Building a surround sound system out of Sonos speakers is a gratifying experience. Even if you don’t go full audiophile and deck your living room out with rear speakers in a five-channel setup, a decent soundbar and, if you can swing the cash, a subwoofer can do wonders for your TV/movie/murder doc viewing experience and your music-listening experience.
Honestly, even a cheap soundbar is a major upgrade to the tinny, small-sounding speakers built into your TV. What’s the point of splashing out a bunch of cash for a big-screen, Dolby Vision, 4K TV and those expensive streaming subscriptions if you’re going to drag everything down with bad sound?
smaller forms, but they’re still sonos
Notice I don’t use the word “cheap.” Even though they’re on various, small, so-so sales right now, the 2nd-generation Beam soundbar retails for $499, and the Sub Mini subwoofer retails for $429.
It’s a damn sight cheaper than a $1,000 Arc Ultra soundbar and $797 Sub 4 subwoofer setup would run you. You still get to take advantage of Sonos’ wonderful Trueplay setup tool on the cheaper speakers, though, as well as the intuitive Sonos app and the easy syncing between the Beam and Sub Mini.
Trueplay is a fine-tuning tool, accessed through the app, that effects spatial audio to create a three-dimensional map of your room so that your speaker combination knows just how to bounce sound around and off the surfaces. It creates more of a feeling of the listener being within the audio, rather than having it fired straight out of the speakers at their face.
You can still build a full-fledged Sonos surround system with their most premium speakers, the ones that seemingly exist to make all of us jealous of their sky-high price tags. We’re starting to see sales on the original Arc soundbar, which seems to have finally gotten a price drop. And the Arc Ultra that succeeded the Arc is mind-blowingly good.
But it’s a lot of money, even if you piece it together when the various components are on sale. Sonos on the Beam and Sub Mini is just as slick of an experience, given how nicely they sync with each other and voice assistants Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, as well as with Spotify and Apple AirPlay 2. In that regard, you get the Sonos experience without having to shell out a thousand bucks.
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