It looks like any regular table lamp. You know, the kind you’ll keep by the bedside table to quickly switch on when you need to get up in the middle of the night. Except, the Symfonisk Table Lamp actually doubles as a functional speaker that can play soft music, white noise, or nature sounds, depending on what works best at helping you fall asleep.
A collaboration between Sonos and IKEA (really), the lamp-slash-speaker hybrid combines two common items you’ll normally have in the bedroom. That way, you can have both function in just a single rig, allowing you to save all that table space for other gear you might like to have within easy reach as soon as you wake up. You know, like a small fan, a bedside clock, or, if you’re the type, a bedside booze drip.
The Symfonisk Table Lamp leverages the strengths of both companies, relying on Sonos for the audio hardware and on IKEA for the product design. The result is a bedside lamp that’s as familiar and comforting as IKEA’s furniture pieces, all while sounding every bit as good as Sonos’ popular entry-level speakers. Because it’s designed by IKEA, the darn thing looks like legit home furnishing, ensuring it will fit in with most any contemporary home without much hassles. Seriously, one look at the darn thing and a table lamp is all you can reasonably think it is (fabric body cover, notwithstanding).
It has lamp shade made from mouth-blown frosted glass, a refreshing break from the mass of plastics we see most tech-infused products decked in these days (yes, it uses plastic in other parts, too, like the disc-shaped base), which you can take off in order to insert any E12 bulb in the socket. That’s right, it uses those small candelabra-style lamps (and only one of them at that), so this is strictly for accent lighting and not for spaces requiring more serious illumination.
Billed cheekily as “the best-sounding lamp in the world,” the Symfonisk Table Lamp is, for all intents and purposes, a Sonos One speaker inside a different shell. That means, all that sound is produced using a single tweeter for high-frequency response, a mid-woofer for bass and mid-range vocal frequencies, and two Class-D digital amplifiers, so sound quality should be on par with that entry-level audio gear. It has old-school mechanical controls (buttons and dials) similar to Sonos’ older speakers, so none of those fancy capacitive controls, all while requiring to be permanently plugged to a wall outlet, since there’s no battery onboard.
Of course, it’s still a modern speaker, so it’s compatible with Spotify Connect, AirPlay 2, Google Assistant, and Amazon Alexa. It can connect with other Sonos speakers, too, so you can have synchronize it to play from the same audio source as other speakers from the outfit that you have at home. Dimensions are 16 x 9 inches (height x diameter), so this makes a substantial presence on your desk, all while coming in two colors for the fabric cover, namely white and charcoal.