Sonos Beam
The Sonos Beam is a smaller, cheaper TV speaker, with a few additions to its spec sheet, including an HDMI connection and voice-control assistant. At just 65cm wide and weighing 2.8kg, it’s smaller and significantly lighter than its older sibling, the Sonos Playbar. Touch controls on top of the Beam allow you to change volume, select track and play/pause, while an LED indicates the soundbar's status, mute status and voice feedback. Around the back are the HDMI connection, ethernet port, power connection and a pairing button.
Stylish but understated
Available in black or white finishes, the Beam looks stylish but understated – and every bit the Sonos product. It's small, light and will fit easily into most living rooms. You can wall-mount the Sonos Beam using the official bracket (£60).
Inside are four full-range drivers, one tweeter and three passive radiators, plus five class-d amplifiers. 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 experience.
The Beam 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 – it’s all supported and all can be combined in on-the-fly playlists and queues.
Just as Sonos is platform neutral when it comes to music services, it also promises to support all available voice assistants. Amazon Alexa is on board at launch, while Google Assistant integration is still in the pipeline.
Siri compatibility is available, but its functionality has been stripped back. You can’t issue Siri commands to the Beam directly, instead you will need to use your iphone as a microphone.
Sonos hasn't upgraded the audio codecs it supports, so it's PCM stereo, Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital 5.1, with no support for DTS or lossless movie audio formats. There's no Dolby Atmos support either – the company believes that soundbars don't deliver Atmos sound to a quality level it is happy with.
Tailored sound
During set-up, you are prompted to tune the Beam’s sound with Sonos's Trueplay system, which uses your iphone’s microphone (Android phones are not supported) to tailor the sound to your room and usual listening position. Sonos has managed to overcome two of the usual sonic limitations of compact speakers: scale and weight. The Beam sounds exceptionally good for its size and 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, and much further into the room than you’d expect. Effects pan smoothly across the front of the room, and there’s a nice height to the delivery, too. It’s not just a wide soundstage, but a tall one, too. It is impressive for the Beam’s size.
This scene has a deep, club-like bassline that the Beam reproduces with depth and authority. It is chunky, solid, grin-inducing bass – few will complain about the Beam not being loud enough.
But it isn’t perfect – there’s a little treble brightness, and sibilance is present, particularly at higher volumes or with poorly recorded audio. And, while the Beam’s presentation is unbelievably spacious for its size, it doesn’t fool you into thinking you’re listening to a proper surround sound system. Effects stretch well beyond the dimensions of the screen, however, they don’t stretch up the sides of the room. It’s a spacious, atmospheric delivery, with echoes and reverb and three-dimensionality, but it’s not surround sound.
Alexa and HDMI ARC are the Beam’s obvious talking points, but to focus on those features would be to overlook the fact that the Beam sounds exceptional. This is an affordable soundbar that could transform your listening experience. The width, depth and three-dimensionality of the presentation smashes expectations, and for the average person in the average-sized lounge, the Beam will be a superb choice.