Sonos

Sonos was founded in August 2002 in Santa Barbara, California, by John MacFarlane, Craig Shelburne, Tom Cullen and Trung Mai, under the name Rincon Audio. The Sonos name came in May 2004. The first products, the ZonePlayer ZP100 and the CR100 controller, were presented at CES in January 2005 and began shipping early that year. The system was created to play music in several rooms of the house over a home wireless network.

In 2009 came the ZonePlayer S5, later renamed Play:5, the brand's first connected powered speaker. In 2015 the second-generation Play:5 arrived and, through a software update, Trueplay, a feature that adjusts the sound to the room's acoustics. Sonos went public on Nasdaq in August 2018 under the ticker SONO. The soundbar line began with Beam, announced in June 2018, and Arc arrived in June 2020, the same year as the S2 operating system.

For installers, Sonos launched in 2019 the Sonos Amp, a rack-format amplifier with 125 W per channel, and the Sonos Architectural in-wall and in-ceiling speakers, developed with Sonance, which use Trueplay when connected to the Amp (the feature applies to the in-wall and in-ceiling models, not the outdoor ones). In March 2023 came the Era 100 and Era 300, the latter designed from the start for spatial audio, and in June 2024 the Sonos Ace headphones. The headquarters remain in Santa Barbara.