Sonos Beam (Gen 2) with Sub Mini + One SL Speakers Soundbar Review

It's the same design as the original Sonos Beam, although the front of the bar is covered with a sturdier plastic grille instead of fabric. The controls are on top of the bar, and there's a Sonos logo on the front.

The Sonos Sub Mini is a solid and sturdy device that's shaped like a cylinder. It's mostly made of plastic, and there's an opening on the side to the drivers inside.

The Sonos One SL speakers have a sleek plastic design that matches the bar and the sub. The top and the bottom of the speakers are made of plastic, while metal grilles wrap the edges.

Thanks to its small size, the bar will fit easily into your existing setup, and it slides between the legs of most 55" TV stands.

The Sonos Sub Mini is, as its name implies, smaller in size than the original Sonos Sub. Since it's wireless, you have flexibility when placing it in your room.

The Sonos One SL Speakers are also wireless, giving you lots of flexibility when setting them up in your room. They don't take up too much space, either.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini has excellent build quality. Overall, it's a premium setup, with a solid and sturdy plastic build on the bar, the sub, and the satellites. The grilles on the bar and the satellites help to protect the drivers inside, too.

• Manuals
• HDMI to Optical Adapter (9cm)
• HDMI cable (4.9 ft / 1.5m)
• 4x power cables (6.2 ft / 1.9m)

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini has a great stereo frequency response. Overall, the bar's sound is even and balanced, making it suitable for listening to a wide array of audio content. The Sub Mini brings solid thump and rumble in the low-bass, especially with genres like EDM and hip-hop, as well as adding some extra boom to the mix. Voices are clear and clean with most content, though they seem a bit boxy with certain tracks. Still, it offers a pleasant sound that pleases many different types of listeners.

If you want a more even sound with stereo content, you can use its bass and treble adjustments to switch up its performance. Setting the bass to '-3' and the treble to '2' results in a more balanced output, as vocals and lead instruments are more clean and detailed in the mix, without the veiled quality you get out-of-the-box.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini has a great stereo soundstage. When you listen to stereo content, the soundstage stretches past the edges of the bar itself, mimicking the performance of larger soundbars. The focus is good, too, so sound effects seem to come from accurate, pinpoint locations in the space around you.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini gets loud enough to fill most rooms with sound. That said, as you crank up the volume, there are some compression and pumping artifacts present in the mix, which takes away from the clarity of your audio.

At normal listening volumes, distortion falls within good limits, meaning you can enjoy clean and pure audio reproduction. As with most bars, distortion jumps when you press the bar to max volume. However, distortion is hard to hear with real-life content, so it's not much of an issue unless you're an astute audiophile.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini's discrete center channel is designed to improve vocal reproduction. Thanks to its balanced frequency response, voices are clearly and accurately reproduced in the mix, and dialogue is easy to follow in TV shows and movies.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini's discrete surround speakers make for a noticeable improvement over the surround performance of the standalone Sonos Beam (Gen 2). Sound effects are more accurately placed in the soundstage, as a result, so you have a more cinematic, immersive listening experience. Given its balanced frequency response, these objects are reproduced with accuracy, too.

Note: For our testing, we send a surround file to the bar and measure its results. While it only activated the surround speakers and the sub, with real-life content, this soundbar plays audio from all its channels.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini doesn't come with up-firing Atmos drivers like the Sonos Arc. Instead, it uses its side-firing and center channels to simulate sound objects in the space around you. It's not quite as immersive as what you get with a traditional home theater setup, which would use down-firing speakers in your ceiling for a more clear and real sound. Still, thanks to its balanced frequency response, sound effects are reproduced with clarity.

Subjectively, this soundbar performs well with Atmos content. The additional subwoofer and satellites make for a much more cinematic listening experience than what you get with the standalone Sonos Beam (Gen 2). You feel more rumble in the bass during action-packed scenes, just like in the theater. Sound effects are more accurately placed in the space around you, too, resulting in a clean and crisp sound with lots of detail. Compared to the Sonos Arc with Sub + One SL Speakers, there's a bit less height, but it still does a great job for such a small bar.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini has lots of sound enhancement features. As with other Sonos bars, you won't find an EQ, but you can still use its bass and treble adjustments to switch up its sound. Like other premium bars on the market, it has a room correction feature that analyzes your room's unique acoustics and optimizes the bar's output accordingly. Sonos calls it Trueplay, and it's available through the Sonos S2 app on iOS devices. If you're an Android user, you can't use it, but you can always use the bass and treble adjustments to compensate.

The bar has limited physical inputs. It connects to your TV or other devices over HDMI ARC. If you have an older TV, you can use the included HDMI to Optical adapter to connect it via Optical. However, without an HDMI In port, you can't use it for video passthrough.

The Sonos Beam Gen 2 with Sub Mini supports many different audio formats via ARC. It can playback 5.1 surround sound like Dolby Digital, as well as lossless and object-based formats like Dolby Atmos.

Via Optical, the bar supports common 5.1 surround sound formats like Dolby Digital and DTS, which you're likely to come across on streaming platforms and Blu-ray discs.

You can connect the bar to your TV over ARC or use the included HDMI to Optical adapter to connect it to older TVs via Optical. Both connections enjoy low latency, so the audio you hear is in sync with the video you see. You don't notice issues with lip-synching, either. Some apps and TVs compensate for latency differently, though, so your real-world experience can vary.

Since the bar lacks an HDMI In port, it can't perform video passthrough.

Like all Sonos soundbars, this bar has limited wireless capabilities. You can stream audio over Wi-Fi and Apple AirPlay 2 connections, but unfortunately, you won't find Bluetooth.

The bar lacks a display, but there's a horizontal light above the controls that changes color and blinks depending on the settings you adjust.

There are some simple control on top of the bar. You can use them to play/pause your audio, adjust the volume, and mute the microphone.

The bar doesn't come with a remote, so you have to control it using the Sonos S2 app. Through the app, you're also able to link the bar with your other Sonos products.

You can control the bar with your voice using its built-in Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. When you're not using it, you can also mute the microphone to keep the bar from listening to you.