What you need to know
- Sonos and Ikea have announced the follow-up to their first smart lamp speaker from 2019.
- The Symfonisk speaker ships with multiple base and shade options.
- Its lamp base alone will retail for $140 starting on October 12 in the United States and select European markets.
In 2019, Sonos and Ikea released their first Wi-Fi speaker that also functioned as a table lamp. Two years later, and perhaps with some lessons learned, the companies are back with the second-generation Symfonisk table lamp speaker.
The refreshed Symfonisk lamp speaker has an improved design and hardware for better aesthetics and sound quality. The Wi-Fi speaker has been updated with a new acoustic architecture that employs a "custom waveguide" to produce high-quality audio.
Ikea and Sonos have also come up with a variety of lampshade options with the new Symfonisk, taking into account some lessons from the previous generation. Stjepan Begic, product owner at IKEA of Sweden, said:
Since launching the first SYMFONISK table lamp speaker, we learned a lot about how and where they are being used. For example, a lot of people use the lamp speaker on a nightstand, which led us to create a new, slightly smaller lamp base. We're now also offering customers more design choices, making the lamp speaker a better fit for their individual homes. By integrating a speaker into a table lamp, we can save space, decrease clutter, and create atmosphere with both light and sound.
You can customize the lamp base with a couple of shades, but you can't purchase them as a single unit. Instead, the Symfonisk speaker is sold separately from the lampshade, which comes in white or black. The lampshades are also available in textile or glass, with black or white variants.
The new lamp also supports E26/E27 bulbs, so it should work with various light bulbs. It is mainly designed to be a standalone speaker, but you can pair it with some of the best Sonos speakers and other Symfonisk speakers such as the $199 picture frame Wi-Fi speaker.
The new lamp speaker will be available from Ikea in the United States and select European markets starting on October 12. The lamp base alone retails for $140, while the textile shade is priced at $29 and the glass shade at $39 (via The Verge).
