Sonos‘ speakers are well-designed, but not in that ‘striking, stand-out aesthetics’ way – they’re designed to pretty much blend in with a neutral, rounded, black or white look (with the occasional color option thrown in for certain models).
But that means sometimes you wish they could be a bit more interesting. Maybe you’d prefer a different color to better match your room’s look, or maybe you bought a white soundbar, then moved house and changed things up, and now wish you had a black soundbar.
I just discovered a company called Soundskins exists (thanks to the r/Sonos subreddit), and it basically makes cloth covers for the best Sonos speakers that come in a range of tones and colors. It’s been around for years, but I hadn’t come across it before, and figured there must be lots of people in the same boat as me, so here we are.
The light gray options look a lot like the more Scandi-styled speakers you’ll find out there, from the likes of Audio Pro or Dynaudio.
There’s a nice copper one I’m tempted by because it’s really close to the color of my curtains, which the Sub is next to, so it’ll blend into the room more neatly than a big white box does by default.
Soundskins says the cloth is “acoustically transparent certified by the Technical University Eindhoven” – not that this is especially important for my Sub, but obviously would be important on my Sonos Arc Ultra or Sonos Era 300 speakers.
(It’s worth nothing here that there currently aren’t any options for the Arc Ultra; just for the original Arc.)
I think the cloth coverings look better up close on some speakers than others – on the smaller speakers, the thick seams take away some of the slickness of the speaker design – but I think they’re really effective for just helping a speaker to blend in more.
Someone on the Sonos subreddit said they used black covers on white products they wanted to move into a home theater room, and someone else said they used a cover because they had a speaker in the kitchen they wanted to protect from grease.
One person also said they use a Soundskins cover to stop their cat trying to claw the inside of their Sub Mini, which is a noble cause.
They’re not especially cheap, but are much cheaper and more sustainable than buying new speakers to fit a change of aesthetic need, so look like a worthwhile investment overall.
I like that there’s a good mix of moods in the color range, in a lot of cases. You’ve got different kinds of gray, different kinds of white, fashionable earthy tones, and electric blue and yellow that I can’t see choosing myself, but I still love.
I can definitely see myself giving my Sonos setup a new look in the future, though I do suspect that unlike the Redditor who used a Soundskins cover to defend from his cat, my own cat is only more likely to be attracted to the nice flat top surface of my subwoofer if I cover it in a lovely fabric…
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