digitized, and then it arrives on your device, and is played out on a tinny sounding pocket speaker, smartphone, or sub-quality speaker so by then there’s no doubt something is lost.
But a revolutionary new technology aims to bridge that gap, by fine tuning your speakers just for you, based on the acoustics in your home, promising “spot-on playback of what the artist recorded”.
Sonos has introduced “Trueplay” which aims to make all your music sound better on your Sonos speakers, since it’s calibrated for the particular room in your home.
What is Trueplay?
Trueplay is a new technology from Sonos that uses the microphone in an iOS/Apple device (and yes, it’s just Apple for now) to measure how sound exists in your particular room. It measures how the sound reflects off walls, furniture and all the other surfaces in a room, and recalibrates your Sonos speaker to make sure it sounds great no matter where you’ve placed it.
Sonos explains that the layout of a room, and where a speaker is placed, can have a significant impact on the sound that you hear, so Sonos technology can now adjust for that. And the whole process only takes about 3 minutes from start to finish.
Why use Trueplay?
Trueplay’s goal is to ensure the song the artist created “makes it all the way from the studio to your home with all its power and passion intact. So you can feel their heartbeat in every note. And in any room,” according to Sonos. It means you’re having a more intimate experience with the artist of your choice, because you’re hearing the music as they hear it in their heads, or in their perfect studio environment.
How does Trueplay work?
Sound from a speaker reflects off pretty much everything in your room before it reaches your ear. Those reflections can cause the distortion of certain frequencies either louder or quieter than they sound in the studio version of the recording.
Using your iOS device, a calibration tone is played, and you move through the room. The microphone in your smartphone or tablet takes an “acoustic profile” of your room by recording how loud those various frequencies sound as you move around. Trueplay then applies a combination of equalizer and filtering techniques to correct these frequencies so your music sounds the way the artist intended it to.
How can I use Trueplay?
Trueplay is available only on Sonos speakers; the PLAY:1, PLAY:3 and PLAY:5. You’ll also need an iOS device as I noted above.
It’s very cool new technology that we hope to be able to test and review in the new year. If it works exactly as described it could be a game-changer not just for music buffs, but for the way we all hear music in the future.
