At a glance
Expert's Rating
Pros
- Lightweight, compact design
- Strong sound quality
- Bluetooth 5.2, wi-fi and AirPlay 2/IP67 water/dust-resistance
Cons
- Battery life could be better
- The Sonos app is a little fiddly
- No wired input
Our Verdict
The updated Roam 2 is still one of the best portable speakers around, providing strong sound quality, AirPlay 2 support, and a lightweight, sturdy design that is ideal for outdoor use.
Best Prices Today: Sonos Roam 2
If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. Sonos’s original Roam smart speaker was released back in 2021, and it was one of the best portable speakers we’ve ever seen, providing very good sound quality in a highly compact design that also managed to squeeze in useful features such as wireless charging and even support for Wi-Fi and AirPlay for Apple devices. The new Roam 2 doesn’t attempt to tamper with that successful formula, but it fine-tunes a number of features such as its set-up and tuning process, and provides more straightforward controls.
Available in a variety of colors–including red, green, blue and plain old black and white–the Roam 2 looks virtually identical to its predecessor (and the original Roam and Roam SL models are still widely available online, so make sure you choose the Roam 2 when buying).
The compact speaker is 168mm tall when you stand it upright, 62mm wide and 60mm deep, and weighs about the same as a tin of beans at 0.43kg. It’s not quite pocket-size, but it will fit easily into a backpack when you’re out and about. It also has a sturdy IP67 rating for resistance to water and dust, which allows it to be submerged in 1m of water for up to 30 minutes without damage, so it’s well suited to life outdoors or on the beach.
The compact design means there’s not much room for a large battery, but the Roam 2 should last for up to 10 hours with music playing at around 50% volume. It needs to stand upright for wireless charging, as the power circuits are in the base of the speaker, while the volume, playback and microphone controls sit on the top. However, a little set of rubber feet allow you to turn the speaker onto its side and lay it flat if you prefer, and there’s a USB-C port on the back that can be used for charging as well (with a USB-C cable included in the box). The Roam 2 starts at $179/£179 (currently the price is marked down to $143/£139 on Sonos’s website). It’s also possible to buy the Roam 2 with an optional wireless charging pad for $228/£228 and there’s an Adventure Set with two Roam 2 speakers available for $358/£358–although if my math is correct that’s exactly the same price as buying the speakers individually, so there’s not much of a saving there.
As you’d expect, the Roam 2 supports Bluetooth–updated to 5.2–and it now has separate buttons for Power and Bluetooth pairing, which are easier to use than the fiddly multi-function button on the original Roam. Getting started is still a little fiddly, though. You can press the Bluetooth button on the back of the speaker to quickly pair via Bluetooth, but you really need to download the Sonos app for iOS or Android in order to set the speaker up properly. The app has its own set-up process, which uses an audio-PIN–a series of chimes–to detect and connect to the Roam 2 via Bluetooth at first, and you are then prompted to enter your Wi-Fi password in order to also connect the speaker to your home Wi-Fi network. However, our office router transmits separate networks on the 2.4GHz and 5.0GHz frequencies, and this seemed to confuse the Sonos app–which has received a lot of criticism following a recent update–so we had to spend some time changing the Wi-Fi settings on our iPad in order to connect via Wi-Fi. But, once that was done, the Roam 2 worked really well, and its support for AirPlay means that connecting it to additional Apple devices was much more straightforward.
Just like its predecessor, the Roam 2 provides very good sound quality for such a compact speaker, especially when using the higher bandwidth that is available with a Wi-Fi connection. It does a good job with the sonic mashup of Sturgill Simpson’s Sing Along, laying down the grinding, fuzzy guitars that form the bedrock of the sound, while the fizzing EDM keyboard wail through the air with arm-waving energy. It’s even got a pretty respectable bass beat for such a small speaker, letting the electronic bass on Billie Eilish’s Bad Guy bounce along with a relaxed, swaying rhythm. It also pulls out the crisp finger-snaps and ticking percussion that give the song a slightly erratic, nervous energy. Switching to a Bluetooth connection causes the sound to lose a little clarity–but that’s a limitation of Bluetooth rather than the speaker itself, and the Roam 2 can go head-to-head with any portable speaker of this size and weight.
See how the Sonos Roam 2 compares to other AirPlay speakers in our round-up of the Best AirPlay Speakers for iPhone.
Should you buy the Sonos Roam 2?
The Roam 2 might not be an essential upgrade for owners of previous models, but this lightweight speaker still punches above its weight when it comes to sound quality. Its sturdy and lightweight design is great for outdoor use, but it also provides wi-fi and AirPlay support for when you get back home.
Best Prices Today: Sonos Roam 2
Author: Cliff Joseph, Contributor, Macworld
Cliff Joseph is a former editor of MacUser magazine and a freelance editor with 30(ish) years experience of Mac and PC technology. He first used a Mac working as a magazine sub-editor and found it so much better than using scissors and a pot of glue to make the words fit on the page that he become a convert to the Mac overnight. He has spent the rest of his career following the ups and downs of Apple (and is old enough to remember the time Apple came close to going bust). Cliff writes many of MacWorld’s games reviews - and is currently exploring options for getting Diablo IV to run on a Mac…