Review on 🎶 Enhance Your Listening Experience with the RIVA ARENA Smart Speaker: Compact Wireless & Multi-Room Music Streaming with Voice Control via Google Assistant (Black) by Doug Small

Update: Added mounting screw size to title as I couldn't easily find it on Riva's website when I ordered the mount. I asked Riva for information. You reacted quickly. This is a quality speaker that works well. The sound quality is of course objective, but in my opinion it sounds great. You should really set your expectations accordingly. This is a small speaker so of course there are physical limitations. However, I find that it has a more powerful sound than its size would suggest. It does a great job of filling our decent kitchen with sound and I'm happy with its setup. I think the bass is a little overrated, but a lot less than most speakers. Mine is in a corner, which of course adds to the bass. But overall I feel it's fairly well tuned and has a fairly smooth sound signature. As a bonus, Riva recently released a firmware update with a matching app update that allows you to tweak the bass and treble levels a bit. I turned the bass down a bit, only 2dB, and now I'm very happy. By the way, the firmware was automatically updated over the air, so there were no problems. I expect a lot of people will be trying to decide between this speaker and the Sonos counterpart, as was the case with me. I can't say anything about the sound of Play 1 because I haven't heard it. Some of the comparisons I read said the Sonos sounded better and some said the Riva sounded better. Everything I read was free for both. Due to the fact that both companies focus on sound quality and both share the same size limitations, I doubt that either will sound significantly better than the other. But again, this is a very subjective area. Where the Riva really outperforms the Sonos in my opinion is in the functionality available. Sonos locks you into an expensive ecosystem. If you want to expand, buy more Sonos products at an additional cost. Riva uses common protocols like Airplay, Chromecast and Bluetooth. It also has physical connectivity options with an aux input and a USB input. This offers a lot of flexibility and allows you to use several rooms cheaply. For example, I bought a $20 Chromecast audio device on sale and hooked it up to the receiver in my living room. I now have an arena in my kitchen and a chromecast in my living room which gives me 2 zones. In fact, I could go even cheaper, there are Chromecast apps for Fire TV, eliminating the need for hardware. I personally don't want the Fire TV to discolor the audio, which is why I chose the Chromecast. Also, Airplay 2 is said to have multi-room support when Apple releases it, and I read somewhere that Riva expects to be able to add support via a firmware update (obviously we can't guarantee that at the moment). really solid product. It looks high quality, sounds good and has a ton of features. I can easily see myself buying another one or two of these in the future, or maybe even trying out their larger Festival model and maybe mixing them with some additional Chromecasts or software solutions to extend them to more zones.