Sonos Beam is the new Soundbar with integrated voice assistants
Sonos has introduced Beam, a new soundbar that can be controlled by Alexa, Google Assistant and Siri and, which becomes the reference for the audio in the living room, aiming to manage both the music and the TV sound.
Sono Beam represents an evolution in the range of products offered by the Californian company, and an evolution that says a lot about the company philosophy. Sonos Beam is a soundbar that wants to be the device for the sound of the living room, whether it be music or film. And wants to be with an affordable price.
Sonos Beam continues along the path started with Sonos One in proposing a connected speaker able to interface with several vocal assistants: on the one hand, Alexa, which is already integrated with specific commands; on the other hand, Google Assistant, which will arrive in the next few months, and lastly Siri, thanks to AirPlay 2.
Sonos does not aim to bind itself to a single service provider, but rather to provide a functionality to its users that is as close as possible to what they ask – and this also goes from neutrality to proposing a voice assistance service. Alexa is not currently available in Italy, so this neutrality compared to third-party services is a winner for our market and is a model to follow.
This approach is actually general for Sonos, which tries to offer ” neutral ” products: for example, Beam is controlled by the TV remote control, thanks to the HDMI-ARC (Audio Return Channel) standard that allows the TV to send the audio signal to an external device.
So you do not need an additional remote control to control the soundbar, which does not have one. If you can control Sonos Beam from the TV, the opposite is also true: you can also control the TV via the HDMI port, which can be switched on and off via voice commands. In case the TV is not compatible with the HDMI-ARC standard, it is possible to use an adapter to an optical port which causes the ” smart ” functionality to be lost.
Sonos Beam has a decidedly smaller body than the previous models and for this reason, it offers obviously lower performances, in particular, as regards the bass response (if not for other reasons, due to the physics). Sonos managed to insert two lateral transducers, two central transducers, three passive radiators and a tweeter placed in the middle inside the body covered with fabric; the positioning of the transducers should guarantee good spatiality to the sound.
Speaking of spatiality, Sonos Beam does not integrate Dolby Atmos or DTS: X technologies because of the limitations in the implementation of these technologies and the impossibility to correctly render them with a soundbar.
Sonos Beam will be available at $399 – a price almost halved compared to the previous Playbase, which aims to be the ” entry point ” in the Sonos world. With Sonos Beam will also debut an update for existing Sonos products (Sonos One, Playbase and Sonos: 5 second generation) that guarantees compatibility with AirPlay 2.
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