No, it’s not nearly as cool as the $179 (£150) Ikea Symfonisk Table Lamp, which combines a speaker with an attractive, functional light fixture. The Bookshelf is simply a versatile multiroom Wi-Fi speaker that offers similar levels of Sonos-based utility, while cutting the price in half. The Bookshelf sounds very similar to the Lamp, though with less bass, and its price makes it a great option for a kid’s system or paired as set of rears for the Sonos Beam, Playbar or Playbase.
The front hosts physical Play and Volume buttons while the rear only offers a backup Ethernet port, in case you don’t want to use Wi-Fi.
The Bookshelf lacks an onboard microphone, which is not surprising for the money, but if you want to make the Symfonisk “smarter” you can add an Echo Dot or Google Home Mini. Thankfully if you don’t like the resulting sound the Sonos app offers the ability to toggle Trueplay calibration on and off so you can compare them. Each required its own setup, and each time I had to hold the controls on the front down quite hard, while steadying it with my other hand, to get the speakers to register. As a background speaker it works great, and I could imagine bookshops or coffee shops gravitating toward the Shelf as a way to play music for their customers.
The stereo Ones made Sleater Kinney’s glitchy The Center Won’t Hold more listenable than either the Symfonisk Bookshelf pair or even the Sonos Playbar. Paired with the Sonos Playbar the speakers disappeared and the jungles of Avatar’s Pandora filled the CNET listening room to the brim. Otherwise the Bookshelf is great for a cheap way to get sound into smaller rooms, and the option to add another speaker later only enhances its appeal.
Ikea Speaker Reviews
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Ikea Eneby (12-Inch) Review
You probably wouldn’t be surprised if we told you that Ikea designed a stylish, affordable Bluetooth speaker—pretty much everything the company makes is relatively inexpensive and visually pleasing. When we think of sub-$100 Bluetooth speakers, most of them are small, portable, and don’t get terribly loud or offer real bass depth. So the price and size of the 12-inch Eneby made us skeptical, but this was erased within ten seconds of playing the first track through its very capable drivers. An included (but optional) handle on top makes for easy carrying or hanging, and also acts as the bass port for air moved by the drivers to escape through.
Ikea’s decision to include dual large drivers and only a single tweeter is an interesting choice that pays off. At top volumes on both the speaker and our sound source (in this case, an iPhone 6s), the Eneby got quite loud, and never succumbed to distortion, even on tracks with intense sub-bass content, like The Knife’s “Silent Shout.”
Bill Callahan’s “Drover,” a track with far less deep bass in the mix, gives us a better sense of the Eneby’s overall sound signature. The drums on this track sound full and round, with some added bass depth, but nothing so over the top that it upsets the balance of the mix.
We’ve tested plenty of speakers in this price range that can’t really muster the bass response required to give these drums a naturally round, rich depth, but the Eneby does it quite well. Callahan’s baritone vocals also receive the ideal mix of rich low-mid presence and crisp high-mids edge. The acoustic guitar strums are crisp enough, too, and the higher register percussive hits have a nice high frequency presence to them. Overall, the is a bass-forward sound signature that will probably turn off purists seeking a flat response, but the lows aren’t obscenely boosted.
On Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “No Church in the Wild,” the kick drum loop receives an ideal high-mid presence, allowing its attack to remain punchy and push through the layers of the mix. We did see the drivers push so hard on “No Church in the Wild” that the grille was visibly vibrating, but the dynamics didn’t sound flattened like they often do on speakers that employ DSP to avoid distortion. The Eneby obviously isn’t as powerful as the $449 Baggen, but it offers a pretty good fight for its far lower price, and it actually surpasses the sound quality of the $249 Tivoli ART.
6 Best IKEA Bluetooth Speaker Review 2021
In addition, you can easily adjust the volume and bass to optimize the sound experience.
Ikea’s Eneby Bluetooth speaker never listens, and I love that
A few months ago, as my winter-pandemic cabin fever hit staggering new heights, I became somewhat paranoid about my Amazon Echo speaker. So I began searching for an anti-Alexa — a speaker that, in my imagining of it, would be so perfect in its simplicity that I wouldn’t miss my ex-assistant even a little. I knew Ikea had ventured into the realm of Bluetooth speakers (Input editor Evan Rodgers’ review of the pocket-sized Frekvens stuck out in my mind) but still didn’t think to look for a speaker there until my partner, browsing the aisles of the store aimlessly as one does, saw the ombre pink-red-orange swappable Eneby front. The Eneby speaker was on sale, at the time, and it met the precise criteria I’d set in my mind for this search, so we gave it a shot.
Unlike its competition, the Eneby is not rechargeable out of the box, instead operating on AC power at all times. It’s more dynamic than the listening experience I had with the Echo and fuller, too, with rich bass and far-reaching treble. I’m entirely comfortable with how large the Eneby is (compared to my Echo, at least) because it delivers the kind of sound you can only get by making your speaker that size. Since it’s 2021, it’s apparently a lot to ask for a not-smart speaker that isn’t made for audiophiles with huge wallets — the Eneby is pretty remarkable in that respect.
Ikea and Sonos picture frame speaker review: wall of sound
The lineup’s purpose is to make technology — in this case, wireless speakers — fit in better with home decor and furnishings. “Wall art speaker” would be more accurate, but the end result is another attempt to camouflage gadgets with a more pleasant design that blends in with the rest of your home. Three physical buttons for play / pause and track controls are located behind the left edge of the frame; the Ikea and Sonos branding is a visual cue for where to reach, and they’re easy to feel for after a while. Ikea plans to sell a range of different art prints for $20 each; swapping between them is as easy as pushing out the panel through the eight cutouts at the frame’s back corners.
If you don’t need all that length, there’s a little storage nook on the back of the frame where you can wrap up and store unneeded cable (with a Velcro strap to keep everything tidy). Ikea and Sonos have put a lot of consideration into the frame’s design, and one of my favorite little touches is that there are several different cord routing paths that lead out of the frame, so you can have the power cable come down from the left or right side if dead center doesn’t work for you.
It’s also possible to daisy-chain two of the wall speakers together with a cable (sold separately) if you want to keep things looking cleaner and spare a second outlet. There’s enough bass to give music the oomph it needs, but your walls aren’t going to be rattling at normal volume levels. Sonos put a waveguide in front of the tweeter to help evenly distribute high-frequency sounds around a room, and in general, the hardware here is sufficient for filling most average-sized spaces. You can also use Sonos’ Trueplay feature in the iOS app to tune the speaker’s output for a particular room’s acoustics.
Once you set up the second speaker, the Sonos app automatically asks whether you want to use them for surround purposes with whatever Arc or Beam is already part of your system. (For music in this setup, you can choose whether the picture frames output a subtle mix — letting the soundbar take the lead — or something more full and substantial.)
Having a picture frame speaker handle surround sound is quite different from a Sonos One; the latter can be placed basically anywhere in your TV room on a shelf or stand for ideal immersion. If you’ve got the right wall situation for two Symfonisk frames behind your couch, you’re probably fine; other layouts might need some experimentation with placement and volume.
It also helps that the frame has several different paths for routing the cable toward a power outlet, depending on how you’ve got it oriented.
The large-sized Command strips held the frame securely in place, and it never came loose or fell from the wall after several hours of music.
You can plug in for a wired connection if your Wi-Fi has spotty performance wherever you place the picture frame speaker. If there’s a section of your house where a normal speaker just won’t work — or if you live with someone who’s not fond of having very obvious gadgets in every room, maybe this will do the trick. But we started counting exactly how many times you have to hit “agree” to use devices when we review them since these are agreements most people don’t read and definitely can’t negotiate. Sonos also collects what it refers to as “additional usage data,” and this covers a lot, including: The temperature of your product
Ikea’s new speakers are the most affordable way to get Sonos in your home
When Ikea’s smart blinds finally ship in October, you’ll be able to set up automated scenes that include the Symfonisk speakers. Seeing as there’s fabric around the entire thing, you might think that the lamp speaker outputs 360-degree sound a la Apple’s HomePod. Its drivers are front-firing, and Ikea and Sonos have tried to make sure you position it correctly by putting the music controls front and center.
I find the trio of physical buttons to be more foolproof than Sonos’ flat, touch-sensitive control areas on its own speakers.
Neither of the Symfonisk products has a built-in microphone, so you’ll need a Google Home or Amazon Echo if you want to start a playlist with your voice hands-free. For the best sound quality, you should use Sonos’ TruePlay feature, which will tune and calibrate the speaker for optimal performance by taking a room’s ambient characteristics into account. Pacing around with your phone as a speaker emits loud noises still feels a little strange, but the end result is worth any awkwardness. The table lamp can definitely fill a living room or bedroom with sound, and it’s capable of getting plenty loud.
The bookshelf speaker, also available in white or black, is styled in a way where it’s also clearly meant to blend in with a room and not call much attention to itself. Our review of Ikea Symfonisk bookshelf speaker Verge Score 7 out of 10 Good Stuff Most affordable way into Sonos ecosystem Good option for Sonos surround sound Bad Stuff No built-in mic for voice assistants Sonos tells me that the lamp and bookshelf speakers each have two class-D digital amplifiers, one tweeter, and one mid-woofer inside.
The usual Sonos stereo pair rules apply: you can only link two of the same product, not mix and match. I’d sure love a wireless charger as part of the lamp speaker, and hopefully, future models will be able to provide more light than the current one. It’s easy to understand why this joint effort makes so much sense: Ikea’s expertise is in creating furniture and other things that belong in the home, but it’s got no clue about sound. We still don’t have a Sonos speaker for everything: both of these require a hard wire for power, so we’re left without a wireless option for the patio or backyard — assuming your Wi-Fi can reach there.
But between the Ikea effort and a renewed push into custom home audio, Sonos is already reaching places that Amazon, Apple, and Google simply aren’t.
Sonos IKEA Symfonisk bookshelf speaker review
Mention the term ‘bookshelf speaker’ in the company of most audiophiles and you’d best be prepared to make a quick escape. When the partnership between IKEA and Sonos was announced a couple of years ago, sceptics could have been forgiven for assuming the What Hi-Fi? It can also be rested vertically or horizontally, and at about the size of a long brick can be easily tucked away in a fashion many other wireless speakers can’t.
Connections at the rear run to only power and wired internet, while without the need for any pairing button or such – there is Apple AirPlay 2, though as usual no Bluetooth – the front is clean but for the play/pause and volume controls.
For reference, though, we ended up taking out a little bass with the speaker resting on our Atacama hi-fi racks, but kept the Loudness feature on for a little extra punch and vibrancy. This particular Symfonisk is bold and focused in its delivery, with voices especially, unashamedly belting out the more animated of our tunes with comparable energy.
That wasn’t particularly to do with a skewed balance, but that it opened up the sound a little; a speaker of this shape and size, after all, can only offer so much room for every instrument. Busy arrangements especially get overcrowded, with the sound often becoming cloudy a little rough around the edges, while rhythmically – though not without punch or drive – it can seem a little pedestrian, and the nuances of dynamic expression are often all but lost. Strictly speaking, there is no other multi-room option at this price that can offer more in the way of these sonic facets, while still delivering such a bold and weighty presentation. On the other hand, you’re not going to get a better-sounding multi-room speaker with Sonos’s sonic signature for less than three figures – not to mention one that you can use as a floating bookshelf.
Ikea Eneby Review: can the furniture people make good speakers?
Our favourite supplier of meatballs and flat-pack furniture has on the odd occasion taken curious steps into tech. There’s been no attempt to create the rounded, cylinder-like shapes that have become prevalent in the Bluetooth speaker market. My DT teacher from the early 2000s hated boxy design, but I’m of the opinion that it’s about the right time and place. The fabric grille helps to blur the lines between machine and furniture, but it is removable if you prefer a more industrial vibe.
Each has a 1-inch soft dome tweeter for high frequencies, plus a reflex port at the rear for more efficient bass. Control is via a single multi-function knob, which handles power, pairing, volume and EQ adjustment.
It takes a little fiddling to figure out exactly how to do those different things, but the instruction booklet is clear and there’s a little LED to help identify what you’re doing. For example, holding down the knob for three seconds lets you go into bass level control, as indicated by a slowly blinking LED.
Don’t worry about leaving the speaker on and draining the power – an auto-standby feature kicks in after 20 minutes. The Eneby 20 comes with an optional handle, plus a tiny hex key for attaching it, which makes setting it up a more typical Ikea experience. Even with the handle, the Eneby 20’s size and shape suggests you’ll probably be moving this to and from the garden, as opposed to taking it out and about to the park. These are mono speakers, which means there’s no stereo effect; you don’t get separate left and right channels of audio.
Unlike the UE Blast, there’s also no way to link two speakers together to manually create a stereo performance. That’s partly because speakers at this price tend to be smaller, more pocketable – Ikea has opted for larger cabinets, which really help in the low-end department. The overall sound signature is a little bass-forward, and the mid-range feels slightly recessed, but it isn’t a huge problem since vocals still have enough of a presence. If you’re going to be putting the speakers in a shelving unit or up close to a wall, I’d recommend tweaking the EQ to avoid overwhelming the rest of the frequency range. A company with no prior experience in the audio market has come up with a surprisingly compelling product that can easily take the fight to similarly priced rivals.
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