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SONOS: DIGITAL MICROSCOPE LISTENING TO QUALITY
An exploded view of a SONOS Playbar.
Speaker manufacturer SONOS makes a good thing better with Keyence.
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udiophiles and casual listeners alike agree: it’s awesome equipment. The Sonos PLAY smart speaker system lets you listen to jazz in the kitchen, classical in the den, and heavy metal in the garage, each room by itself or all at the same time. So whether you want a whole-house Gojira jam or a little Don Henley with friends on the patio, Sonos brings music to places that were once silent.
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It’s not all about music. Sonos offers a home theater system as well, one that’ll have you ducking for cover each time Luke Skywalker pulls out his lightsaber. The Sonos PLAYBAR produces crisp, clean dialogue and memorable sound effects, while the SUB generates bone-shaking bass. Add a pair of PLAY speakers to the back and you’ll have a surround sound system sure to make the neighbors jealous. Best of all, Sonos is wireless, making it easy to grow your system one room at a time. Plug a speaker into the nearest wall outlet, update the configuration on your smart phone or computer, and you’re ready to rock. Fill every home with music Sonos Inc. started in 2002 as a provider of custom home audio installations. Within a few years it began offering its ZP100 player and CR100 wireless controller, and has since 13 | Industry USA | January 2017
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been on a growth curve steeper than the hills surrounding its Santa Barbara, CA headquarters. The company today employs over 1,200 people and boasts offices across the US, Europe, and China. With growth comes challenges, however, and Sonos recently began looking for an easier and more accurate way to validate speaker component quality levels, many of which are made of flexible materials that are difficult to measure. One of these is a damping mechanism known throughout the industry as a spider, a piece of fabric covered in a phenolic resin and then pressed over steel dies into a corrugated shape, giving it a complex geometry and part profile best described as a sine wave. Tony Ferraro, transducer mechanical engineering manager at Sonos’ Boston, MA facility says the spider is an important part of sound quality, and is analogous to an automobile suspension, in that it controls oscillation of the cone assembly. The spider also helps control the position of the cone and voice coil relative to the speaker frame and transducer motor assembly.