Looking to upgrade your Sonos setup? The Sonos Era 300 (9/10, WIRED Recommends) is 20 percent off from Amazon, bringing it down to just 359 and tying its lowest-ever price. That's a great deal on our editors' favorite surround sound Sonos speaker, and it would make a perfect upgrade to your existing Sonos configuration or a place to start building your audio empire. The big draw here is spatial audio, which our team feels performs even better than Apple's Homepod (5/10, WIRED Review) when it comes to filling a room with sound. That's largely thanks to the array of drivers, including six speakers, four tweeters, and a pair of mid/bass drivers all packed into one vaguely robot-butt-shaped device.

The Era 300 is the second in Sonos's next-generation line of wifi hi-fis, packing six speakers into one curvaceous box capable of immersing listeners in quality sound. The speaker costs £449 ($449/A$749) and sits above the new £249 Era 100, competing directly with Apple's HomePod and other high-end speakers – premium audio at a premium price. But where the Era 100 is a compact bookshelf speaker, the Era 300 is a different animal. It needs to sit out in the open to allow it to project music outwards from its front, sides and top to fill the room with sound. The cinched-in design allows a series of speakers to fire up and out to the sides from the back half of the Era 300, projecting sound all around the listener for full stereo and new spatial audio surround sound.

No, of course you don't buy a speaker to look at it. But should your gaze fall upon your speaker while you're enjoying its sound, ideally the sight of it shouldn't make you wince. So it's just as well that Era 300, the latest Sonos wireless speaker and the company's first foray into spatial audio (except for its Dolby Atmos–enabled soundbars, of course), is such an impressive and accomplished performer--its physical appearance is easy to overlook. Unless you somehow find it in your field of vision unexpectedly, anyhow, in which case it never ceases to be startling. It's fair to say Sonos' ubiquity has, until now, been established as much on its utterly painless ownership experience as on the sound its products actually make.

The Era 100 is the first of a brand new line of wifi speakers from multi-room audio specialists Sonos, taking what was good about its popular longstanding One series and adding more bass and stereo sound. With a similar aesthetic to the outgoing One, it is only 2cm taller and 1cm deeper, making it pretty compact and easy to place on a cabinet or bookshelf. It requires just a power cable, connecting to your router via wifi 6 for streaming music from more than 100 different services, including Spotify and BBC Sounds, controlled from the Sonos app on your phone. In a first for Sonos's non-portable speakers, it also supports Bluetooth 5 for impromptu streaming from guest's phones or other Bluetooth devices, which works great. A button on the top turns the voice assistant on or off.

If you pay attention to the music industry, you've probably heard about spatial audio. The promise is that music will envelop the user from all directions without needing a room full of speakers to achieve the effect. Apple has pushed it a lot in the last few years, in Apple Music, its line of AirPods headphones and the latest HomePod speaker. Amazon's streaming service also offers spatial audio, and its Echo Studio speaker can play back compatible tracks. Sonos has been paying attention, as well – its recent Arc and Beam soundbars support Dolby Atmos for movies, and now the company is releasing its first music speaker designed for spatial audio, the Era 300.

Of the two speakers Sonos announced earlier this month, the Era 100 is much easier to sum up: it's a replacement for the Sonos One, which was first introduced in 2017. Unlike the Era 300, there's no need to ponder the value of spatial audio; the Era 100 is a relatively straightforward mono speaker, just like the One and the Play:1 before it. Don't let that simple description deceive you, though – the $250 Era 100 is a complete redesign, inside and out, and the end result is a worthy upgrade and a very versatile speaker. At first glance, the Era 100 looks quite similar to the One, but upon further examination you'll notice a number of small but meaningful changes. That starts with the vertically-oriented Sonos logo that you'll find on most of their other speakers like the Roam and, naturally, the Era 300.

I've never really admired Sonos' speakers for their actual sound quality. But the main draw of a Sonos speaker is the technology behind the grill. Boasting integrations with Alexa, Apple, Google, and virtually every music streaming service worth mentioning, the multiroom-capable system is the most convenient way to listen to everything, everywhere, all at once. With the new Era 100, Sonos finally wipes the floor with competitors when it comes to sound quality too. With stereo tweeters and a more advanced room tuning feature, this is a single speaker that easily holds its own with everything but more expensive two-speaker systems.