Many tech manufacturers have paused their big product announcements. Sonos — maker of some of the finest audio equipment I have heard — is fortunately one of those that haven’t. The company announced its very fine Arc under-TV speaker and two others.
Sonos makes excellent streaming audio speakers, which use your Wi-Fi instead of cables. They aren’t cheap, but they are good, really good. And they work, seamlessly. Plug a Sonos One in the first room, another in the second and a bigger setup in the TV room and they all play the same music. Or different music in every room. Long before streaming music services like Spotify emerged, Sonos was already doing the actual delivery.
A few years ago, Sonos dipped its toe into a new category of speakers, called soundbars, to mount below your flatscreen TV and augment its sound. Sonos called the first product PlayBar, and then, two years ago, introduced the Beam — a more compact model. It was so good that we at Stuff magazine named it both audio and overall gadget of the year in 2018.
The moment I plugged it in to test, I saw the rationale. In fact, I never unplugged it, I simply bought it off the distributors.
Sonos is in a league of its own for consumers who want simplicity and good sound
The laws of physics are against TV manufacturers. For speakers to give a rich and deep sound, they need a space to produce it. A literal, physical space. The flatter the TV, the less space for that important resonance. The TV manufacturers themselves noticed this and have been selling their own soundbars.
But Sonos does only one thing. It makes audio equipment. And it’s in a league of its own for consumers who want simplicity and good sound.
The Arc solves a problem that I’ve had for years and which is getting worse.
All movies and TV shows seem to be sound-edited by two people. The dialogue tends to be barely audible, forcing you to jack up the volume to hear what the characters are mumbling to each other. But as soon as there is an advert, or the theme song plays, or there’s a chase or fight or driving-with-music or music-playing-while-character-is-walking scene, the volume leaps.
Despite having a high-end LG OLED TV I’m endlessly dialling the volume down, then back up. It’s a minor problem in the age of coronavirus, but a problem, nonetheless. The Arc has fixed it.
The other thing Sonos does is play nicely with other Sonos speakers. It’s great for having multiple speakers in different rooms, but especially good when you want to add extra bass.
Sonos has also launched a new version of its excellent standalone bass speaker, the Sub (Gen3). If you have either model in your TV room, the Arc will offload the frequencies for bass sounds to the other speaker, thereby freeing up the Arc’s processing power to focus on the other frequencies. Sharing really is caring.
- Shapshak is editor-in-chief and publisher of Stuff magazine
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