The Sonos Beam. A compact soundbar that promises to significantly improve the
sound quality over your TV, with minimum fuss, whilst also doubling as a speaker
capable of being part of a multi-room music streaming mesh network. But,
is it a jack of all trades and master of none? Or, does it truly deliver at a very competitive price?
Welcome to my Tech Gear…
Let's find out!
The design of the speaker is perfectly in line with the rest of the speakers in Sonos's range.
Black, sleek and oh so smooth to touch, with a mesh fabric grille across the front.
I would have preferred a solid mesh front like found on the Sonos One as I think it would just
be more hard wearing, but all in all the result is a speaker that wouldn't look at our place in
any lounge. There are only a few buttons on the top that provide the ability to control
the speakers basic functions with most of the control coming from either your voice or
the Sonos mobile app. More on those later. The speaker sports a relatively low profile design
that should allow it to sit underneath most TV’s. Alternatively you can also wall mount it using a
proprietary wall bracket, which isn't cheap, but you can buy third-party options as well.
Now I did say it was compact and for a sound bar. I'm not kidding. It only measures 2.7
by 25.6 by 3.9 inches high, wide and deep. Or for those of you in a metric country,
in millimeters, it's 69 by 651 by 100. Now that's certainly a compact sound bar,
and the sound that it produces certainly wouldn’t make you think it was small though,
and that's due to some clever design choices that I'll get to in a bit.
To get the Beam set up you just plug in the power cord and use the provided HDMI
cable to connect the speaker to the ARC enabled HDMI socket on your TV.
Now you can use an ethernet cable to connect the speaker to your network, but it is just easier
and cleaner to use the inbuilt wi-fi to connect wirelessly, and you're pretty much good to go.
Now ARC stands for “Audio Return Channel” and enables the TV to send the audio signal
from the TV to the speaker. Now most modern TV’s have at least one ARC enabled HDMI port
so just look for the one on your TV that's labeled ‘ARC’. If you don't have this on your TV
then you can use the HDMI to optical out adapter that comes with the Beam
in the box to connect optically from your soundbar to the TV.
There are only four buttons on the top that allow limited control of some of the speakers basic
functionality that allows you to play / pause your music, change tracks, adjust the volume, and also
turn the mic on and off. You can also control the speaker using the Sonos app or your voice
That's right, this speaker also doubles as a smart speaker and supports the main voice
assistant ecosystems of both Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa, so you can use either to not
only control your speaker but also use it as another speaker in your smart speaker network.
There are five mics built into the sound bar ensuring that your voice is easily picked up
even whilst it's playing music or a movie. You can also disable those mics using the touch sensitive
button on the top of the speaker with the LED indicating whether the mic is enabled or not.
You can choose which voice assistant you want to have enabled on the Sonos Beam in the mobile app
but you can't have both on at the same time. It does also support Apple's AirPlay 2,
so you can make it part of your Apple ecosystem too, although Siri support is
limited and you have to use the mic on your phone to control it rather than the mics in the Beam.
The Sonos app really is where most of the settings for this speaker sits.
From the app you can adjust the EQ, and it is just limited to treble and bass adjustments,
but that's certainly not a bad thing. Sonos is well known for creating well-tuned speakers and
honestly I don't think there's any need to adjust the settings here. One setting I would enable
though is the ‘loudness’ toggle. Enabling it not only provides additional emphasis on the bass,
which generally is great for movies, but it also provides more clarity and detail to the sound.
I'll get to the sound quality of the speaker in a bit. As it's a Sonos speaker
it not only functions as a soundbar but also as a media streaming speaker,
where from the app, once linked, you can select and stream music from all the major streaming
services such as Spotify, Deezer or even Amazon or Apple Music straight to the speaker. If you
have more than one Sonos speaker in the house then you can even play on just a single speaker,
or a single room, or every speaker in every room in your house at the same time. It truly is a
multi-room audio system and one that Sonos has been renowned for for years. So the fact that
this sound bar doubles as both a soundbar and a multi-room speaker is an added bonus.
The whole point of a soundbar is to provide additional clarity and
depth and a wider soundstage over the default speakers that come with your TV,
and here the Sonos Beam absolutely does not disappoint. The sound bar consists of four
full range woofers, three passive radiators, and a dedicated tweeter in the center
of the speaker which is for vocals. They all work together to provide a focus and clarity on voices
while still delivering a wide and expansive sound stage, and wide and expansive the sound certainly
is, and surprisingly so in a package so compact. This is significantly helped by the
two side-facing woofers that spread the sound way past not only the edges of the soundbar
but also the TV that it supplements. You can further improve the sound using ‘True Play’
which is found in the mobile app and uses your phone to tune your soundbar to the acoustics
of your room. It's a great feature and really allows you to get the most out of your speaker
but unfortunately it's only available for iPhones, and that's annoying, because I've got an Android
phone! So I got around this by borrowing a friend's iPhone for about five minutes
so I could get it set up. If you can't do that though you're not going to notice it too much and
it doesn't make too much of a difference. It is better for doing it, but it's a minor improvement.
The bass in the Beam, whilst never going to reach parity with a dedicated subwoofer, is impressive
for its size. Actually, it's impressive for something twice its size! It's not bone rumbling
but there's definitive presence and weight to it. Now combine that with the wide soundstage and you
have a sound bar that provides, whilst not full surround, certainly an engaging sound experience.
If you absolutely want a surround sound system then you can add left and right surround sound
channels by adding any compatible Sonos speaker, such as the Sonos One SL, to the Beam using the
mobile app. It's great to be able to have this option so you can upgrade the system over time
if you want to. It definitely adds an extra dimension to the sound but it's not a must-have.
You can also add a subwoofer, but seeing as Sonos only make one subwoofer,
and it's twice the price of the Sonos Beam, and it's more marketed as being a match for their
Playbar or Arc speakers, then I think it's an unbalanced upgrade and really not worth making.
Audio format support is probably the most disappointing aspect of the Sonos Beam.
It only supports Dolby Digital and stereo PCM audio formats.
It does not natively support any variation of DTS nor Dolby Atmos. So for audio formats
other than Dolby Digital, sound is going to be down mixed to a stereo PCM signal,
which is a bit of a bummer. However, I've still quite happily listened to the Sonos Beam,
with down mixed audio and still enjoyed it. So it's probably more of a purist
complaint than a real one, especially in a sound bar that is only a 3.0 system.
So with all that said and done, should you buy it? Well for me there are three issues with
the Beam. The first one is the native audio format support is limited and disappointing,
as I just mentioned. The fabric mesh grille could be better. I've got it
caught on something and it's pulled so just be careful when cleaning it. And
third is that no ‘True Play’ support unless you have an iPhone. They really should look
at a way to get it to self-configure similar to the Apple Homepod or the Google Home Max.
All of these though are really minor gripes on what is a fantastic soundbar
that delivers an excellent wide and detailed soundstage in a compact package. You will
not find a better compact speaker, with more versatility, both sonically and feature wise,
for the price of only $399 or £399. I definitely recommend that you check it out
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