Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Audio / Video
  3. News

Sonos Radio HD offers ad-free, CD-quality streaming for $8 per month

Simon Cohen
By

Sonos has launched Sonos Radio HD, a premium tier of its Sonos Radio service that eliminates all advertisements and boosts audio quality significantly, for $8 per month. The service is available in the U.S. and U.K., with other countries being added in the future.

Sonos Radio HD
Sonos

Sonos claims that its free tier of Sonos Radio is already the fourth-most-popular music source for users of its whole-home wireless speakers. After listening to user feedback, the company decided to add the premium HD tier, which addresses several desired changes:

Recommended Videos

Sonos Radio HD will also be the exclusive home for new artist-curated stations. The first of these is Dolly Parton’s Songteller Radio, which Sonos claims will continually evolve and feature Dolly’s hits, favorite artists, and special commentary on songs and moments throughout her career.

Related

The company plans to keep adding more of these artist-curated stations over time, with five more promised in early 2021.

In addition to serving up all of the same stations currently on tap with the free Radio tier, Sonos is developing a new set of stations exclusively for HD subscribers. Stations like Nashville Now, Americana Ramble, Unforgettable, and Distant Kingdom each offer a deeper exploration into genres and music scenes with the help of expert curators.

Specialized stations such as The Inner Now, Chill Beats, and Mellow Morning are designed to be companions for at-home activities like cooking, working, relaxing, and sleeping.  Six sleep stations have also been created with soundscapes that have been tuned specifically for Sonos speakers: White noise, pink noise, brown noise, rain, rainforest, and piano.

As intriguing as Sonos Radio HD sounds, the question is whether or not Sonos users will pay $8 per month for the service.  Like the Sonos app itself, Sonos Radio HD (as well as the free tier) cannot be accessed from any other device — it only works when at home listening to Sonos wireless speakers over a Wi-Fi network. This means that there’s no way Sonos Radio HD can fully replace a traditional streaming service like Spotify or Apple Music, even if it offered the same on-demand library of songs, which currently it does not.

Nonetheless, a pandemic might just be the perfect moment to launch an at-home-only premium radio service. Playlists are popular because they take the guesswork out of trying to find something to listen to. Netflix believes that the same thing could be true for streaming video — it recently launched a linear, nonskippable stream in France called Direct.

It’s also worth noting that SiriusXM, which offers a streaming-only version of its subscription, charges $13 per month and you can’t skip songs or get a lossless, CD-quality stream.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Simon Cohen
Simon Cohen
Contributing Editor, A/V
Simon Cohen covers a variety of consumer technologies, but has a special interest in audio and video products, like…
It still isn’t cheap, but this 100-inch Mini-LED TV is $6,000 off
100-inch Hisense U8K 4K mini-LED TV.

One of the biggest TV deals in every sense of the word is over at Best Buy right now. Currently, you can buy a Hisense 100-inch U8 Series Mini-LED QLED TV for $4,000 meaning you save a huge $6,000 off the regular price of $10,000. Sure, $4,000 still isn’t the kind of price just anyone is in a position to spend on a TV but if you’re looking to upgrade to a truly huge TV, this is a good opportunity to do so for less. Want to know more about it? Here’s what you need to know.

Why you should buy the Hisense 100-inch U8 Series Mini-LED QLED TV
Hisense is one of the best TV brands for variety while being a fairly good all-rounder. With the Hisense 100-inch U8 Series Mini-LED QLED TV, you get mini-LED Pro technology so you can enjoy a brighter image with greater contrast and more precise local dimming than with a traditional LED TV. Alongside that come all the benefits of QLED so you also gain purer and richer imagery with more accurate colors. On a 100-inch screen, it’s going to look fantastic.

Read more
Best wireless speakers for 2024: Sonos, Apple, KEF, and more
Sonos Era 100 top panel showing touch controls.

Choosing the best wireless speaker from the sea of options out there can be tricky. What defines a "wireless" speaker can mean many things to people: Does it use Bluetooth or your home's Wi-Fi network (or both) to connect and stream music and podcasts from your phone or other sources? Is it portable (with a battery) or more of an at-home, plug-in kinda speaker that's part of a bigger multi-room network music system? Yes, yes, and yes.

For this roundup, we're going to focus more on the plug-in variety with Wi-Fi and/or Bluetooth wireless capabilities, because we have a whole other roundup of the more portable Bluetooth speaker variety for you to check out, too.

Read more
Best stereo receivers and integrated amplifiers for 2024
The Cambridge Audio CXA81 integrated amplifier

If you're looking to dig into the world of hi-fi systems that consist of a separate stereo receiver or integrated amplifier that powers a set of passive speakers — whether your passion is turntables and vinyl records, sweet CD sound, or streaming audio — then this list might be the resource you need to get going.

Not to be confused with the complex world of AV receivers (we explain the difference in the FAQs below), stereo receivers and integrated amplifiers (one that combines both a preamp and power amp) vary in price and power output. They can also contain a medley of analog and digital audio inputs and outputs, as well as features like EQ adjustments, A/B speaker switching, HDMI, and Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity.

Read more