Sonos Era 300 vs Nothing Ear (3): Is the 2025 Model Worth the Change?
Sonos Era 300 or Nothing Ear (3)? We compare price, measured performance and real-world trade-offs to work out which is the better buy.
Maya Okonkwo
The short answer
Sonos Era 300 at Spatial audio, Trueplay against Nothing Ear (3) at IP54. Where they part company is who they suit: the Sonos Era 300 is the one to get if you are people who want one speaker to fill a room properly, the Nothing Ear (3) if you are buyers who want most of the flagship experience for a third of the price.
Price difference: The Nothing Ear (3) undercuts the Sonos Era 300 by £320. That gap only matters if the extras below are ones you will actually use.
Specifications side by side
| Specification | Sonos Era 300 | Nothing Ear (3) |
|---|---|---|
| Price | £449 | £129 |
| Our score | 4 / 5 | 4 / 5 |
| Type | Powered speaker | In-ear, closed |
| Drivers | Six, including upward-firing | — |
| Connectivity | Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, USB-C line in | — |
| Extras | Spatial audio, Trueplay | — |
| Codecs | — | SBC, AAC, LDAC |
| Battery | — | 5h 40m with ANC |
| Rating | — | IP54 |
How we tested
Every figure quoted above comes from the same protocol, run on every unit in this category. This one spent two weeks of daily listening, including commutes, calls and at least one flight. A blind A/B panel of four listeners, level-matched to within 0.5dB, using the same eleven-track reference playlist across every pair.
| What we measure | How |
|---|---|
| Battery life | Continuous playback at a metered 75dB with noise cancelling on, run to cut-off. |
| Noise cancelling | Attenuation measured against a recorded cabin-noise loop, reported by frequency band rather than as one number. |
| Call quality | Recordings made on a busy street and in a quiet room, judged by the same panel blind. |
| Comfort | Clamping force measured, then a three-hour wear session logged for hot spots. |
| Latency | Audio-to-video offset measured on a fixed test clip over each supported codec. |
We deliberately do not report frequency-response graphs presented without listening notes — they describe a tone, not an experience.
The honest caveat: Fit dominates both isolation and bass response. Our panel has four head shapes; yours is not one of them.
Where the Sonos Era 300 wins
- Genuinely convincing spatial audio from one box
- Room correction that measurably helps
- Line-in via USB-C
It also has the edge on the intangibles: the upward-firing drivers do far more work than the marketing suggests.
Where the Nothing Ear (3) wins
- LDAC support at a budget price
- A genuinely good companion app EQ
- A properly pocketable case
And in day-to-day use, in flat EQ they are surprisingly balanced.
The trade-offs
Neither is flawless. The Sonos Era 300 has one clear weak point — expensive for a single speaker — and the Nothing Ear (3) has its own: cancellation behind premium sets. Weigh those against how you actually work rather than against the spec sheet.
The value case
Both scored 4 out of 5, and the Nothing Ear (3) costs £320 less. Unless genuinely convincing spatial audio from one box is specifically what you need, the cheaper one is the better buy and we would not agonise over it.
If neither quite fits
Look at the Sony WH-1000XM6 at £399 — it scored 5 out of 5 and suits frequent flyers and commuters. If the budget will not stretch, the AirPods Pro 3 at £229 is the cheapest option in this category we would still put our name to.
Living with each of them
On paper the gap looks like a specification difference; in use it is a habits difference. With the Sonos Era 300 the thing you adjust to is expensive for a single speaker, and you do adjust — within a week it stops registering. Its type (Powered speaker) is the part you stop thinking about. The Nothing Ear (3) asks for a different accommodation: cancellation behind premium sets, against a type of In-ear, closed that holds up better than the number suggests. Neither compromise is severe. They are simply different, and which one you would rather not think about is a more useful question than which is objectively smaller.
Which one ages better
The Nothing Ear (3) is 1 year newer, which usually means 1 more year of security updates at the far end of ownership — the part of the decision nobody weighs at the till and everybody feels at year four. The other half of ageing is the weak point you already know about: cancellation behind premium sets on one side, expensive for a single speaker on the other. Weaknesses of that kind do not improve with firmware, so assume you are buying them for the life of the device and price the decision accordingly.
Our recommendation
For most people we would take the Sonos Era 300, which scored 4 out of 5 in our testing against 4 for the other. That said, a score is a summary, not a substitute for knowing what you need.
Buy the Sonos Era 300 for genuinely convincing spatial audio from one box. Buy the Nothing Ear (3) for lDAC support at a budget price.
Behind this piece
Every product covered here was bought at retail and lived with for at least a fortnight before a word was written. Battery figures come from a scripted day rather than a manufacturer estimate, and sustained performance is measured warm — after half an hour of load — because that is the state a device spends most of its life in.
Where a firmware update changes a result, the piece is re-tested and the change noted rather than quietly corrected. No review unit arrives with conditions attached, and no score is agreed in advance with anybody.
Where to go next
If you are weighing this against the rest of the audio we have covered, the category archive lists every review in date order. The closest comparisons we have published are Sonos Era 300 vs Sennheiser Momentum 4: Is the Sonos Era 300 Worth £150 More? and Sonos Era 300 vs Sonos Ace: Same Money, Different Priorities.
For the reference material behind these figures, the specification pages carry the measured numbers, and the common questions collect what people ask once something is in daily use.
