Sonos Arc: Is it worthwhile to spend your money on this soundbar?

Sonos Arc is a sleek soundbar that provides a premium surround sound experience without needing additional speakers. The Sonos Arc wireless speaker uses Dolby’s most recent TrueHD and Dolby Digital Plus sound codecs.

To deliver the highest quality lossless audio found on cutting-edge Blu-ray disks and some of the most popular streaming services.

Sonos Arc: Price

As a standalone unit, the Sonos Arc soundbar will cost $799 / £799 / AU$1,399 when it launched globally on June 10, 2020. However, it is now $899 / £899 / AU$1,499 after Sonos announced a nearly product-wide price increase.

Design

The Arc measures 45 inches wide, 3.4 inches tall, and 4.5 inches deep. The curvaceous cabinet is available in black or white and looks and feels like a premium product. As evidenced by a mesh grill and touch-based controls.

The Arc’s curved, perforated grille and elliptical shape fit the company’s newer look, which steers away from rounded rectangular designs. The soundbar is available in matte black and white finishes, with a subtle Sonos logo in the center and a small, LED indicating microphone status.

The LED adjusts to limit distraction based on the ambient light in the room. The top side Arc features capacitive volume and pause/play controls.

Also Read: Bose Noise Cancelling Headphones 700 Price, Design, Performance, and More Details

Performance

Overall, the Sonos Arc’s audio capabilities are quite impressive. Eight elliptical woofers work together to deliver a solid overall bass response, and the tuning balances a nice amount of warmth through the mids with an impressive level of clarity.

The Arc also includes eight custom elliptical woofers, four of which are forward-firing, two reflect upwards on the ceilings, and one shoots sideways out of each end.

This precision is matched by the three silk dome tweeters, which deliver particularly crisp highs with impressive control. We were particularly impressed by the unit’s ability to deliver soundscapes that distinguished sound from individual instruments during specific arrangements without feeling disjointed.

Features

Because the Arc is designed to bounce audio off your room’s roof and walls to create a 3D soundscape, it’s surrounded by metal, hole-punched speaker grilles that cover the various orientations of the Atmos driver array on the top, front, and either end.

In addition, the Sonos Arc includes two software-based tuning features: phasing rays and TruePlay time alignment. The phasing rays function similarly to noise-canceling headphones but on a larger scale to focus sound.

The Arc retains many of Beam’s features, including built-in microphones for voice commands from Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant. AirPlay 2 from Apple is also supported.

In my experience, these features are most useful for music listening, and even then, I frequently ignore them. If I want to interact with a voice assistant, I still use the Sonos app on my phone or a different device for non-TV audio.