Sonos and IKEA announce $100 bookshelf speaker and $180 lamp speaker

Two years after first announcing a partnership, Sonos and IKEA are finally ready to show off their first products designed for the home.

The first in the new SYMFONISK product line is a $99.99 WiFi Bookshelf Speaker that can be mounted in a number of ways and serve as a wall shelf for small and lightweight items like books. The other is $179.99 table lamp with built-in speaker.

The two products are the next phase in IKEA’s Home Smart family of products, which already includes furniture with built-in wireless charging mats and smart lighting. 

The partnership is a natural fit: Sonos is well-known for its high-quality home speakers and IKEA is a household name when it comes to furniture. And both companies pride themselves on creating good-looking products that are sold at reasonable prices.

Though we haven’t seen it in person yet, the WiFi Bookshelf Speaker looks pretty neat. It can be mounted horizontally or vertically and support up 6.6 pounds of weight. 

It even comes with a special bracket system that makes the shelf speaker appear as if it’s floating on a wall without making the brackets themselves visible.

Additionally, the Bookshelf Speaker can be laid flat on a shelf or even hung onto rails using separate hook accessories.

Of course, because it’s a collaboration with IKEA, the shelf speaker was also thoughtfully designed to work well with IKEA furniture. Sonos says the speaker integrates snug into its popular Kallax and Expedit bookshelf systems.

Sonos tells me the speaker contains two “class-D digital amplifiers” and a built-in tweeter and a mid-woofer. Despite its compact size and $100 price, Sonos says it and IKEA made sure not to compromise on sound. Of course, we’ll have to be the judge of that once we’re able to listen to shelf speaker for ourselves.

The generically-named “Table Lamp with WiFi Speaker” is a little more purposeful with its dual functionality as a lamp and a speaker.

Sonos and IKEA designers told me they noticed bedside tables were getting cluttered with both a lamp and speakers like a Google Home or Amazon Echo. So they combined the two into one product.

Like the Bookshelf Speaker, the Table Lamp with WiFi Speaker is a very simple product. There’s a dial on the fabric-covered speaker body that turns it on and off and playback control buttons on the base.

The speaker lamp’s shade and fabric-covered exterior are also “hackable” and were designed to be easily removable. 

Sound is reportedly comparable to a Sonos One and also like the Bookshelf Speaker, it also has two class-D digital amplifiers, a tweeter, and a mid-woofer.

One thing you may have noticed by now is that neither speaker has any smarts. Neither has a built-in microphone and as a result don’t support Amazon’s Alexa or the Google Assistant. And the Table Lamp doesn’t come with a smart light bulb.

When I asked Sonos and IKEA why these aren’t smart speakers, they told me their goal with the two SYMFONISK products was to focus on the fundamentals of form and function. 

If you, however, want to add smarts to the two products, you can. I’m told you can pop in any smart light bulb like one from Philips Hue control it via an app or a digital assistant. Similarly, you can also connect both speakers to a non-IKEA Sonos speaker, like the One, that does have a microphone and use Alexa to control them. 

On paper, both products appear to be solid speakers that serve dual functions. The real test will be how good they sound. We’ll find out in August when both of them go on sale at IKEA.