Headphones aren’t the only new product Sonos rolled out today. The company also refreshed its cheapest portable speaker, the Roam. The Sonos Roam 2 has the same audio as its 2021 predecessor but adds more streamlined controls and a quicker setup. The $179 speaker is available today.
Sonos says the Roam 2 “delivers the same rich, detailed sound and bass” as the original model, so owners of the first Roam would only notice some subtle quality-of-life upgrades. One is a separate power and Bluetooth button, which solves a common gripe from its predecessor about its multifunctional power / sleep / Bluetooth button. Customers found that the overloaded button was confusing and often led to accidentally triggering the wrong behavior.
The company says setup is also more straightforward in the Roam 2. The previous model required you to set up the speaker over Wi-Fi, so you couldn’t quickly connect to Bluetooth until you’d gone through the (potentially cumbersome) process of pairing with a