Sonos has a few speakers designed for the living room, but their Playbase and Playbar are really suited for larger TVs and home theater systems. That’s why they’ve come out with the new Sonos Beam — a smaller sized soundbar that packs in all of the smart features we’ve come to expect from Sonos.
Measuring 25.6 inches across, the Sonos Beam is significantly more compact than the Playbase and Playbar. It features a singular input via HDMI ARC. This will let you do things like control your TV’s audio through a remote. It also means that you can tell Alexa through the Sonos Beam to turn your TV on or off (if you’re using a FireTV). If you’re not able to use HDMI ARC, you can fall back on the systems optical audio input.
Under the hood, the Sonos Beam is packing in 4 full range woofers. The Sonos Playbase is one of those rare speakers that excel at playing music and also playing back movie and TV dialogue, so we have high hopes for the new Sonos Beam. There’s also growing demand for a soundbar that fits well into bedrooms and smaller apartments — where a larger speaker system isn’t practical.
In addition to the launch of the Sonos Beam, Sonos has announced that AirPlay 2 support on their speakers will be available in July via a free software update. The update will also allow users to use Siri to start a track from Apple Music and play it in any room on a Sonos speaker. Sonos also says that they are committed to bringing Google Assistant integration to their speakers, and that they are actively working on it.
The Sonos Beam will retail for $399 and it goes on sale on July 17th. It will be available in a choice of white or black. It’s available for pre-order now.
