Sonos Beam
With the Arc soundbar coming on sale as we go to press, the
Beam will become the only other soundbar offering from Sonos. It looks nicely unobtrusive, 65cm wide and precisely 10cm deep, its top just 7cm above a table-top, which should keep it clear of many current television models. It is wildly minimalist in its connections, having no inputs at all except power and Ethernet, while a single HDMI output connects to the ARC-equipped input on your TV. (No ARC? Sonos sells an optical-to-HDMI adapter.)
Its driver count is unusual — a single tweeter and four full-range elliptical woofers, one each for left and right far out on the curved sides, and the centre getting two woofers and the tweeter — a good approach for dialogue clarity. Three passive radiators deliver extra bass — two on the front, and one at back right. It has five microphones as well, all the better to hear your Alexa or Google commands even when the Beam is already making a noise itself. This works well. You can add the Sub, or wireless rears of Ones, or IKEA Sonoses. And it has all the abilities of any Sonos speaker, able to access the many many music services which are made available through the Sonos app, and to interact fully within a Sonos system.
For TV and movies, give it Dolby Digital if you can, as this allows it to quite dramatically outperform a stereo input. We’d mark the Beam just over the line as listenable for music, but it’s not a hi-fi performance. With movies, on the other hand, the Beam delivers remarkable sound for its size and price. In a full-on action scene you can crank the Beam, and its spread of sound even without the Sub added qualifies as amazing given the size of the unit. And of course with Sonos streaming inside, the Beam is far smarter than the average bar.