Sonos has had two great soundbar ranges for a while now – the Beam and Arc, known in their latest versions as the $500 Beam 2 and $1000 Arc Ultra. While the Beam 2 has virtualised Dolby Atmos, you needed to get the full-size 9.1.4 Arc Ultra to get a full Dolby Atmos audio system.
That’s no longer the case, since Sonos has today launched the mid-size $699/£699 Beam Ultra, delivering true 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos in a mid-size soundbar. That’s great news for those of us who don’t have huge TVs – the Arc Ultra is 46in/118cm long and doesn’t really suit anything under a 65in set.
As rumored, the other new hardware from Sonos is Sonos Ace Ultra, a new spin on Sonos’ Ace headphones which include the ability to link headphones together and push/pull audio with your existing Sonos speakers (a feature that will initially be avaulable for opt-in Early Access users). They’ll be $399/£399.
After some punishing times over recent years, the multi-room specialist is also hoping to get things back on track with the announcement of Sonos 27 – its latest generation software that ushers in a further improved app which isn’t before time and should make it easier to navigate and hopefully more reliable, too. Sonos is also giving a name to the software glue that holds your devices together – Sonos Fabric.
One new feature is the ability to use the voice assistant of choice with your Sonos system. While you’ve prevuously been able to use Sonos’ own assistant (now improved) or Amazon’s Alexa, now you can link up other systems such as ChatGPT.
Sonos Positioning Technology is also new – it uses high-frequency sound to sense a speaker’s location and change its role within your Sonos system based on that. So through this, Move 2 or Sonos Play speakers can become rear surrounds for your soundbar the instant they’re moved into position – powerful stuff.
“Twenty years ago, we made a bet that the rest of the industry is only now arriving at – a home deserves an audio operating system made just for it,” said Tom Conrad, CEO of Sonos. “We built our system around a shared love of music and the belief that nothing sets the mood like great sound. Sonos 27 takes that further, bringing acoustic engineering, adaptable software, intelligence and design together in a way only Sonos can. This is just the start of what our audio operating system can do.”
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