More than five years after the Playbar, Sonos is finally launching a new soundbar. More compact and less expensive than its predecessor, the Sonos Beam presents itself as a speaker full of modern ergonomic innovations, better suited to modern uses, and even including Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant.
The Sonos Beam comes very close to total success. It manages to achieve amazing sound quality for such a small footprint, while benefiting from all the attributes traditionally associated with Sonos products: a multi-room among the best there are, intuitive use (at the cost of a closed ecosystem and ultra-minimalist connectivity, of course), compatibility streaming of an unbeatable completeness… Too bad however that the only major defect of the bar, its inability to reproduce a precisely localized central channel, is a little in contradiction with its vocation as a TV/home cinema.
Strong points
- Perfectly balanced restitution.
- Surprisingly deep bass.
- Perfectly contained distortion, admirable precision.
- Ample and enveloping spatialization.
- Compatible with almost all existing streaming services.
- AirPlay 2 compatible.
- A multi-room system with multiple possibilities, and easy to use.
- Very well designed step-by-step guidance during initial setup.
- Incredibly efficient automatic TruePlay calibration…
Weak points
- … but only available on iPhone.
- Center lane too blurry.
- Minimalist connectivity.
- PCM stereo and Dolby Digital 5.1 compatible only on the HDMI ARC input.
- An ecosystem still just as closed.
NB: The reported price drop is calculated by comparing the lowest price of the day with the average of the lowest prices charged by all merchants for the product last month, with security rules to exclude prices from shops whose the VAT policy is not clear (known as “grey” shops, typically in the case of imports from China).
Alternatively
The Sonos Beam Gen 2 is certainly only a very minor evolution of the first Beam of the name, but it does not need more to remain one of the most recommendable compact soundbars on the market. Its remarkably musical and immersive sound (despite anecdotally Dolby Atmos compatibility) combines with a connected audio ecosystem of unparalleled completeness and maturity to form a very attractive whole. Beware, however, of its ultra-minimalist connectors, which could be a source of frustration in certain installations.