Sonos Beam: a giant-slaying sound bar

Sound bars are all the rage in home entertainment, offering powerful sound for a heightened TV or gaming experience.

And one of the most interesting brands on the market is Sonos, a smart-speaker brand focused on blending high-quality audio with smartphone connectivity.

The company initially made a splash with its standalone speakers, such as the Play One and Play:5 which are some of the best speakers for streaming music in the home.

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In 2013, Sonos moved into the sound bar market with its £699 Playbar, followed by a dedicated sub unit to give customers a cinema-like audio system without investing in an expensive and complicated hi-fi setup.

Now the company have launched an entry-level version of the Playbar called Beam. It’s a £399 sound bar which is slightly smaller than its premium sibling, but that doesn’t mean Sonos has compromised on sound quality.

The company says it has worked with “over 50” sound experts from various corners of the entertainment industry, including music producers and film audio engineers to perfect the Beam. And while the speaker’s sound design is aimed at giving users the clearest possible representation of music recordings and TV audio, there are options to manually tweak settings such as bass and treble to find your optimal sound.

Sonos has also integrated Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant into the speaker, meaning users can issue voice commands to skip tracks or create playlists. The Beam is only the company’s second product to have Alexa built in, after the entry-level One. Buyers can also pair the sound bar with Sonos’s £199 One speaker for a makeshift surround sound setup.

The Beam is also proving to be a hit with the critics, too. According to What Hi-Fi?, the Beam is “an affordable sound bar that most could find space for”, as the “width, depth and three-dimensionality of the presentation smashes expectations.”

“The Beam is more than enough speaker for most people, to the extent that spending the extra £300 to get the Playbar could, in many cases, be entirely unnecessary”, the tech site says.

Tech Radar says that the Beam may actually be better than the Playbar. This is because the Beam comes with more connectivity options, such as HDMI, which makes it easier to integrate with a user’s existing TV setup.

Orders for the Beam are open now and can be placed on the company’s website for £399.