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Design
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Features
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Price
Premium audio outfit Sonos has delivered a much-needed revamp to its flagship soundbar in the Arc – taking the Playbar’s home cinema positioning and giving it most of the key functionality fans have clamoured for.
HDMI support means that Dolby Atmos is present and correct, and an aesthetic overhaul brings the Sonos Arc bang in line with stiff competition.
Does it have what it takes to overhaul your audio? Let’s find out.
Design
The Arc certainly fits into the current wave of sleek soundbars, offering a massive upgrade in the looks department. An elegant, yet imposing 45 inches in length, this all-over mesh does away with the material of former devices, coming in a fetching matte white or black finish.
Tipping the scales at a shade over 6kg, the heft of its form is immediately apparent, housing eleven speaker drivers all delivering a complimentary soundstage.
Bolstering optical with support for HDMI makes for a supremely painless set-up – connecting to wi-fi and plugging it into one of the eligible TV ports for the full-fat audio experience is all that’s required.
On that note, it does take up one of your HDMI ports with eARC support, so our LG for testing was fully booked with the Sonos, a PS4, an Xbox and a Sky Q box.
Touch controls are discreetly placed on the top of the device, making for easy access to the main volume buttons.
Features
Let’s get it out of the way – the improvement in sound is little short of a revelation. The dual upward-facing speakers lend a weight of all-encompassing audio which offers a night-and-day difference.
The spatial connection between front and rear (additional Sonos Play One speakers can still perform the latter) is really incredible, effortlessly filling a room with rich and bassy sound that puts you in the thick of the action.
The usual left-to-right panning is impressive as ever, enhanced by the length of the Arc – some 10 inches longer than the original Playbar and a good 20 more than the Beam – but it’s the vertical space where sounds cascade as though they’re overhead which delivered the ‘wow’ factor.
Fire up some encoded content from a Blu-ray or Disney+ (the opening sequences from Rise of Skywalker were a reference here) and immediately become impressed with how the sound seems to envelope the viewer, with laser blasts whizzing overhead and an altogether broadened aural experience.
Both as a solo soundbar and accompanied a suite of Sonos wireless efforts, the results are a clear step closer to the true home cinema experience for a fraction of the cost of a bespoke built-in arrangement.
The sound mix takes a while to calibrate – the Trueplay app is still your friend here for a room set up as it lacks the Sonos Move’s automatic tuning – as initially dialogue coming from the centre speakers had a tendency to be overshadowed by the cacophony of those surrounding it.
A tap of a (virtual) button in the app, however, can enable both the enhancement of vocals as well as soften the bass for those midnight movie marathons.
That’s not to say that the Arc can’t do delicate, sometimes it’s those moments in a game with an incredible sound mix like The Last of Us: Part II where the chirping of crickets or rain tumbling from a corrugated iron roof can almost shock in both their authenticity and directional presence in your physical space.
A revamped Sonos app does the honours for volume and settings selection – a sleeker affair but expect to find the finer tweaks still nested in slightly unintuitive menus.
One of the great positives in the Sonos range is its support for multiple streaming services and voice-activated assistants – the same goes when talking about the Arc. So everything from Deezer to TuneIn Radio in addition to the usual suspects are here for music, whilst support for both Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Assistant makes it eminently customisable for your situation.
A great addition to the supported formats is Apple’s Airplay 2, meaning this can be seamlessly added to rival devices if required.
Price
An element which can’t be avoided is that the Sonos Arc remains priced firmly in premium territory, with the £799 price point acting as a strong indicator of the level this piece of kit is aimed at.
Adding a beefy Sonos Sub and a pair of Play:1 / One SL speakers can land just shy of £1,900, but with unrivalled ease of installation due to their wireless nature, and the streaming features above and beyond a dedicated home cinema does make this a versatile solution for those looking to leap headlong into a better audio arrangement.
The Beam is still a great option at £399, but lacks Dolby support and is only half the array of speakers…a great fit for the smaller home and display (Sonos suggests sub-49″ TVs), but lacking in the oomph the Arc delivers so capably.
Verdict
A surefire upgrade for those owners of 2013’s finest in the Playbar, the Sonos Arc is a kitted and capable device that delivers on the promise of elevating home cinema, music and gaming with the gold standard in Dolby Atmos support.
A few shortcomings in just having the single HDMI port and needing to be part of the Sonos family to truly make the most of its all-encompassing audio, it still fires on all cylinders as a truly impressive soundbar for the larger room.
It’s Sonos’ banner product with a price tag to match, but few come close to matching its versatility, AI smarts and all-around aural experience.
