If you’ve always wanted to have affordable smart speakers with an aesthetic design to blend in with your other furniture, your dreams are about to come true, especially if you’re a fan of Swedish furniture makers and American speaker manufacturers. IKEA and Sonos will soon be releasing a collaboration called Symfonisk, which is a line of affordable connected speakers. The best news is that the price range of these devices will be below $200 (at least for the first two ones).
There are two initial designs for this Symfonisk range: a table lamp and a bookshelf speaker. Both will be compatible with other Sonos speakers in case you want to do multi-room audio. Instead of being controlled through IKEA’s Tradfri smart home app, you’ll use the Sonos app, giving you some of the latter’s most popular features out of the box, like linking the two as a stereo pair or using them as rear channel speakers for your surround sound home theater system.
The Symfonisk WiFi Table Lamp Speaker has an amorphous bulb on top and a removable shade that you can mix and match and customize according to your room decor. It has a standard bulb socket so you can choose from compatible bulbs from IKEA. The bottom half of the device is a fabric speaker grill that will come in either black or white. It kind of looks like an Apple HomePod speaker except that it has a bulb and lamp shade of course.
The Symfonisk WiFi Bookshelf Speaker meanwhile can be used in two ways. One, you can put it on your bookshelf or any other furniture. Two, you can use it as a mini-shelf in itself if you attach it to your wall and it can support up to 6.6 pounds of weight on top of it. It will also come in two finishes, either black or white. There might be more finishes and colors soon but for now, those two are your options.
The Bookshelf Speaker will be priced at $99 while the Table Lamp will be at $179. Both will be available by mid-August of 2019 at IKEA stores but not in Sonos stores. They also have not released specs on the hardware of these devices but if you trust Sonos, then this should be more than okay sound-wise.
VIA: SlashGear
