Sonos Arc, The premium smart soundbar for TV, movies, music and more, with Dolby Atmos. (White)

Product Information

Protect the power cable from being walked on or pinched, particularly at plugs, convenience receptacles, and the point where they exit from the apparatus. Weightier more bassy sound. It's already best in class or top 2. As with every Sonos iteration, the bass always improves and I'm sure it will here too. But the current Arc is already excellent as a stand alone sound bar. And now Tidal has begun offering Dolby Atmos mixes of some music, the Arc has even more opportunity to demonstrate just how expansive it can sound with a well-mastered Atmos file. But the little absence between low-end and midrange is still apparent, and the tendency for the top of the frequency range to get just a little glassy is in evidence, too. Verdict About the only audible shortcoming, except for the latent treble response, is the area where low frequencies become midrange frequencies. Presumably Sonos has deployed its digital sound processing to allow some of the forward-facing drivers to deliver all that midrange fidelity, leaving the other drivers to deal with more of the lower stuff - but there’s a slight disconnect between the two. A kind of concavity exists in this section of the frequency range, a slight disconnect between bassy sounds and those higher up. Of course, your TV’s specs are important here. To get True HD Dolby Atmos, your TV needs to not only support eARC but also have pass-through functionality. And just because your TV has eARC or ARC doesn’t mean every one of its streaming apps that should carry Atmos actually will.

We switch to Blade Runner 2049 and this dynamism impresses us further. The scene in which K and Joi fly out of Los Angeles and towards the orphanage transitions from loud – as waves hit the flood barrier ­– to eerily quiet, as the rain hits the car, with occasional bits of clearly projected dialogue.Four of the woofers face you directly through the front of the Arc. There’s one in each end and two more that fire upwards to generate the height elements required for Dolby Atmos. One tweeter fires straight out from the centre of the Arc, while the other two fire out at a left and right angle. Once in position, most of what you can see of the Arc is a 273-degree grille that hides the array of front-mounted and up-firing speakers. Each end also features a grille-covered driver. We've now tested the Arc with many of the best TVs, and it's clear that mileage varies based on brand and age. The Now Playing screen in the Sonos app flags up that Dolby Atmos is being received, while the About My System part of the settings menus confirms the format in which it’s being transmitted. With a bit of fiddling in the TV menus, all of the LG OLED and Samsung QLED TVs that we've used have been able to transmit Dolby Atmos to the Arc from their integrated apps and pass through True HD Atmos from our Oppo UDP-203 Blu-ray player without issue. A woofer in each end of the soundbar provides a wide soundstage. Photograph: Samuel Gibbs/The Guardian The setup process is designed to be as simple as possible, all done through the Sonos S2 smartphone app. (Image credit: Future)

With Dolby seemingly licensing the Atmos badge to anyone willing to pay the fee, it’s little guarantee of quality, as anyone who’s listened to the tiny speakers of an Atmos-badged phone or even most Atmos-badged TVs will attest. The Sonos Arc contains eight elliptical woofers combine to deliver a solid overall bass response. (Image credit: Future) Sonos Arc: audio performance Here's what we want to see from the next Sonos Arc (Gen 2) soundbar : Read moreI disagree with the changes you would like to see: Clean only with dry soft cloth. Household cleaners or solvents can damage the finish on your Sonos products.So while we were able to experience excellent height and left/right soundscape movement, we definitely didn’t get the same surround sound experience as a multi-speaker array. Most soundbars do a good job of reproducing TV and movie audio, but fall down on music. The Arc is simply fantastic as a music speaker, sounding far better than any other soundbar I have tested, including the Beam, and many dedicated music systems. Use your voice to control your Sonos system with any voice-enabled Sonos product—play and control content, turn the volume up or down, and more. The Arc must be plugged into the ARC-capable HDMI port on your TV, which reduces the number of HDMI ports available for actually plugging in set-top boxes, games consoles and other sources.

With HDMI eARC and full-fat Dolby Atmos onboard, the Arc already supports a combination of features that no other Sonos product offers. So what might we expect the company to add to this already class-leading soundbar? According to Fink, Sonos put much work into iterating the curvature of the internal waveguides, revamping Trueplay to account for ceiling distance, angles and acoustics, and tuning Arc with Atmos content producers in music, movies and TV. Rarely does a device arrive that does so much and does it all so well. Even rarer that it remains a class leader almost three years after release. Be in no doubt; the Sonos Arc is a superb bit of kit. You can perform True Play tuning, waving an iPhone or iPad about your room listening to what sounds like loud alien blasters. The Sonos app listens to the sound to optimise the Arc for your particular room. Sadly the feature isn’t available for Android devices because of the variances in microphone quality.The Sonos Arc also features revolutionary Trueplay technology. Trueplay scans your room, analyses the results and then fine-tunes the speaker for the ideal listening experience. Whether your room is large or small, densely furnished or minimalist, the Arc adapts to give the most natural and realistic sound possible (iOS device required). The Arc's own status light consists of LEDs that shine through four holes above the subtle Sonos logo (fun fact: there are 76,000 holes in all the grilles combined). By default, these LEDs remain off most of the time and their brightness is tailored to the ambient light in the room even when they are lit (when adjusting volume, for example), so as not to appear too bright.