Review: Sonos Beam

There are two distinct ways of looking at the new Sonos Beam soundbar: from the perspective of a person who already owns Sonos speakers, or as a person who does not have any Sonos speakers.

The former, the speaker-rich among us—that's Sonos's sweet spot. The company says nearly 40 percent of Sonos purchases within the past year were made by people who already own a Sonos speaker, and that once people buy a Sonos product, they use it for years.

In that context, the Sonos Beam isn't just a TV soundbar, but a WiFi-connected, fabric-wrapped hypnosis machine. You will think you are listening to Beyonce or Childish Gambino or "Chill Hits" on Spotify. But what you're really hearing is "Buy more Sonos." You will wake up with no recollection of having bought the thing, and you may have some explaining to do.

However, if you've never owned a Sonos speaker and you happen to be looking for a TV soundbar that lets you use Amazon's Alexa to control the experience, then the Beam is worth considering. At $400, it's much less expensive and smaller than Sonos's previous home entertainment speakers. But it's still an impressive compact soundbar for your TV. And of course, when you're not using it to enhance onscreen visuals, it makes a good all-around living room speaker that sits comfortably on its own, or as part of a multi-room system.

Notably, the Beam was designed to support a trio of voice assistants—Amazon's Alexa, Google's Assistant, and Apple's Siri—all on the same device. That's no small feat; each company's voice service has its own rules of engagement for smart-home hardware. If the whole speaker thing doesn't work out, Sonos's executives may very well have futures in diplomatic relations.

While support for all three services is the promise, the reality is that the Sonos Beam doesn't actually work with all of those virtual assistants at the time of this review. Its shrunken size also means Sonos has made some sacrifices in the sound department. But we should talk about its design first, since the Beam is something that you'll probably be looking at a whole lot after you place it under your television.

This is the third Sonos speaker meant to serve as a companion to your TV, and the smallest. If the Sonos Playbase and Playbar (both $700) are, respectively, a truck and a mid-sized sedan, the $400 Sonos Beam is a coupe. It measures 26 inches across and 2.7 inches tall, and weighs around six pounds. That's heavier and longer than something like the Polk Audio MagniFi Mini, but that soundbar is also taller and, like a lot of soundbars, is visually uninspiring. The Sonos Beam is a delight to behold, a perfectly baked breadstick complementing an endless buffet of video and audio content. It ships in black and white, and it can be mounted on the wall if that's where your TV lives.

The body of the Beam is wrapped in a single piece of knitted polyester. The speaker's guts include a single center tweeter, three passive radiators, four custom-designed full-range woofers, and a five-microphone array for voice control. On top are some capacitive touch controls: a play/pause button, volume up and down, and a microphone icon, to turn the voice assistants on and off.

In back, you'll find three ports: power, Ethernet, and HDMI-ARC. If your TV doesn't support HDMI-ARC (my old Sony Bravia TV does not), there's an HDMI-to-optical adapter you can use. But you definitely lose some of the magic of Sonos's promised content control when you have to revert to optical. The "ARC" in HDMI-ARC stands for Audio Return Channel, and it means that audio signals can be sent from the TV to an external audio device using a single HDMI cable. And if you're using HDMI, that means the Sonos Beam is also tapping into CEC, or Consumer Electronics Control, to let you control the TV's volume or toggle the power through the Beam.

Sonos is positioning the Beam as "Not Just a TV Soundbar," but still, its primary function is supplying the audio for movies and shows. And as a soundbar, it performs well. It lacks some of the deep, heavy bass of its larger competitors. But it does enhance dialogue, effects, and soundtracks to enrich the whole entertainment experience. It strikes me as something that won't bowl over audiophiles, but will add value for casual listeners—and at the very least, even audiophiles might appreciate what Sonos has done with the Beam's physical constraints.

As part of my testing I watched John Wick, an extremely family-friendly movie about a man who's sad about the death of his dog and befriends his Russian neighbors. The action movie genre is the one my TV's built-in speakers struggle with the most, with most low-toned speech drowned out by dramatic scores, club beats, violent action, or dudes doing donuts in cars.

The Sonos Beam eliminated the need for me to hold a remote in my hand to adjust the volume 27 times throughout such a movie, with dialogue coming through crisp and clear. It evens out all the sounds really well and, like other Sonos speakers, adjusts its output to best suit the room. (Though you still have to go through Sonos's mildly awkward, 45-second TruePlay setup to establish this.)

Like the previous Sonos soundbars, there's a Speech Enhancement feature you can toggle on and off in the Sonos app. There's also a Night Mode feature, which clarifies dialogue and other quieter sounds while toning down the kind of high-octane effects that would normally keep your neighbors up. I used both of these features liberally, although, even with Speech Enhancement on, dialogue can sound a little flat and lacking in resonance.

To get a sense of the speaker's abilities for music, I listened to Gregory Alan Isakov's concert with the Colorado Symphony from 2016, among other playlists. The Beam's didn't give me any kind of illusion that the symphony was playing behind me, or that it was comparable to seeing Isakov in concert with an orchestra (which I have seen). But it still filled the room, and its spatial sound abilities made it possible to envision where members of the ensemble were on stage when it was recorded. Also: This soundbar gets loud.

Since the Sonos Beam natively supports Amazon's voice services, you can ask the soundbar the same things you'd ask an Echo, whether that's "Alexa, play Spotify workout playlist" or "Alexa, tell me a joke" ("How do you win over a chocolate lover? Keep some Twix up your sleeve.") You can search for and download skills, Amazon's term for voice apps, and set timers, something that accounts for approximately 90 percent of my Alexa requests on my Echo speaker.

The draw of having Alexa in the Sonos Beam soundbar, though, is that you can control your TV with your voice. Using voice commands to control certain aspects of your TV experience has been an option on various home entertainment devices for a few years now, but it has almost always required that you push a physical button on a remote to initiate the voice functions. The latest push in TV voice control is toward devices that rely instead on a simple wake word. That's Sonos's strategy here—you can just shout "Alexa" at your Beam and ask it to turn the TV on and off or to raise the volume.

If you have an Amazon Fire TV Stick, too, you can link your Fire TV Stick to the Beam and ask Alexa to pause the program you're watching by speaking to the AI through the Beam. This workaround is a little convoluted, though, as it requires you to first connect the two devices in a sub-menu of the Alexa app (not the Sonos app), and even after that you have to be specific: "Alexa, pause Fire TV," not just "Alexa, pause."

Unfortunately, my TV doesn't support HDMI-ARC. That meant I wasn't able to use an HDMI cable to connect the Beam to my TV, and instead I was forced to rely on the optical audio connection. This kept me from utilizing the CEC functionality, the feature of HDMI that lets a soundbar or other speaker send commands to the television set. As a result, I wasn't able to turn the TV on or off with my voice using my current home setup.

I recently tested another product that lets you toggle your TV power with your voice: the Amazon Fire TV Cube. But in addition to the HDMI option, the Cube also comes with little infrared blasters you can use to send commands to older televisions that lack support for HDMI-ARC. While I didn't love the Cube, I did like that it gave me the option to use my voice to control my older TV. So while CEC is a useful feature for the Sonos Beam to support, those with lesser TVs won't be able to take advantage of it.

Sonos's voice strategy doesn't stop with Alexa. The company has some competition in that space, like Polk Audio's upcoming $300 Command Bar, a voice-controlled soundbar that also has Alexa built in (and which we haven't reviewed yet). So to get ahead, Sonos has been working on support for Apple's AirPlay 2, which will also give Siri some limited control over the Sonos Beam. Sonos has also said Google Assistant support will arrive on its newest speaker models sometime this year. This is supposed to allow for a "continuity of control"—in theory, you'll be able to start music with one voice assistant, then ask another voice assistant to identify the song, or to pause or stop the music.

The problem, though, is that AirPlay 2 support wasn't ready by the time I wrote this review. Nor was Google Assistant. This means Sonos has effectively asked the media to review a product that doesn't yet do everything it's promised to do. (Sonos has also asked us to hold off on publishing our impressions of the AirPlay 2 experience on the Beam, even though AirPlay 2 software is technically available now, which seems excessive.) By promising these features in the future, Sonos is asking consumers who don't want Alexa to take a chance by pre-ordering the Beam before it works with their voice assistant of choice.

It's also worth noting that you can get some of this same voice-controlled Sonos experience with the Sonos One, a $199 smart speaker that works with Alexa—and will also be upgraded in the future to work with AirPlay 2 and Google Assistant. Of course, it's not a TV soundbar, so it won't work the exact same way the Beam does. However, if you're not actually that interested in a soundbar but are still very interested in a Sonos speaker with voice control, the One is a quality gateway drug. That speaker competes more directly with products like Apple's $349 HomePod and the $400 Google Home Max—although Sonos's argument has always been that its speakers let you play whatever audio you want without pushing you into one music service or voice assistant over another.

Sonos is relying partially on the goodwill it's developed with customers over the past several years in order to sell the new Sonos Beam. Trust us, the company is saying; AirPlay 2 and Google Assistant are coming soon, and it will all be great. Normally, in that scenario, I would say hold off.

But even without the full assortment of voice assistant capabilities, the Sonos Beam is a and impressive and thoughtfully designed soundbar. In under two weeks, it's improved my own TV watching, podcast listening, and music playing experience in a real way. Having Alexa in a soundbar has been useful too, even if that's the sole virtual assistant for now. The Beam has also become something of a sound centerpiece to the Sonos speakers I already have at home. Which probably sounds like music to any Sonos lover's ears.