Can it take on the competition or is it too little too late for the Arc? Let’s find out. But today we are here to test how the basic unit can do and how does it perform as a single Dolby Atmos soundbar. Sonos is surely pricing their products a bit higher and with the Arc in case you add the subwoofer and the surrounds the price can go considerably higher. First of all the Arc is rated as a 5.0.2 channels soundbar which supports both Dolby Digital and Dolby Atmos formats, comes with Airplay 2 support, includes voice control for both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, it is controlled through Sonos own S2 mobile app and can also be expanded into a 7.1.2 channels surround system if you add the Sonos Sub or Sonos One SL speakers, or both. Taking a quick look at the specs of the Arc one would think that this is an upgraded Beam as many features are the same between the two but with a few major additions in the Arc indicating that Sonos is aiming for a more unified feature set between their products. But is this enough to make the Arc special? Sonos doesn’t have such an extensive soundbar lineup like LG for example, in fact right now they are promoting only the Beam and the Arc as far as soundbars is concerned so this shows that with so few products in the market they can more easily focus on improving what they already have. With the Arc, Sonos is pushing into Dolby Atmos territory and it’s certainly in a completely different class than where the Beam belongs. Recently we had the pleasure of reviewing another Sonos product, the Sonos Beam, which was a nice casual little soundbar that certainly had its own merits but also some notable weaknesses. Sonos was a bit late to all this but they finally released their own Atmos capable soundbar so today in our Sonos Arc review we will be looking how this one does compared to the competition. Thankfully Dolby gave us a smart solution with up-firing Atmos speakers and soundbar manufacturers found the solution they were seeking in order to add the new object oriented format into their new units. But with certain limitations that soundbars have concerning their size and capabilities making them reproduce Dolby Atmos faithfully is not an easy task and the need for ceiling speakers is a requirement for that.
More expensive than other single soundbarsĭolby Atmos is all the rage lately and naturally soundbars could not stay out of the party.