Sonos ARC: The new premium Soundbar is now Dolby Atmos

Speaking of home multiroom audio, Sonos is certainly one of the leading brands. The company has its roots in 2002 with the desire to create a wireless audio system for listening to music. Over the years, several products and generations of them have followed, but some of them have represented a turning point for Sonos.

Sonos Beam certainly belongs on this list. The small soundbar has managed to breach the general public to a greater extent than the Playbar and Playbase sisters’ presented in the past.

Compactness and more accessible price represented two of Beam’s strengths, combined with great ease of use, compatibility with voice assistants, and, last but not least, a truly satisfying sound performance in musical use.

Furthermore, adding two Sonos One, it is possible to create a home theater system with wireless rear channels in a very simple way and at a fairly affordable price.

One of the questions that, as journalists, we have always asked in Sonos in recent years has been that about the lack of certifications, such as the one for Dolby Atmos content. The company has always replied that it preferred to focus on audio quality rather than adding a simple label to its products.

Dolby Atmos, from the first presentations to the present day, has gained great attraction on the public, also for the undoubted quality in its performance on a spatial level even without the need to install rear channels. So Sonos has also changed course, and the big news of the new Sonos ARC soundbar is the support for Dolby Atmos and surround 5.0 audio content.

To optimize the enveloping rendering of sounds, Sonos has integrated 11 speakers in the soundbar, including two oriented upwards, to take advantage of the rebound of sounds against the ceiling and two 90° seats on the sides of the soundbar, to direct the sound towards the walls.

In all, we have three dome tweeters and eight elliptical woofers in the construction scheme of Sonos ARC. Each speaker is driven by a dedicated Class D amplifier. The soundbar can be placed on the surface under the TV or mounted on the wall, using the appropriate optional support, and adjusts the sound output according to the type of installation.

As in the case of Beam, the connection is made via the HDMI eARC/ARC cable, and the adapter for the optical cable is available in the package, to also support systems without HDMI. Sonos ARC also integrates a 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port for direct cable connection to the router. Still, most users will take advantage of Wi-Fi and wireless connection for integration into the Sonos audio system.

As already happens as a Beam, it is possible to pair a wireless subwoofer to the soundbar, to emphasize the bass performance. With ARC Sono, it also presents Sonos Sub (Gen 3) designed to best combine with the new soundbar, also taking advantage of the new management system and S2 app, which will also allow the use of higher-resolution audio formats. Also, you can add a pair of Sonos One as wireless rear channels to increase the immersion of the cinema content viewing experience.

Among the goodies, we also find an ambient light sensor, able to detect the degree of illumination of the room and, consequently, adjust the brightness of the status LED, so as not to disturb the night vision with any reflections on the TV screen.

At the interface level, ARC integrates capacitive buttons for play/pause, volume and to disconnect the microphone. The grid of microphones should best recognize the voice to control the Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, and Apple AirPlay2 voice assistants.

Among the audio options, Sonos ARC offers the dialogue enhancement function and the Night Sound function which attenuates the loudest sound effects to listen to a normal volume of movies and TV series in the evening without disturbing the rest of the family or the neighbors when a shooting occurs on the screen or explosions.

As already seen on previous products, we find the TruePlay function that allows you to dynamically adjust the response of the soundbar based on the characteristics of the room. The function is only available via iOS devices since, to be precise, it must know the microphone response.

The calibration takes place through the reproduction of sample sounds by the soundbar while the user goes around the room with the smartphone in his hand. Unfortunately, it is not available in the app for Android devices, probably due to too much variety of devices based on the Google home operating system.

 

Many expected an automatic calibration system similar to that of Sonos Move, which uses the integrated microphone to adjust the sound when it is moved: perhaps it would not have been as precise as TruePlay, which collects the sound and its reflections in different points of the room, but it would have been good news for Android users.

It is possible to borrow an iPhone to perform TruePlay calibration, since once the soundbar is positioned the sound profile does not change, but be careful not to move the furniture. In addition to TruePlay, you can then adjust the sound response via the equalizer on the app.

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