This is the speaker you need over summer

Only Apple Music, Amazon Music, Deezer and Pandora get the full Gus Fring treatment. For any other service you have to pull out your phone, tablet or PC and control them from the Sonos app, which is a fine app, but not nearly as convenient as just using your voice.

Over the years, we’ve drifted away from pulling out phones and opening up apps to perform simple tasks, and we fear that Sonos (or Spotify, one or the other) will find users drifting away if they don’t sort their shit out.

As well as Sonos Voice Control, the Sonos Move 2 does support Amazon’s voice assistant, Alexa, but there are reasons not to go that route.

There are plenty of parents who don’t want voice assistants in their kids’ rooms that open them up to ecommerce and internet searching, for instance. Sonos Voice Control is dedicated to the task of controlling music with your voice (though you can also set a timer, and ask the time) and that’s a good thing.

Not to mention, it has Giancarlo Esposito (swoon). I still speak to him all the time, even though he can only pause/restart YouTube Music tracks that were already selected in the Sonos app.

So anyway, the Sonos Move 2 is a refresh of the Sonos Move we reviewed in 2019, and of course loved the way we love all Sonos equipment.

The Move and now the Move 2 play an important role in the Sonos ecosystem, which being a multi-room hi-fi ecosystem is very indoors oriented, but sometimes needs to be taken outdoors.

Like the Move, the Move 2 acts like any other Sonos speaker when it’s attached to Wi-Fi and is in your house, but it also has Bluetooth connectivity so you or any visitors to your home can stream audio from a phone or tablet. It also has weatherproofing and a built-in battery so you can take it with you on the road.

Battery life is one of the big improvements in this year’s model. Sonos says you’ll get “up to” 24 hours of audio play out of a single charge, compared to 11 hours with the previous model.

We need to take issue with Sonos on this claim, however. In our tests the battery life on the Move 2 is nowhere near 24 hours. It’s more like 32 hours 10 minutes, at least when this speaker is brand new.

Admittedly, we did run our battery life test at a fairly modest volume, much quieter than this big, heavy speaker is capable of, so as not to disturb the neighbours for 24 hours straight (or, as it turned out, 32 hours 10 minutes straight).

It might well be that Sonos made its battery life claim based on a Move 2 with the volume cranked up to 11. Pity the poor people who had to run that test.

Another improvement is that the Move 2 now has USB-C line-in input in case you want to plug in a turntable or something, though you need a special adaptor for that which we didn’t get, so we didn’t review this feature.

Regardless, the USB-C port on the back of the Move 2 can also be used to charge the speaker when you don’t have its wireless charging base with you. It can also be used to charge other devices, which is a great idea because this thing clearly has a battery the size of Queensland, and not sharing it with your other devices would be a crime.

(We wish the B&O Beosound A5 we reviewed in April had this feature, too. It has a Qi charger on the top, to share its massive battery with wireless-charging phones and earbuds, but a simple USB-C power outlet is so much more useful.)

Sonos says the Move 2 is now “stereo”, as opposed to the “mono” Move from 2019, and while that’s a big claim to make about a single speaker, it is true that it has a slightly wider soundstage (depth and richness) than the original.

The Move 2 has two tweeters, up from one in the original, and we presume they’re facing in opposite directions to allow the company to call it “stereo”. (If you really want stereo, though, you can always get two of these things, and pair them into a stereo set. I imagine this feature works only over Wi-Fi, and not outdoors using Bluetooth, but we only got the one Move 2 to review, so we couldn’t test it.)

To our ears, though, the main improvement brought by the extra tweeter is that the Move 2 now has better detail and clarity to its sound. We’re a little biased towards bright speakers, and this one is just our cup of tea.

The extra clarity is especially good for podcasts, or indeed for any speech. The magic of Giancarlo Esposito’s voice is in its sibilance, and it’s especially magical on the Move 2.

Me: Hey Sonos, play the new Beatles song!
Giancarlo Esposito: Before I can do that, you need to subscribe to a music service supported by Sonos Voice Control.
Me: (Swoon)

Likes: Works standalone or as part of a multi-room system. Inexpensive compared to the B&O equivalent. Replaceable battery.
Dislikes: Voice control doesn’t support Spotify or YouTube Music
Price: $799