The Sonos Beam is a 3.0 soundbar with a small, compact design. It's a smart soundbar with built-in voice assistant support that you can easily add to your Sonos ecosystem using the Sonos S2 app. Like other premium bars on the market, it comes with a room correction feature to optimize audio reproduction based on your room's unique acoustics - though this feature is only available with iOS devices. While the standalone bar struggles to reproduce the deep, bassy rumble, you can always add on a separate subwoofer to improve its bass reproduction as well as satellites to improve its surround sound.
Our Verdict
The Sonos Beam soundbar is fair for mixed usage. Its neutral and accurate mid-range makes it ideal for listening to vocal-centric content like podcasts and TV shows. Vocals and lead instruments in your favorite music reproduce clearly, too, but you don't feel the rumble in the bass with bass-heavy genres like hip-hop and EDM. Though the bar can play surround sound, it doesn't offer a very immersive listening experience as a standalone bar. There's no Atmos support, either.
- Very well-built design.
- Easily upgradable setup.
- No Atmos support.
- No Full HDMI In ports.
The Sonos Beam is very good for dialogue-heavy content like TV shows. With its discrete center channel, this 3.0 setup anchors voices to a pinpoint location in the soundstage. Its balanced mid-range ensures that dialogue reproduces clearly and accurately, and there's extra brightness in the treble to make higher-pitched voices sparkle. You can even use its dialogue enhancement feature to make voices more clear and crisp if you prefer.
- Dialogue enhancement tool.
- Great center channel performance for dialogue in movies.
- No Full HDMI In ports.
The Sonos Beam soundbar is decent for music. It has a room correction feature - which Sonos calls TruePlay - that adjusts its audio reproduction based on your room's unique acoustic characteristics. With this feature on, it has a balanced mid-range that makes vocals and lead instruments clear and present in the mix, and there's extra brightness in the treble to make higher-pitched vocals sparkle. If you want a different sound, you can customize it with its bass and treble adjustments. However, you need to add a separate subwoofer to feel the deep rumble in bass-heavy genres like EDM and hip-hop.
- Wide soundstage.
- Lacks rumbling low-bass.
The Sonos Beam soundbar is passable for movies. The bar supports surround sound like Dolby Digital and DTS, but it has to downmix it into stereo to play it. It doesn't sound as immersive as setups with discrete satellites, but fortunately, you can add on separate satellites from Sonos if you watch lots of movies. However, you'll also need to add a subwoofer to feel the rumble in the low-bass during action-packed scenes.
- Great center channel performance for dialogue in movies.
- Easily upgradable setup.
- Wide soundstage.
- Lacks rumbling low-bass.
- No Atmos support.
- Poor surrounds performance.
Changelog
- Updated Jan 17, 2024: We've updated this review's text to ensure its accuracy and clarity.
- Updated Jun 13, 2023: Converted to Test Bench 1.2. Updated the results for audio format support via ARC/eARC, HDMI In, and Optical. Added Video Passthrough to TV results as well.
- Updated Mar 20, 2023: Added cable lengths to In The Box.
- Updated Mar 16, 2023: Converted to Test Bench 1.1. With this update, we've added a Mounting test and added information aboutSubwoofer Output, Spotify Connect, and Microphone Mute.
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Differences Between Sizes And Variants
The Sonos Beam comes in one color variant: 'Black'. Some retailers sell a version of this product known as the Sonos 'Beam Shadow' or the Sonos 'Beam Shadow Edition' soundbar, which is in a gray color scheme. While we haven't tested them, we expect them to be the same product and perform comparably in tests.
The second generation of this soundbar came out in 2021. You can see our review for the standalone Sonos Beam (Gen 2) or for the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) with Sub Mini + One SL Speakers.
If you encounter a variant not listed here, let us know in the forums, and we'll update our review.
Popular Soundbar Comparisons
This bar's small, compact size packs a decent performance that can be easily upgraded down the line, thanks to its separate subwoofer and satellites. Its side-firing speakers also help ensure a wide soundstage. Unfortunately, it lacks Bluetooth connectivity, and like many small, standalone soundbars, it has a limited amount of inputs. Unlike its successor, the Sonos Beam (Gen 2), it doesn't support Dolby Atmos either, but it can still be a good choice if you're looking for a bar to handle podcasts or music.
If you're still looking for more soundbars, check out our recommendations for the best small soundbars, the best soundbars for dialogue, and the best Dolby Atmos soundbars.
The Sonos Beam is better than the Sonos Ray. The Beam is a 3.0 setup, meaning it has a discrete center channel to improve dialogue reproduction, unlike the Ray. It can reproduce a bit more rumble in the bass range, and its soundstage offers a much wider, more immersive listening experience. There's also an HDMI input, which the Ray lacks.
The Sonos Arc is more versatile than the Sonos Beam since it supports eARC and Atmos content. The Arc can deliver deeper bass and has better surround and height performances. That said, the Beam performs better at max volume. It's also shorter and much easier to fit between the legs of a 55-inch TV.
The Sonos Beam is a better soundbar than the Sonos Playbar. The Beam has a more neutral sound profile and a sleek, compact design. It also supports ARC via an adapter and is Apple AirPlay compatible.
The Sonos Beam is a better soundbar than the Bose TV Speaker. The Sonos is a 3.0 setup with a better surround performance. It comes with more sound enhancement features, it can get loud enough for a large room, and you can stream music wirelessly to it using Wi-Fi or Apple AirPlay. It also has a companion app that can control all the bar's features. However, the Bose is a 2.0 setup that lets you use Bluetooth to play audio from your phone. The Bose also has an auto-off power-saving feature.
Test Results
