Inside the Sound: Live Immersive Listening Sessions Curated by Sonos
An intimate evening at Soho House blends classical Indian music and jazz with the immersive spatial audio of the Sonos Era 300
Walk into Soho House on any evening, and there’s a good chance you’ll find something special. But on the top floor one recent monsoon night, something transcendent was in the air.
That evening felt like stepping into a Fitzgerald novel—if Gatsby had been an audiophile with a love for Indian ragas and jazz. The lighting was moody, the air rich with anticipation, and somewhere between the clink of cocktail glasses and the murmur of conversation, you could already feel that something special was about to unfold.
I was there for the launch of the Sonos Sound Suites, Sonos’ first such experience in India, a space designed to celebrate immersive listening, cultural heritage, and sound that does more than fill a room, it elevates it.
The main floor, dimly lit and buzzing with energy had a bar tucked on one end, serving craft cocktails and small bites, while the other half was reserved for the stars of the night: the musicians. The setup was sleek yet intimate, and you could tell Sonos wasn’t just here to demo a speaker. They were here to create an atmosphere.
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Later, we were ushered to the top floor, where the breathtaking spatial audio immersion of Sonos Era 300 and Sonos Sound Suites system awaited us. Harry Jones, Sonos’ Sound Experience Engineer, introduced the system. His voice was calm but passionate, as he explained how the speaker was designed to project sound from eight different directions, creating a spatial audio experience that mimics live performance. More than focusing on just the volume or clarity of the sound, one could understand the depth, nuance, and presence of different instruments playing at the same time and audio mixing.
The details of the sound system were impressive—six internal drivers directing sound forward, backward, upward and side-to-side; Dolby Atmos support; and tuning developed with producers like Giles Martin.
Created as an India-first experience, Sonos Sound Suites placed Sonos products in thoughtfully curated spaces, inviting influential voices, artists, and tastemakers to explore what great sound truly feels like.
With the Sonos Sound Suites, you could sense how spatial audio can recreate the same dimensionality one can hear in a live performance that greeted us after the audio experience- the jugalbandi between the sitar played by the maestro Purbayan Chatterjee, the keys played by Merlyn D'Souza, the beats of the tabla and from the drum kit.
The Sonos Era 300 impresses with its sophisticated spatial audio capabilities, featuring six precisely engineered drivers that deliver sound in multiple directions, creating a true 3D soundstage with Dolby Atmos support. Its upward-firing speakers project height channels that give music a sense of vertical space, while side-firing and forward-facing drivers ensure a wide, immersive horizontal sound field.
Tuned in collaboration with industry experts, including renowned producer Giles Martin- Beatles remastering engineer- the Era 300 balances rich bass response with crisp mids and clear highs, maintaining tonal accuracy without distortion even at higher volumes.
The speaker’s Trueplay tuning adapts sound output to the room’s acoustics, optimising clarity and depth in real-time. Additionally, its multi-room capability integrates seamlessly with other Sonos products, allowing for synchronized playback across spaces without latency.
The Era 300’s compact design houses advanced processing algorithms that preserve dynamic range and subtle audio details, delivering studio-grade precision and emotional depth that bring both vintage recordings and modern tracks to life with remarkable fidelity.
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As the performance reached its quiet finale, a unison phrase gently tapering into silence, there was a brief, sacred pause before applause—a collective exhale to say that it was nothing short of a private concert.
I left that night convinced that what Sonos had created was not just a speaker setup. It was a soundstage for the soul, a system that not only amplify music, but also honours its architecture, its imperfections, its depth. In that darkened room above the chaos of Mumbai, tradition and technology elevated each other. And that’s something worth listening to.