Sonos Beam
£399 FOR Open, spacious sound; bass depth; streaming AGAINST A little bright at high volumes
At just 65cm wide and weighing 2.8kg, the Beam is significantly more compact than its older siblings, Sonos’s Playbar and Playbase. Available in black or white finishes, the Beam looks stylish but understated – and every bit the Sonos product.
Inside are four full-range drivers, one tweeter and three passive radiators, plus five class-d amplifiers. As on the Playbar and Playbase, the drivers and radiators are positioned along the front and the far edges of the bar, helping to drive sound around your room for a more immersive, room-filling experience.
Voice control is taken care of by five far-field microphones, which ensure the Beam can hear you wherever you are in the room, even when the speaker is blaring a movie or music out.
This is typical Sonos – and that’s high praise indeed. It isn’t simply a soundbar: it’s also a wireless, multi-room speaker that can play music from almost any source. Spotify, Tidal, Apple Music, Amazon, Google Play, Deezer, your phone, network-connected hard drives – all are supported.
Just as Sonos wants to be platform neutral when it comes to music services, it also promises to support all available voice assistants. Amazon Alexa is on board, as is Siri (indirectly – you’ll need an iphone), while Google Assistant integration is still in the pipeline.
And you can connect two smaller Sonos speakers (One, Play:1, Play:3 or Play:5) to act as rear speakers in a cinema system or add a Sonos Sub.
To cut to the chase, the Beam sounds exceptionally good for its size. The width and spaciousness of the soundstage is astonishing. Play the opening of the 2017 remake of Ghost In The Shell and the sound effects of the gunfight fill the room in a way that confounds expectations. Gunshots echo and ricochet far out to the left and right, further into the room than you’d expect. Effects pan smoothly and, at the end of the scene, a helicopter is heard in the far-right corner of the room with a weighty thrum before it appears at the screen’s right edge. And it can go loud, too – few will ever complain about there not being enough volume.
Excellent with dialogue
Despite the weight and width on offer, dialogue is clear and direct, and never drowned out by the rest of the action. If your TV’S own speakers lose clarity of dialogue, the Beam will see you right. Suddenly you’re getting scale, dynamics, detail and punch and as close to the intended performance as you could expect from a £400 speaker.
It isn’t perfect – there’s a little treble brightness and sibilance, particularly at higher volumes or with poorly recorded audio. We had this issue with the Playbase too, but it’s far less of a problem here; with decent content and everyday volumes, it’s barely noticeable.
And while the Beam’s presentation is amazingly spacious for its size, it doesn’t quite fool you into thinking you’re listening to a proper surround sound. Effects stretch across the front of the room, well beyond the dimensions of the screen – but not up the sides of the room. It’s a spacious, atmospheric delivery, with echoes, reverb and three-dimensionality, but it’s not surround sound. For that you’ll need to add a couple of Play:1s.
The Beam is, though, is musical for a soundbar. A Play:5 is better for music alone, but for a device designed first and foremost as an AV product, the Beam makes for a solid music system.
Beam or Playbar?
This is an affordable soundbar that most could find space for, and it could transform your listening experience. The depth and three-dimensionality of the presentation smashes expectations.
Sonos’s larger Playbar sounds richer and generally more sophisticated, and still has a place for people with larger rooms and budgets, but for the average person in the average lounge, the Beam is a superb choice.