Sonos and Ikea team up to make smart speakers that hide away in your home

Your shelves and lamps just got a lot louder

(Sonos/Ikea)

Sonos and Ikea have teamed up to create speakers they claim takes the best of both companies.

The new Symfonisk range puts Sonos smart speakers into Ikea furnishings, allowing them to be placed around the home in ways that allow them to disappear.

They arrive in August and are cheaper than the companies other new speakers, despite including most of the same technologies. The new table lamp combines light and sound and costs €179, and the bookshelf speaker – which can be tucked away or on display,set on a bracket to allow it to work as a shelf or hooked onto a kitchen rail – costs €99.95

The two devices are exactly like something Ikea would sell: a lamp and a book-shelf. But they just happen to be hiding Sonos smarts, which means that they also function as speakers, with all of the audio and software technology that Sonos has developed in its time making devoted speakers.

On the speaker side, they work exactly as you'd expect a Sonos product to. They are controlled by its app, include all of the recent technology such as Apple's AirPlay 2 but no microphones for voice control, will even function as rear speakers if you have a Sonos soundbar for your TV and the company says they will sound similar to the Ones, its cheaper newer speaker.

And Ikea's input works exactly as you might expect, too. The speakers have been squished down into other pieces of furniture that are made to work around the home, in quietly inventive ways.

Two years ago, Ikea introduced smart lighting, an internet-enabled technology that it made on its own. Now it comes in a range of different bulbs, each sold alongside its more traditional lighting.

"We did not do that because we thought it was a cool technology or anything like that," says Björn Block, global business leader at IKEA. "We did it because we understood smart lighting could really improve people's lives at home."

Ikea had been making lighting for decades, though until recently it had been purely analogue. For sound, however, it needed a partner.

That's when the Swedish company turned up on the doorstep of the Californian one, for a partnership that began in March 2016.

Both say it quickly became clear how "alike and aligned we were" in their approaches. But initially they gave themselves "time to get to know each other", says Block, rather than jumping straight away into a specific design.

When that design did come, it once again made clear just how similar the two companies were. Both are very values-oriented, says Tad Toulis, head of design at Sonos, and began by asking broader questions: "what is the atmosphere and attitude we're going to create?"

But it was also the differences that helped spur the collaboration. Ikea has its long history in home furnishings, and brought that to the work; Sonos could share the observations it has made in years of creating speakers.

Some of that work was more complicated than it seems. Sonos, for instance, has done considerable work on the difficult job of making a simple-looking enclosure that nonetheless packs a significant amount of audio punch – experience that was extra important when trying to fit the speakers into the unusual places that Ikea wanted to put them.

The two companies also release products in wildly different ways. Ikea launches some 2,500 products a year, many of them quietly and with little fanfare; Sonos launches just a couple a year, and each of them is lavished with attention.

But the partnership kept returning to the principles that underpinned both companies' work, they say. Making the speakers isn't even all that difficult to light, says Toulis, and so the lamp that functions as a speaker can be seen as collectively working towards an aim Ikea and Sonos share: making spaces into places, through the use of atmosphere.

The way sound works in the home is analogous to that of light, he says: different setups and settings and fundamentally alter the way a space feels.

"The most basic example that's available to people is home theatre. In this metaphor, that's like turning all the lights on." It's the kind of sound and light you'd lean into, he says.

But there are other times you might opt to lean out, and to use sound or light in a more ambient way. As such, the lighting and sound comes to be associated with different tasks, changing the place and people in it in ways that allow the context to shade the content you are listening to or watching.

Sonos' speakers can hide away or be out in the open: over the last year or so, it has released both new speakers that literally blend into the wall as well as bright coloured ones that are pitched precisely to stand out. The new Ikea speakers seem destined to be hidden away, almost in disguise as something else, but Block is clear that's not entirely true: the lamp speaker, for instance, can stand proud or hide away and is ready to do what is needed for the room.

As much as anything else, both companies are keen to stress that the partnership they are so enthusiastic about isn't over yet, and in fact might only just be beginning. Each of the companies speak as the partnership as very much ongoing, and the new speakers as just the latest evidence of a range of other products that could arrive soon.