Sonos releases new Arc soundbar with Dolby Atmos, addressing longstanding questions

New TV speaker arrives alongside updates to other products

Smart speaker company Sonos has unveiled a new premium soundbar, known as the Arc, with an updated design and a host of new features.

The new soundbar finally adds Dolby Atmos to the company’s line-up, responding to a request from customers that has been asked for years. And it updates the long-neglected Playbar, which has gone for years without any kind of update.

The new home theatre speaker comes alongside updates to other Sonos products as well as a major revision to the app that controls its system of internet-enabled speakers.

Sonos’s new soundbar costs £799 or $799, can be pre-ordered now and will be available on 10 June. Though availability through other channels may be restricted because of the coronavirus outbreak, enough of the speakers are expected to be available through Sonos’s own website by the time of their release date.

The new Arc soundbar adds technologies including eARC – which allows improved sound to be sent through the HDMI cable – as well as voice control, meaning that the soundbar can be turned down using Alexa, for instance. But probably the biggest change is the addition of Atmos, which is intended to allow the speaker to send out sound in 3D and give viewers a sense that the audio is happening around in them.

To do so, the new Arc uses a host of drivers: as well as some that send sound up and down to give a sense of space, it also includes a new subwoofer to add extra base and volume to the sound. All of those speakers are controlled using Sonos software, which the company said was tuned in collaboration with its sound board, which includes professional film sound professionals.

The design of the speaker is based on the much smaller Beam, Sonos said. That speaker was released in 2018, and costs exactly half as much.

While the Arc is much longer than that speaker, at 44" wide, it is still relatively small. The company designed it to ensure that it could fit around the television and be used either sat in front of the TV or mounted underneath it on the wall, and will adjust the sound according to where it is placed.

The Arc replaces the Playbar – which was released in 2013, and has long lagged behind other Sonos products in terms of features – but also the Playbase, which was only released in 2017. The company chose to get rid of both products to simplify its offering, as well as in recognition of the fact that many new TVs are not able to fit properly on sound bases, it said.

The name Arc is a gesture towards the use of HDMI ARC and eARC, which also means that the soundbar only has one connection to the television. Sonos will include a converter in the box for TVs that use the more traditional optical cable, as it does with the Beam, which has the same connector.

Sonos has long resisted the inclusion of Atmos or other newer surround sound technologies, but said that the Arc included them in line with the proliferation of Dolby’s technology on streaming services, and the accessibility of films and TV with Atmos sound. Some 25 streaming services now support the technology and Sonos’s software has been updated to support the higher quality audio.

Although the new speaker includes Atmos, which can use a whole array of speakers to give a sense of spaciousness, Sonos will still only support the use of two rear speakers and a separate sub as part of a home theatre system. But it did not rule out the release of more speakers in the future, noting that its software platform means that more products can be added after release.

The new TV speaker comes alongside a new version of the Play:5, which is now simply called Five, and the Sub. Both feature new components inside for extra memory and processing, and a different radio, though Sonos said they will sound and work the same as the products they replace.

The new Five has the same colour the whole way across its body, like the relatively new Sonos One. The new Sub looks exactly the same as the old one

It will also be launched alongside a new version of the Sonos app, and the operating system that powers it, which will arrive on 8 June. The updated version of the app bring support for Atmos as well as changes to the look of the and features of the app.

All three of the new products will only work on the new version of Sonos’s software. That means that will not run alongside some of Sonos’s older products, which it said will be stuck on the older software, in a decision that prompted some criticism from users who complained that the company had left their speakers without necessary updates.