Sonos or Studio?
I’m thinking about the tradeoffs one might look at for the Sonos speaker vs the Echo Studio, especially around voice control. Sonos has had Alexa Built In for some time. Amazon has had had the Echo Plus for over a year and now the Echo Studio offers up higher end sound than that.
The tradeoff from a consumer perspective would be, do I go with third party voice integration or a third party speaker (in the case of the Echo Studio, in that it probable white labels others’ technologies). You could argue that the Echo Studio has better voice interaction on the grounds that Amazon would built it to the same standards as other Echos. Then again, you could use that same argument to say that Sonos had to pass more rigorous requirements to get its device to be approved.
You could go on and on like this.
From my perspective — and this is a fairly ignorant one in that I only have experience with a 5 year old Sonos device and a few iterations of the Echo — it’s probably better to go with the Echo Studio. A few reasons:
- Amazon provides its own music service plus allows access to others
- It has an investment in maintaining high accuracy of voice interaction
- Most audiophiles would poo-poo on Sonos in any case, going with much higher end units. It which case, better to use the Amazon Echo Link or with a dedicated Amazon speaker that’s good enough.
- The central focus of the device is on voice interaction. The Echo Studio will likely work better, especially in louder playback (this needs to be verified).
- Amazon will likely push DSP updates to the device from what it learns from others using Echos
There’s been much more innovation coming from Amazon vs Sonos, so probably better to go with an offering from one investing more.
