Sonos Beam Review

Sonos has a strong reputation in the sound space, having offered its high quality mesh networked speakers for many years now. The Sonos Beam isn't the company's first soundbar, but it's the first to bring with it the promise of smart assistant compatibility, with Alexa right now and the promise of Google Assistant to come.

Looking for the latest model? We have also tested the new Sonos Beam 2.

Design

Design

• Available in black or white finishes
• TruePlay requires an iOS device
• Supports optical and HDMI-ARC output

• Read more about the Sonos Beam's design

  Soundbars have their niche in the home theatre sound market, and it's for the audience that craves simplicity above all else. If you do want to go all out on a 7.1 Surround ATMOS system, you can still do so. For many - especially those living in small apartments or rental accommodation - that's overkill. Soundbars should be easy to install and invisible once installed because it's all about the audio, not the visuals.

  Quite how invisible the Sonos Beam ends up being will depend on your decor and choice of colour finishes. Sonos sells the Sonos Beam in either white or black finishes, with the black model (as tested) more likely to blend into the front of most TVs.

  Measuring in at 651 x 100 x 68.5 mm it's a mid-sized soundbar. The Sonos Beam is undeniably a Sonos design, from the rounded corners to the touch-sensitive buttons that mimic those on the Sonos One. Having tested the Sonos One recently, I couldn't quite shake the perception that the Sonos Beam might be a Sonos One that has spent too much time on the rack.

  One trap to avoid - and the Sonos Beam's smaller size makes this easier than some - is that if your TV of choice sits on a low-ish stand, you may block the IR ports on the TV with the soundbar itself. Naturally, if you chose to wall mount both your TV and the Sonos Beam, you'd dodge this issue. I solved it via the rather lower-tech method of shifting the Sonos Beam slightly to the side of the IR port on my TV, for what that's worth.

  

  Installation

  Installation of the Sonos Beam is identical to other Sonos products. It is largely handled through the Sonos App for either iOS or Android. For the vital connection to your TV, you've got the choice of HDMI-ARC or Optical Audio, although HDMI-ARC is highly recommended.

  Optical Audio will work for audio output, but if your TV has an HDMI-ARC compliant port, you'll also be able to control audio levels with your existing remote, as well as (theoretically) engage TV control features through Amazon Alexa. More on that in a moment.

  Sonos also boasts speaker equalisation, dubbed trueplay, to match the room that you're installing it into for perfectly balanced sound, although there is a slight catch here.

  To enable TruePlay, you've got to use an iOS device to measure sound reflections using your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch microphone. When I asked about it, Sonos' position on this for Android users was that there's too much variance in Android microphones to finely tune the audio.

  Trueplay can make quite a difference to the audio output of the Sonos Beam. The best advice for Android users would be to find an iPhone-owning friend and invite them around for a movie night to get it set up.

  Then there's installation of the one current voice assistant that the Sonos Beam supports in the form of Amazon Alexa. In my case, I was testing with a system already containing a Sonos One, so some of the set-up beyond discovery of the Beam by the Amazon Alexa app was already done.

  However, my experiences reviewing the Sonos One suggests that this isn't always a flawless experience. It didn't happen to me for the Beam, but it did for the One, so you may have to bounce between the Sonos and Amazon apps to get the relevant app and account links happening.

Performance

Performance

• Solid audio quality, though not as loud as some soundbars
• Sonos app supports plenty of music streaming services
• Lack of Dolby Atmos support is disappointing

• Read more about the Sonos Beam's performance

  Sonos is no newcomer to the soundbar space, and the Sonos Beam isn't the new flagship of the range. Indeed, at $599, it's actually a more affordable Sonos soundbar than existing playbase or playbar soundbars.

  The Sonos Beam has five onboard digital amplifiers, four woofers and a single central tweeter to handle its audio output. Audio is generally very good, although it's not the loudest soundbar I've hit, and there are some limitations depending on connectivity. Dolby Atmos is notably absent if that's important to you. Soundbars are never going to challenge a proper set of stereo speakers, and I quickly gave up integrating the Sonos Beam into my existing set-up. Sonos does sell a subwoofer product, and naturally you can engage other Sonos speakers to act as surrounds, although that quickly gets expensive if you don't already own them.

  Sonos' background is in music, for which the Sonos Beam delivers a strong room filling presence. Through the Sonos app it has support for a wide variety of music sources, excluding Bluetooth pairing with a mobile device.

  Testing with the remaster of Prince's Purple Rain gave every screamed note and guitar reverberation their proper purple majesty. There's something to be said for simply stopping and listening to an album properly, a luxury so many of us skip for background music, but then the Sonos Beam has to do a little more than that.

  For TV-based audio, the Sonos Beam delivers good central sound, albeit not quite full surround sound for rather obvious reasons. The Sound Enhancement feature emphasises voice nicely, with both quieter dramas and more rambunctious action content mixing in vocals and explosions, while avoiding the whole hassle of punching volume up and down continuously through a movie. Sonos' "night mode" works much like competing offerings, with lower tones to avoid disturbing your fellow dwellers, although you'll still need to keep the volume down.

  

  Digital Assistant performance

  Amazon's Alexa is the only digital assistant currently enabled for the Sonos Beam, although Sonos did warn me that I was testing with a "beta" version of its Beam software.

  That does give it a slight escape clause in that future software releases may improve functionality, and I'd certainly hope that will be the case.

  Alexa is fine as a basic smart home assistant in much the same way that it is on any of Amazon's Echo speakers. Although, like the Sonos One, you do lose the calling ability, as well as spoken Audible audiobooks on the Sonos Beam.

  What you should also be able to do is perform simple TV functions when connected via HDMI-ARC to your TV, including volume and power adjustments. My own testing experiences with this were rather patchy, to say the least.

  Volume adjustment worked fine, although I suspect most users will work out the one or two levels they always want the volume to be at. The Sonos Beam's five far field microphones work well across the room, except if you tell Alexa to set the volume to 10. At that point, as I rather painfully found out, you've got to shout a lot to get it to pick up your voice. Again, I was testing with Beta software, and maybe this is a feature that will improve over time.

  In theory, you should also be able to use HDMI-ARC to control TV power with your voice, but I couldn't actually get that function working on a Sony TV. That may be due to smaller model differences, or even the slightly different Alexa feature set we get in Australia. There's no real support for channel or input switching on the Sonos Beam in any case (or at least not yet) via voice, but you may find your voice inputs limited to simple volume shifting, as I did.

  The other limitation of Alexa is one that's essentially Amazon's fault rather than Sonos', and that's around workable music sources.

  Alexa only fully "talks" to Amazon Music and Spotify, a very far cry from the wide variety of sources that the Sonos App can talk to. Alexa will play and pause tracks you queue up from other sources, but you can't search for them, or ask it to play using those services using your voice.

  Sonos is promising big things for the Sonos Beam, with AirPlay 2 due in July, and Google Assistant set to appear at some point this year. Once it has got those two features on board, the Sonos Beam will become a lot more appealing, simply due to the larger flexibility in voice commands that will bring.

Verdict

Verdict

• An excellent addition to an existing Sonos setup

Should you buy it?

If you've already invested in Sonos speakers and the asking price of the better sounding Playbar or Playbase is too rich for your tastes, the Sonos Beam is highly recommended. It's not the greatest soundbar Sonos has produced, but it's a good performer at its price level.

If you're more generally looking at a soundbar investment, it's worth your while if you're also looking into smart home appliances generally, although right now that's only true if Alexa is going to be your assistant of choice. As always while manufacturers can promise new features, that doesn't always mean they'll arrive when you need them, or in the way you might expect. Once the Sonos Beam is fully across the Amazon, Google and Apple ecosystems it'll be a much better buy and a serious leader in its price category.

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