Sonos has been selling home theater products for a long time, but the company has made the show even more of a priority in recent years. It started with the Sonos Beam, a smaller, more affordable version of the Playbar flagship soundbar. And the new flagship of 2020, the Sonos Arc, was the company’s first sound bar capable of playing Dolby Atmos.
Today, Beam gets a major update. The new second-generation Beam goes on sale today for $ 449 and will be available on October 5th. That’s $ 50 more than before, in line with the other price increases Sonos announced last week. The good news is that the new Beam is more capable than its predecessor in several ways. We’ll have to review it before we can really tell if it’s worth making an extra $ 50, but here are some notable features.
The new Beam looks almost identical to its predecessor, apart from a new perforated polycarbonate grille instead of the fabric front that is in the original. It also has the same speaker components inside: a center tweeter, four woofers, and three passive bass radiators. What’s different is that the new Beam processor is 40 percent faster, which opens up a lot of new audio formats.
Sonos
Most notably, the Gen-Beam is compatible with Dolby Atmos, for movies, television and music (the latter in a limited way, for now). Scott Fink, Sonos’ head of product who worked on the new Beam, says the power of the new CPU allowed the company to increase speaker arrays, not speaker-specific components, but, as Fink explains, “The set of software that coordinates the playback and interaction of all the speakers together in the sound bar.” The new Beam has five arrays, up from the three in the previous model, and Fink said the extras are dedicated to information of surround sound and pitch.
Still, the Beam supports the same home theater audio formats as the Arc (including Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus, multichannel PCM, and more), which costs twice as much as the Beam. In addition to increased processing power, the new Beam features HDMI eARC to facilitate these new formats. Sonos says the speaker should have improved the clarity of the dialogue thanks to the added power of audio processing, which should make the currently available voice enhancement feature work better than before.
The hardware also supports additional music formats. Beam (as well as Arc) will soon support Amazon Music’s Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos formats. Some Sonos speakers have been working with a handful of HD music services for a while, but this is the first time a 3D music format works with the company’s products. I asked if there was any plan to support Dolby Atmos in Apple Music and, as expected, the company was not yet ready to say so. But, there should be no technical reason, it’s just a matter of Sonos and Apple working together to get more Apple Music formats.
Sonos
As with other Sonos products, the new Beam connects to the company’s other speakers for playback of multiple rooms; you can also use other Sonos speakers as a surround. You can tune the speaker in your room to enhance the sound using Trueplay, assuming you have an iOS device. The Beam also has far-field microphones, so you can receive voice commands via Alexa or the Google Assistant, but that’s not necessary (there’s also a mute button on the microphone at the top of the Beam). Like some other recent Sonos speakers, the new Beam has NFC to make setup even easier: if your phone plays with the Sonos app nearby, it will automatically connect to the WiFi network.
According to what Sonos has said so far, the new Beam is probably not a crucial upgrade for most, unless you’ve wanted to incorporate Dolby Atmos into your setup without spending a lot of money. But given that the Beam is already the best-selling compact soundbar (according to NPD data), these upgrades should help it maintain its competitive edge, even with this $ 50 hike.
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