Sonos Move 2: one of the best portable speakers just got better

Sonos has announced the Move 2. It's the follow-up to 2019's Move, Sonos’s first battery-powered speaker.

This upgrade is almost entirely good news, with just one mildly thorny nugget to swallow. The Sonos Move 2 costs £50 more than the original at £449/$449.

However, given how much inflation we’ve seen since 2019, perhaps we should be grateful for the minor jump.

For the sound fiends, the big news is the Sonos Move 2 has gone stereo. While the original sounds great, it uses a single downward-firing tweeter whose output is guided to basically fill the room.

The Sonos Move 2 has two of these higher-frequency tweeter drivers, angled to achieve that proper separation between left and right channels.

It’s no longer a truly wireless-only speaker either. Just like the Sonos Era 300 and 100, you can plug in cabled sources, like turntables, with the help of Sonos’s line-in adapter (sold separately), and you have the option of streaming via Bluetooth to a stereo pair of Move 2 speakers when connected to WiFi, or group Move 2 with the rest of your Sonos system.

Rock around the clock

Other important changes include improved battery life and redesigned touch controls. Where the original Move lasts around 11 hours off a charge, Sonos says the Move 2 will last up to 24 hours. Perfect, then, for your literal all-dayer.

The volume slider is also much more like those of the Sonos Era 300 and 100. It’s an indented bar, making adjustments feel both more precise and intuitive.

As in the last generation, the Sonos Move 2 uses a wireless charging base, but Sonos says it’s a bit smaller this time around. It also uses USB-C, where the original has an inflexible non-removable wired in power supply.

Standby power drain has been lowered too, by 40%. According to the Sonos site, the original Move consumes 3.2W in standby, meaning the change should bring us down to 2W. It’s not going to noticeably lower your energy bills but, hey, we’ll take any improvement.

The Sonos Move 2 largely sees Sonos update the original Move, including Bluetooth/Wi-Fi transmission, with some of the tech it developed for the Era series. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

Sonos’s Move 2 will be available from September 20, and comes in three colours: black, white and, new for the series, olive green.

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