Sonos Beam
Backing up its Playbar and Playbase stablemates, the Sonos Beam is a smaller, cheaper TV speaker with a few additions to its spec sheet, including an HDMI connection plus voice control assistants Amazon Alexa and, from July, Google Assistant, with Apple Siri set to follow.
At just 65cm wide and weighing 2.8kg, it’s smaller and significantly lighter than the Playbar. Around the back you'll find the HDMI input, ethernet port, power connection and a pairing button.
Available in black and white finishes, the Beam looks stylish but understated. It's small, light and will fit easily into most living rooms. Inside are four full-range drivers, one tweeter and three passive radiators, plus five class-d amplifiers. Voice control is taken care of by five far-field microphones.
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, your phone, hard drive etc), and talk to any other Sonos products, so you could have two smaller Sonos units act as rear speakers in a cinema system.
It sounds exceptionally good. The spaciousness of the soundstage is astonishing, particularly for its size. 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. There’s stacks of scale and weight to the sound too.
Gunshots echo and ricochet far out to the left and right, and much further into the room than we’d expect, while effects pan smoothly across the front even if there’s a touch of treble brightness and sibilance, particularly at higher volumes. Despite the weight and width on offer from the Beam, dialogue is clear and direct.
The Beam is about as musical as a dispersive soundbar can be. There’s a bit of a sacrifice to directness incurred by the angling of the drivers, but for a device designed as an AV product, the Beam makes for a solid music system.
In short, this is an affordable, flexible soundbar that could transform your listening. And the broad functionality is the tempting icing on a very tasty cake.