- 350 bucks will get you in a walled garden
that'll ruin your life.
I'm obviously incompetent.
Oh, that's not working.
I'm going to cry.
What do I have to do to make this work?
Turn that (beep) up.
What do you mean that your eighth of an inch thick OLED TV
has terrible speakers?
What if we could fix it?
Today, we have the Sonos Ray, a sound bar that you can stick
in front of your TV to make it sound less (beep).
Ooh.
Look at that.
That's kind of cool.
Looks like it comes with a little box
of accessories as well.
This is all looks like recyclable cardboard.
I don't see any plastic, which is actually quite nice.
Can't have straws
but we can still get giant black tubes
that we throw out in three weeks when they update the app
and no longer support it.
Sonos.
That's the problem with these app compatible speakers.
Sometimes, maybe the company goes under
and then you can't use it for your TV anymore.
We'll figure out if this one can even work without the app.
I know that the iPhone app has a lot of features
that the Android app doesn't,
like home surround sound testing type of thing.
So if you get multiple speakers,
you can take your iPhone around
and it'll measure all of the space
to get the best sound possible.
Not available on Android, it seems.
It comes with an optical cable
and it comes with a power cable and that's it.
Okay, that.
Oh, I have it upside down.
Oh no.
Their logo can go either way.
So for connectivity, we don't really have too much.
We've got a pairing button, I guess.
We've got a power cable, which goes in here,
and we've got tos-link, optical and ethernet.
That's it.
That's all you get.
No HDMI, no arc.
None of that.
This is their entry level model,
which is sort of, on the cheap end
of their main center sound bars.
The level above this would probably be your Arc,
which I think is about a thousand bucks, 1100,
that sort of thing.
This is much more designed
as a cheap entry into their ecosystem of connected speakers.
And if it doesn't sound very good, you can always modify it
with satellites or a subwoofer, that sort of thing.
It does have some reflex ports over here
and some mid drivers.
And I think it's got a couple tweeters in the middle.
Four D-class amps, whatever that means.
So I guess we'll segue to our sponsor, Secret Labs.
Secret Lab chairs are engineered
to keep you incredibly comfortable for long hours
at work and play.
Their new Titan Evo, 2022 chair
keeps you feeling comfortable for longer.
Four way lumbar support, ultra comfortable lines
of different seat material, and more.
All chairs come with up to a five year extended warranty
and a 49-day return policy.
Head to the link in the description
and check out Secret Lab today.
How does it look in front of the TV?
Quite nice actually.
Tos-link is like an answer to an upgraded analog audio.
It's all digital, but it still carries audio.
And you can transfer a lot of different channels over it.
It's not quite up to the level of the newer HDMI standards,
which is probably why it's gonna be phased out soon.
But you don't get any analog interference.
You don't have to worry about grounding.
Any of that, 'cause again, it's optical.
It's a plastic cable with little LED at the end,
rather than a laser like in fiber optics.
I mean it's still fiber optics, but you know, whatever.
One of the problems with only having fiber optics
compared to HDMI,
is now we don't know if the TV's gonna be in sync.
Unlike that really nice Sony speaker,
which didn't make you make an account to use a piece
of audio equipment, the Sonos one does.
But thankfully it's already found it, which is phenomenal.
So I now have to let my app record audio.
That's really bassy.
This might actually not be terrible.
It's already connected.
So just plays the sound and then it's fine.
Turn on your TV, plug in the optical cable.
I already did that.
What's wrong with you?
No signal detected.
Another good way to check tos-link.
Don't do this with fiber 'cause you'll die,
but you can see if it's got a little red light,
which it does.
Let's make sure we plugged it in right.
I'm going to cry.
I'm seeing optical activity coming off of the back
of the tos-link cable.
You know the red light's on,
but the Sonos isn't detecting the TV
or the TV's not sending audio properly to the Sonos.
Welcome to my other living room.
Well, we got it hooked up to optical on this TV
and it just worked immediately.
So I think there's an issue with that other TV,
rather than the Sonos itself.
LG, it's nicer TV anyway.
Hey, I want to. - No.
No I want one. - No.
- Okay, I have one too.
This is a nice volume.
It sounds like it's coming from right there though.
It's not very wide,
which it obviously isn't but I don't hate this.
I hate this song.
- The song is great.
- Oh, there's the too much bass.
It doesn't keep up.
Okay, I take back everything I said.
- It's good. - No.
- What? - No, it's not good.
At low volumes, the highs and mids
are like quite reasonable.
You know, the start of that song was actually really nice.
It was crisp.
You could hear the clickity, clackities,
but as soon as the bass dropped,
it just explodes really, really thumpy.
The whole room's shaking and it's missing that nice crisp,
I don't know, 200 to 300,
all the sixties and the eighties of the kick drums
are just very boomy.
And then as we increase the volume up to like 100%,
the highs and everything start to crisp up
and clip and it just kind of turns to bad, unfortunately.
I think for a center channel,
this is quite a reasonable product.
Most of your speech is gonna be coming
from a center channel,
which is probably where this fits into their ecosystem.
It's a nice, cheap, $300 addition.
- [John] It's a cheap.
- Cheap, well, I mean, you know,
hi-fi stuff can get really, really stupid.
To me, it sounds almost like
the speakers are being overwhelmed
with the bass and they're freaking out.
We'll go back to our drop.
We can hear when the bass starts
and then I'll turn off loudness
and we can start playing with it.
Doesn't change it too much.
There's a little bit of a character adjustment.
Let's turn the bass down though.
Bass at negative 10.
Sounds bad.
No, I was hoping for more controls with equalizer.
The treble adjustment seems to move the 10,000 Hertz areas.
Whereas the bass also doesn't seem to hit
the right areas for me.
Loudness doesn't adjust things quite enough.
So their quite versatile, if you have an iPhone.
Unfortunately I don't get the privilege of using Chromecast.
So I switched to John's phone.
Let's have listen to one of my reference tracks,
The Wheel by Sohn.
Come on.
(upbeat music)
John, I need your face.
Ow (beep).
- Oh, it locked.
- Turn that (beep) up. (upbeat music)
Really nice crisp pitch car.
As a center channel, for movies and TV,
I think this would be quite phenomenal.
The highs are nice and crisp.
The mids are nice and balanced.
But as soon as you have anything in there with bass
everything just explodes and goes (beep).
Very disappointing, honestly.
Maybe pair of satellites.
So now you're into it for 2000 bucks.
Subwoofer, another 300 bucks.
Is it worth it for a $350 center channel
that you can only listen to speech or hi-hats on?
One thing that we might find is
that all the frequencies sound really nice when
they're played individually, which is this is doing,
it's playing one frequency at a time.
When you get into a music or speech or a movie situation,
you get multiple going on at the same time
and it might fail at that.
To get it to disconnect from Apple, Johno-land,
we had to power cycle it, which is irritating,
especially when all of these are interconnect connected
and you could potentially have seven in your room,
plus four in the ceiling.
I'm gonna set the volume down at around half
because we're gonna die, if we have it any higher.
I am hearing some gentle murmurs at around this hertz.
Really started right there, around 30.
(speaker humming)
Oh, did you hear it get all quiet there?
It went (mimics speaker) and then went away.
So it's got a massive boost right around 30.
And now we're coming back up around 60.
It's not really that directional actually.
It's got a nice wide sound field.
(speaker vibrating)
Wow, you can hear it vibrating, right?
Like the unit itself is going (cracking noise)
when it's, I guess, sympathetic resonance.
So it's probably, maybe not built like it should be.
It's just irritating for everybody.
Yeah.
Nice and even through the one thousands.
Slight dip around 3K.
This is that missing mids that I was hearing,
but now we're getting into that nice high band,
and this is all sounding very nice and even.
It's probably gonna get painful in a second.
Big dip around six.
See, this is where sort of human speech is.
And then another big dip around eight.
Nine.
Let me know when you can stop hearing this.
Ten, 11.
These are all nice and crisp and clean.
Thirteen, 14, 15.
- [John] That's gone for me.
- Me too.
Oh no, a bit there, about six.
Anybody else?
You still hear it about over six.
- Right up to 17. - Good boys.
Yeah, you're younger, aren't you?
That was actually pretty enlightening.
It's a really nice sound stage
from the early one thousands all the way up to,
when we can stop hearing things at around 16 to 17.
- [TV] This is Dolby Cinema.
It's where the most advanced cinematic
technologies you could ever experience, begins.
- The speech there is just so nice.
It's so pure.
The problem is there's lots of bass hits and stuff
in this demo and they just ruin everything.
I hope we can disable that.
I think, if you're watching TVs or shows or movies,
this is gonna be lovely.
Maybe not action movies.
You wanna watch a Master Chef, or a drama
or Linus Tech Tips.
We have another channel that you might not be aware of.
Probably perfect, honestly.
Sympathetic resonance coming throughout the whole unit,
shaking it, vibrating it.
You can hear the internal clicking of it.
And big dips.
I'm talking 10, maybe five DB, unnecessarily large.
It does have really good low end output,
but it's all over the place,
which is probably why crab rave sounded so bad.
And all the music sounded so bad when the bass came in.
Everything else without bass was absolutely crisp
and beautiful and it sounded really, even,
even in that sign suite.
For me, I don't think the Ray is gonna be living
in my living room.
I think if you had a small apartment or a smaller TV
or just wanted a little bit more background noise
or music in your place, then this would be a good buy.
Only if you're an iPhone user,
and only if you can't find something for 350 bucks,
that's maybe more your style.
This isn't particularly versatile.
For a single channel like this,
I would probably just go for stereo speakers.
You're gonna have a better experience.
You're gonna be able to fit more stuff in here.
But as an entry point into a multi-channel home audio system
I think this is fine for somebody out there, I guess.
Thanks for watching.
If you wanna look at other really stupid audio products
that Johno makes me review.
Sorry, that Johno makes me not review.
Check out the Sony LPX glass tubie thing.
It was also expensive and bad.
It was very a product.