Stunning gadgets

Tech that will take your breath away (and that's pretty useful too) 

-  Alex Cox

Sonos Sub Mini

Finding the right sound is about design as much as anything else. Sonos knows it’s usual to conjure up deep bass tones with a huge corner cluttering cube but figured that a pair of faced-off woofers could, given a sufficiently well-engineered cabinet, offer just as much rumble in a whole lot more style. The original Sonos Sub does this, packing two distortion cancelling speakers into a square-sided rectangular cabinet. The Sub Mini carves its design down to a bare cylindrical minimum, retaining the central output slot but reducing the size – if not the sound – significantly. Once you’ve figured in Sonos’ standard single wire connectivity, the result is a sub that can be hidden but doesn’t have to be.

Indeed, there’s every chance you’ll want to keep the Sub Mini on display. Little bigger than a bookshelf speaker, packed with power, and smart enough to balance its output to match the acoustics of your room, the Sub Mini hits a sweet spot basically nothing has before – and gives the rest of a Sonos system, whether that be a lonely soundbar or a set of the excellent Era 300 smart speakers, a chance to focus on the highs without muddying themselves with the lows.

£339, sonos.com

Teenage Engineering EP-133 KO II