Sonos Arc Review

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The Sonos Arc is the sound giant's latest take on a premium soundbar. It's not a replacement so much for the much cheaper Sonos Beam or it's recently released follow-up, the Sonos Beam Gen 2, as it is for the older Playbar and Playbase, and is designed to match up with today's much larger TV sets. It's an impressively large soundbar with an equally large asking price, especially if you want to expand it out to a full 5.1 speaker system down the track.

Design

Design

• Black or white finish
• Minimal lighting
• Massive
• Guided set-up is great
• Trueplay requires an iOS device
• Some app crashes possible especially when adding component speakers

• Read more about the Sonos Arc's design

  There's a word to describe the Sonos Arc. That word is "large" because this is a seriously hefty bit of living room sound equipment, available in either a white or black finish depending on your décor preference.

  It's 87mm high and 115.7mm deep, which is solid enough, but it's finding the necessary 1,141.7mm of length to accommodate it that may prove a challenge if you want to install the Sonos Arc into any smaller living room or adjacent to any TV smaller than around 65 inches. For my own home set-up, it matched up nicely enough across the entirety of my TV cabinet, but only just.

  There's a very solid argument to say that it would be a better match for any wall-mounted TV because you'd then also dodge any issues if your TV stand can't quite clear the height of the Sonos Arc in the first place. My own TV only just managed that feat, and TVs with smaller stands might lose a few base centimetres of screen size blocked out by the Arc unless you're willing to safely raise them up.

  For all of its massive size, the Sonos Arc is actually nicely minimalist in design terms. My review model was the black variant with a subtle Sonos logo in the middle that effectively vanishes unless you make a habit of sitting closer than a metre or so from your TV. There's a single front-facing indicator LED that lights up when you make volume changes or to indicate microphone status. It's unobtrusive as it is, but it'll even go a little further than that, dimming relative to the level of light in the room so as to provide minimal distraction. It's smart work because it means that while the Sonos Arc is a large device, it quickly fades into the background of whatever you're watching at the time, which is at it should be.

  

  There are touch controls on the top of the Arc covering play/pause, volume and microphone controls if you want or need them, but as a soundbar, they're not likely to get all that much use unless you sit far, far closer to your TV than you really ought to.

  While Sonos's history is in wireless audio, any soundbar has to be able to connect to your TV somehow, and in the case of the Sonos Arc, it's via a single HDMI connection that's designed to hook into either an ARC or eARC compatible HDMI port on your TV. There's a bit of a potential issue there depending on your HDMI layout and specifically how many other HDMI devices you need to connect up. If you are connecting up to a much older TV, there's also the option for an optical adaptor, but you'd be missing out on much of what makes the Sonos Arc really special if you go down that route.

  Unlike some competing soundbars, there's no supplied remote control with the Sonos Arc, but that's very much by design because it's built to be part of the wider Sonos ecosystem, which can be either voice or app-controlled from an iOS or Android smartphone. The Arc also supports IR pass-through to your TV, and once it's hooked up to your TV and configured, you should then be able to pass most control functions over to your existing remotes in any case.

  

  Installation

  Once you've figured out where the Sonos Arc is going to sit in your living room, it's time to get it set up. The physical side of this is quite simple, but then it's just a matter of finding a power socket and HDMI port, preferably on an ARC or eARC compatible TV. It's then, as with any other Sonos speaker, that you turn to the Sonos App for actual configuration.

  The big point of difference here is that the Sonos Arc is the company's first speaker array to use its new S2 platform. Sonos courted a lot of controversy with its fan base over the shift to S2 because some – and to be fair, much older – Sonos gear isn't S2 compatible, and at first it appeared to many that they were going to be left with bricked speakers that were otherwise functionally sound.

  That's not quite the whole story – and Sonos's own communication around this at first wasn't all that clear so there's room for confusion – but the key detail here for my own testing and set-up of the Sonos Arc is that it was with a beta version of the S2 Sonos App, sideloaded in my case onto an iOS device.

  Actually detecting and configuring the Sonos Arc was an essentially painless experience, and even the most technically challenged should be able to walk through that stage of its set-up process. I chose to use the iOS version of Sonos's platform for one very specific reason. Sonos has a sound tuning system it calls "Trueplay" that uses the microphones on your smartphone to measure tones through the room and dynamically adjust the Arc's output based on what it can detect.

  That in itself isn't a unique idea – plenty of home sound systems have used cabled microphone arrays with a similar concept in mind for some years now – but Sonos's take of using a smartphone means you can move around a space in real-time and get a definite improvement in audio quality by mapping out the soundscape space and applying it to the Arc's output. However, just as it was for the Sonos Beam, it's only available for iOS users. Sorry, Android fans – Sonos's position on this has long been that there's too much variance in the quality of Android microphones for them to offer Trueplay outside the Apple walled garden.

  Quick tip if you're an Android fan who wants an Arc: Either use an iPad or "borrow" somebody's iPhone to get through Trueplay tuning because it can make a significant difference to your audio experience, especially for movie watching purposes.

  

  While the Arc is designed such that it can work as a full audio system if that's all you want, you can also optionally add the Sonos Sub and other Sonos speakers for a full 5.1 surround sound system. Sonos supplied me with a sub and two Sonos One SLs to act as rear speakers, and I tested with the Arc, then Arc plus Sub, then Arc plus Sub plus rears to form a full 5.1 system, which meant that I had to go through the install process for adding components as well.

  This presented a challenge, and to be fair to Sonos, I was working with a beta version of the S2 compatible app. It's feasible that the issues I was hit with might be unique to that environment and by the time they're available to consumers that they may have been ironed out. At the same time, it may be a question of squashing bugs post-launch, and I've no way of knowing one way or the other.

  My issues there largely related with adding the second-generation Sonos Sub to the system. Like any sub-woofer, you can place it wherever you like because bass frequencies just love to travel everywhere, but at first, the S2 Beta Sonos App decided it was an S1-only component. It's not in any way, but it took a full app crash and restart before it would "see" the Sonos Sub properly and add it to the system.

  The rear-right speaker added neatly, but adding a rear-left speaker took a couple of attempts before the Sonos system would see it. Again, this might be down to the use of beta software, and I hope it was because one of the bedrocks of the whole Sonos system has been the ease of use and installation. It's great when everything works, but frustrating when it doesn't because there's not that much you can actively tweak to get it up and running if the worst happens.

Performance

Performance

• Works well as part of a wider Sonos system
• Good standalone audio
• Getting it up to 5.1 is a pricey prospect

• View test results and read more about the Sonos Arc's performance

  Once you've installed the Sonos Arc, it can do anything you might want to do with an existing Sonos system, including streaming music from a wide range of sources and taking input from digital assistants from Google or Amazon. Although only one of them at a time; you can't ask Google and Alexa different things or get them to virtually fight on the Sonos Arc, which would either be amusing or annoying depending on your perspective.

  That's not why most folks buy soundbars, however. They buy them because the speaker output of most television sets is lousy, especially in larger areas, and a soundbar is an easy way to significantly boost your audio output in a single painless step.

  Sonos already has a play in this area via the more affordable Sonos Beam, but the Sonos Arc is a rather more serious high-end device than the Beam. It's equipped with a total of 11 drivers hidden behind that black or white mesh, which gives it a very wide soundscape indeed. Two of the drivers specifically point upwards to accentuate spatial audio in three dimensions, and even as a standalone unit, it's capable of some very rich sound indeed.

  

  The level of sound quality you'll get out of the Sonos Arc very much depends on the environment that it's in, and this goes beyond Sonos's own Trueplay balancing software. The Sonos Arc is Dolby Atmos certified, but you'll need to pair it with both a service that supports Atmos and a TV platform that can serve it out. My own two-year-old Sony TV sadly couldn't stretch to Atmos, and you'll need a newer panel if you want to make the absolute most of the Sonos Arc.

  Which isn't to say that it can't put out some impressive audio. Sonos keeps your audio options within the app quite simple, with volume controls and buttons for Night Sound mode – to limit the thump of those explosions so you don't wake the baby up – and Speech Enhancement to bring up those mid-range vocals that are often muddied in the mix along with dramatic music or audio effects. They're simple on-off toggles, and how effective they are depends a lot on the mix they're working from, which is as you'd expect.

  What impressed me with the Sonos Arc the most was the seemingly effortless way that it accentuated different audio mixes and quality levels while generally picking a best-case scenario for their output. That was true across straight streaming music, podcasts, video games and streaming media services, where audio quality can vary from basic stereo upwards. Every once in awhile I'd hit a mix where I had to do some rapid volume adjustment relative to what I'd just been watching, but that's an issue with audio mastering, not the Sonos Arc to speak of.

  The Sonos Arc sits as part of the wider Sonos system, but that's not just a question of having other Sonos speakers through your home that you can share music through because with additional speakers or the Sonos Sub, you can build the Sonos Arc out to a full 5.1 system fairly easily.

  

  What's interesting here is how the Arc shifts its audio focus depending on which separate speakers are added to the overall system. Sonos supplied me with a second-generation Sonos Sub and two Sonos One SLs to expand out the Arc to its full potential. That let me test just how nice Sonos's take on 5.1 sound is, but it also let me appreciate what the Arc could do in a standalone fashion.

  Testing with the 4K streaming version of Avengers: Endgame via Disney+ showed off the differences between a full 5.1 and a virtualised surround with just the Sonos Arc in play. It's a noisy and somewhat stupid scene, but there's a lot of smaller action sound cues and speech thrown into that mix, and whether I was in full 5.1 mode or just relying on the Arc alone, I could make out every thump, explosion and rally-the-troops speech very clearly indeed. Of course, the full speaker array gave more audio space for Marvel's mightiest to impress me, but it did also make it clear how well the Arc could work just as its own standalone soundbar. You'd probably want to have it in a smaller space than my own large-ish living room for maximum impact, however.

  The other issue here is one of cost. The Sonos Arc isn't cheap, and neither is the Sonos Sub or the cost of adding those two rear speakers. That kind of money could buy you an actual designed-in-place 5.1 sound system with more HDMI flexibility than the Arc can offer, for example, although you'd also be inviting complexity into your life that way. It is, as always, a balancing act all the way.

Verdict

Verdict

• Great sound, but at a high cost

Should you buy it?

The Sonos Arc is Sonos's play into the premium soundbar space, and it's priced accordingly. There's little to fault in its overall sonic delivery, and it's easily best recommended to those who already own compatible Sonos gear. With the whole switch between S1 and S2 platforms that might see some punters shy away of course.

However, it is premium priced, and for some, the existing Sonos Beam might be more than enough for your needs. If you can afford it, though, the Sonos Arc delivers on its promises of powerful and richly toned sound very well indeed.

And if you're looking for something cheaper in the Sonos soundbar range, we have also reviewed the Sonos Beam 2.

Pricing and availability

Price

RRP $1,395

Where to buy

AmazoneBay

Specifications

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Images: Sonos and Alex Kidman