One person’s “deliberate and unhurried” is another’s “tardy and overdue,” of course. But whatever spin you put on it, there’s no denying that Sonos takes its sweet time in developing and launching new products. So the fact that it’s replacing its Move portable wireless speaker after just four years seems almost like a rush job.

Sonos did rather imply that it had more or less invented Bluetooth simply by finally specifying it for the original Move back in 2019, which will never stop being amusing. But the company obviously realizes there is more to making a competitive speaker than adopting technology everyone else had been utilizing for years—and it’s made quite an effort to ensure that the Move 2 is an even more complete and impressive proposition than the product it replaces.

Move 2, it’s fair to say, is a significant and worthwhile upgrade over the original Move. Except where the asking price is concerned.

Unless your Move 2 comes in the new matte Olive finish, though, there’s not a lot at first glance to let you know this is a newly reworked speaker. It’s still a hefty device, for example: At 241 x 160 x 127 millimeters (9.5 x 6.3 x 5 inches) and 3 kilograms (6.6 pounds), it’s just as lacking in genuine portability as the outgoing product. Down the garden? Fine. Accompanying you on holiday? Not fine, unless you want to use up a chunk of your hand-luggage allowance taking a speaker away with you.

Subtle as the external changes may be, though, they’re all worthwhile. For instance, the selection of physical controls on the speaker’s top surface are now swipe or tap surfaces that handle play/pause, skip forward/backward, volume up/down, and “summon voice assistant”—the Move 2 is compatible with Amazon Alexa as well as Sonos Voice Control. They’re arranged to sit between the mic openings that facilitate voice control and also enable the Trueplay calibration feature that’s here in its automatic guise. (Basically, the speaker routinely and regularly appraises its position and calibrates its frequency response according to its environment.)

On the rear panel, in a fairly deep recess that forms the Move 2’s carrying handle, there are power on/off and Bluetooth pairing buttons. There’s also a switch to turn off the mics if you prefer privacy to convenience. Below here there’s a USB-C socket that can be used not only to charge the battery but to let the Move 2 be used as a power bank. So if you don’t mind the speaker’s battery life suffering, the Move 2 can charge your smartphones or other devices.

Happily, the battery life here is up from the original Move’s rather miserable 11 hours to an altogether more acceptable 24 hours—and Sonos provides a charging base, a literal ring of power, that the Move 2 sits in to charge from the mains if you don’t fancy the USB-C option. Just as with the first Move, the battery in the Move 2 is replaceable when the inevitable eventually happens.

As well as charger/charging options, the USB-C can act as an auxiliary line-level input. Simply spend a little more money (of course) on the Sonos Line-In Adapter and you can physically connect more or less any appropriate source to the Move 2.

For a portable wireless speaker, though, wireless connectivity is really where it’s at. The Move 2 can connect via Bluetooth 5.0 and Wi-Fi. (The first Move was strictly Bluetooth or Wi-Fi when it was running.) And once the audio information is on board, it gets the treatment from three blocks of Class D amplification, the power of which is—as is Sonos’ baffling wont—a secret.

The biggest departure from the Move, though, is where the Move 2’s driver array is concerned. The original speaker used a mid/bass driver along with a tweeter behind a complex wave guide in an attempt to extract some sonic width and scale from a mono layout. The Move 2, though, has a pair of tweeters that fire left and right respectively above its mid/bass driver—and so it’s a stereo device, one that would seem to have far more chance of providing the range that’s so important in a speaker designed as much to be used outside as inside.

Sonos being Sonos, of course, there’s no knowing how big these drivers are, what they’re made of, or what their frequency response is.

The Move 2 is IP56 rated, so you can take it into pretty much any realistic environment without alarms—well, without alarms beyond how very heavy it felt while carrying it there. And it can be controlled using the exemplary Sonos S2 control app, as well as via its touch surfaces or the sound of your voice.

This interface remains the one to which all other brands must aspire—no control app is cleaner, more logical, more stable, or more friendly than this. As well as the obvious stuff like playback control, software updates, integrating your favorite music streaming services (except BBC Sounds, which proves tenacious in its resistance), and so on, the app makes creating a multichannel and/or multiroom system from your Sonos equipment absolute child’s play. If there’s one overarching reason why Sonos is fast closing in on ubiquity, it’s the nigh-on flawless implementation of its control app.

Despite Sonos' efforts to keep the Move 2’s technical specification under wraps, it’s possible to tease out a detail or two during the course of an extended listen. For instance, using Apple equipment to stream to the Sonos (an iphoness 14 Pro and a MacBook Pro running Colibri software) means using AirPlay 2—and the Move 2 is more than happy to take receipt of lossless audio files. But there’s no way of knowing the resolution they end up at once the Sonos DAC has done its thing, of course.

Switching to Bluetooth streaming from an androids Nothing phones (2), though, reveals that the Move 2 is compatible only with the bog-standard SBC and AAC codecs—so despite the fact the phones (2) is ready to hand over audio files using the higher-resolution aptX HD, LDAC, or LHDC codecs, the Sonos is not prepared to accept them. So is this, in fact, a high-resolution audio device? It seems unlikely, and Sonos just isn’t saying.

In any case, the technical specs don’t tell you as much about a speaker’s performance as sitting down and listening to it does. And while Sonos has made things difficult for the Move 2 in a number of ways (its size, its weight, and its cost, to name a few), there’s no question that this is a speaker that never sounds less than good, and in the right circumstances it can sound very good indeed.

If you're listening indoors, make sure loudness is switched off in the control app before Trueplay does its thing. (Indoors, it makes the speaker sound muscle-bound and plodding; outside, the lack of physical boundaries makes loudness a good idea). And that’s about the extent of the preparation that’s required. After that, just stream your favorite tunes using your preferred method, and the Move 2 has a lot of pertinent observations to make about them.

From the antiquated charms of Fanny’s “Hey Bulldog” as a Bluetooth stream via TIDAL to the slightly more contemporary allure of “Two Weeks” by FKA Twigs delivered as a hi-res file via the laptop, the Sonos is an observant, detailed, and periodically quite insightful listen. It keeps a close eye on the minor and transient occurrences in a recording, giving them appropriate weight and context—and as a result, you never feel as if you’re missing out on any vital information.

Tonality is convincing from the top of the frequency range to the bottom, with a nice evenhandedness that makes the Move 2 sound unified rather than a collection of several individual components. There’s substance to complement the bite and shine at the top of the frequency range, good control of the bottom end (as long as the loudness control rules have been observed), so that rhythmic expression is naturalistic and convincing, and a proper degree of insight and understanding through the midrange. No matter how accomplished (or otherwise) a vocalist might be, the Sonos grants them a stack of character and expression—so even FKA Twigs’ whispered and muttered imprecations are disclosed in full.

The internal reconfiguration results in a much broader, better-defined overall presentation than the original Move was capable of delivering. But although the Move 2 spreads sound over a greater area than the speaker it replaces, there’s still a quite obvious point-source of sound—the Move 2 sounds more like a notably expansive mono speaker than a truly stereo alternative. There’s no particular sensation of channel separation, even though the Sonos is putting left and right top/mid information through separate drivers facing in different directions.

The upshot is that while recordings are quite well defined and simple enough to follow, the Move 2 doesn’t create a soundstage in the left-right plane anything like as readily as it does the top-bottom and front-back. Again, this is not an unhelpful trait if you’re listening outdoors—but it can make for a slightly condensed listen when you come back inside.

Not for the first time, I get the strong impression that Sonos is preaching to the converted. Listeners who are already invested in the Sonos ecosystem (and why wouldn’t you be?) will enjoy the punchy, detailed nature of its sound almost as much as the complete ease with which the Move 2 will slip into their existing system.

Those who are coming to the Move 2 cold, though, are likely to have concerns that center around the price, and the relative size and weight, of this supposedly portable speaker.