Sonos Beam

The Sonos Beam is smaller, lighter and cheaper than its two older siblings, the Playbar and Playbase. Available in black and white finishes, the Beam looks stylish but understated – and every bit the Sonos product. It will fit easily into most living rooms, and though you can wall-mount the Sonos Beam, the official bracket is a fairly expensive £59.

Touch controls on top of the Beam allow you to play/pause, alter volume and skip tracks, while an LED indicates the soundbar’s status and voice feedback. The connections, including HDMI, ethernet port, power and a pairing button, are around the back.

Inside, there 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 drive sound around your room for a more immersive 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.

More than a soundbar

This 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 and network-connected hard drives are all supported and they can all be combined in on-the-fly playlists and queues.

The Beam can talk to any other Sonos products you have in your home, and will also support Airplay 2, allowing you to build a multi-room system with products from different manufacturers.

Of course, the Beam also deals with TV and movie sound too. The sole purpose of the Beam’s one HDMI connection is to receive audio from the TV, using ARC (audio return channel).

Thanks to voice support on the Sonos Beam, you can turn on the TV and adjust the volume with voice commands. Sonos promises to support all available voice assistants, with Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant now on board. Siri is also here, but you can’t issue commands to the Beam directly, instead you simply 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 audio formats. There’s also no Dolby Atmos support here – the company believes that soundbars at this price don’t deliver Atmos sound to a level it is happy with. So you will have to step up to Sonos’s excellent Arc for Dolby Atmos smarts.

Overcoming limitations

The Beam sounds exceptionally good, and Sonos has overcome two of the usual limitations of compact speakers: scale and weight. Given the Beam’s dimensions, the width and spaciousness of the soundstage are 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 out to the left and right, and further into the room than you’d expect.

Effects pan smoothly across the front of the room, and a helicopter appears in the far-right corner of the room with a weighty thrum before it eventually appears at the screen’s right edge. There’s a nice height to the delivery, too. It really is impressive for the size.

Then there’s the weight. This scene has a deep, club-like bassline that the Beam has no right to reproduce with anything like the depth and authority it does. This is chunky, solid, grin-inducing bass and few will ever complain about the Beam not being loud enough. You’re getting scale, dynamics, detail and punch and as close to the intended performance as you could expect from a £399 speaker.

It isn’t perfect – there’s a little treble brightness and sibilance is present, particularly at higher volumes or with poor quality audio. And while the Beam is almost spacious for its size, it doesn’t fool you into thinking you’re listening to a proper surround sound system.

Extra dimensions

Effects stretch right across the front of the room, well beyond the dimensions of the screen. They don’t, however, stretch up the sides of the room. It’s a deep, spacious, atmospheric delivery, with echoes and reverb and threedimensionality, but, unsurprisingly, it’s not surround sound. For that, you’ll need to add a couple of Play:1 speakers.

The Beam is, though, about as musical as a dispersive soundbar can be. You sacrifice some directness due to the angling of the drivers, but for a device designed foremost as an AV product, this is a solid music system, with good tonal balance, bass weight, rhythm and punch.

The Beam sounds rather exceptional for its price and size. This is an affordable soundbar that could transform your listening experience – the width, depth and three-dimensionality of the presentation smashes expectations. For the average person in the average lounge, the Beam is a superb choice.

“The Beam is an affordable soundbar that could transform your listening experience”