Is the Sonos Arc the best Dolby Atmos soundbar around?

Sonos updates its soundbar portfolio. An update in due form. Or more precisely: a Dolby Atmos update. Finally. We've been waiting a long time for Atmos sound from the supplier of high-end audio products. Competitors such as Sony and Samsung have already been at it for some time.

The new Dolby Atmos soundbar, the Sonos Arc, has been on sale since 10 June. I promised you a review before it went on sale. I didn't manage to keep my promise. And for good reason: a certain virus that delayed the delivery of the equipment to be tested. Sorry about that. But it finally arrived and here's my test. And to give you a little taste, I can tell you that:

the Sonos Arc is not just any soundbar. It is a statement; an expensive statement.

An interesting speaker architecture

The Sonos Arc is wide: it measures around 114 centimetres. That's a good 30 centimetres longer than its predecessor, the Playbar. Rather bulky, especially for those with a small TV: the Sonos Arc is wider than a 49-inch diagonal screen.

Width: 114.2 cm
Height: 8.7 cm Depth: 11.6 cm

But bulky doesn't mean massive or ugly. The Sonos Arc looks a lot more chic than the Playbar. Gone is the fabric covering that attracted dust like light attracts insects. Instead, there's a grille reminiscent of the Sonos One. With an oval, less angular shape. It looks very elegant and, it has to be said, pleasantly slim.

By the way, the Sonos Arc has been designed to work "standing up" or "lying down". It doesn't matter whether you place it in front of the TV or hang it on the wall. If you choose this option, you'll need a wall bracket from Sonos.

There are eleven amplifiers under the grille. Specifically:

• Eight elliptical woofers. They offer faithful reproduction of midrange and vocal frequencies as well as rich bass.
• Four woofers face forward, two upwards (for Dolby Atmos) and two to the sides to create an even wider soundstage.
• The woofers are supported by three tweeters equipped with a forward-facing dome that generate high frequencies. Above all, they guarantee crystal-clear dialogue.

By way of comparison: the Playbar, which is seven years older, has six midranges, three tweeters and a woofer for bass. The Sonos Arc therefore offers more. That's probably why it's 30 centimetres wider. What's more, all eleven speakers are equipped with a Class D digital amplifier.

All in all, Sonos is talking about a 5.0.2 sound system. The '5' instead of the Playbar's '3' and the '2' at the end refer to the speakers angled sideways and upwards.

The explanation: the American company from Santa Barbara, in California, uses a chip that, with the revised architecture of the loudspeakers, produces a combination of sound signals and counter signals. This creates a kind of "sound dome" around the listener, with vertical and horizontal sound levels, without the sound actually coming from above or to the side; whether it is reflected from the walls or from the speakers physically present.

I have of course tested this.

The sound: Dolby Atmos at its best

One of the best Atmos soundtracks I know is that of the film "Le Mans 66", which takes place in the 1960s. Ferrari was considered the best in motorsport. Especially for the Le Mans 24-hour race. Ford wanted to end that dominance and sent its two best drivers, Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) and Ken Miles (Christian Bale), to race.

The Sonos Arc's performance in the race scenes is as Oscar-worthy as the film itself.

I tested the soundbar without additional surround speakers or subwoofers. I want to know what the Sonos Arc has up its sleeve. For example, I want to see what its bass is capable of. They roar softly and powerfully at the same time when Raubein Miles presses the accelerator and lets the 550 bhp of his Ford GT's V8 engine roar. The sound is crystal clear. Incredible balance for a soundbar; I'd never have believed it if I hadn't heard it.

In other words, it's like sitting behind the wheel of the car myself and feeling how the acceleration pushes me to the back of the seat and how the car shakes every time I shift into gear.

But it's not over yet. In the 24-hour race, night falls. It gets dark. It's raining. Visibility is very poor. In his typically British accent, Miles keeps muttering "bloody hell" into his beard. Fragments of words that I can clearly make out amidst a wonderful sonic cacophony of falling rain, roaring engines, creaking bodywork and creaking cars being almost torn to shreds by G-forces.

This is due to the interaction of Sonos amplifiers and Dolby Atmos. You should know that Dolby Atmos doesn't mean better audio quality per se. It is the quality of the audio information that is better with Dolby Atmos than with a conventional surround sound mix.

In short: with Dolby Atmos, sounds are not simply placed on one channel. Instead, things that move, such as racing cars, brake discs or even rain, are assigned to a simulated object. Dolby also calls these "dynamic audio objects". Using algorithms, it is possible to separate these audio objects from the background with great precision and position them exactly where they should be in space.

This is why there is no overloaded sound storm in the scene above. An example: when I select the surround mix, the heavy rain falls somewhere in the bass. Parts breaking, tyres squealing, etc., all stand out much more clearly from the background noise in the Atmos mix than in the Surround mix.

That's what Atmos is all about. Not this marketing blah blah about "sound from above" with abracadabra things like "wall radiation".

In general, Sonos seems to have put a lot of thought into the strengths of Atmos dynamic audio objects. I mean, even when I close my eyes, I can hear exactly how a Ferrari and a Porsche sway in front of Ken Miles' Ford GT so he can't overtake them. When one of the cars slams into the strip and Miles misses the car by just a few centimetres, I unconsciously duck.

It's just incredible.

On the other hand, the Sonos Arc doesn't work wonders in terms of vertical sound. It fills the room very well, but I never had the impression of hearing sound coming from above. Nor did I expect to. I've tried many speaker systems with upward-firing amplifiers. They all promised sound that seemed to come from the ceiling. None of them delivered. As I've said before: marketing blah.

Sonos is smarter. It never promised sound that came from the ceiling. At least, not to my knowledge. Just deep, rich sound that fills the room and audibly places sound objects. And that's a promise the Sonos Arc keeps.

Oh, wonderful music!

With all this talk about Dolby Atmos, I almost forget the main thing: the Sonos Arc can also be used as a music speaker in a multi-room speaker system.

So it can be controlled from the revised Sonos app. You can connect it to music services like Spotify or digital radio stations. Apple users can also listen to music via AirPlay. The Sonos Arc can also be controlled by voice via Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa. Four built-in far-field microphones take care of this. I haven't tested it; the microphones remain switched off at home.

Let's turn to the music. My first choice is "Another Day of Sun" from the film "La La Land".

So, let's move on to the music.

Jazz to perfection: the double bass hums quietly, a piano plays with the harmonies, the drums drum and swirl in the background, while the trumpets celebrate the oncoming melody.

Minute 0:08: there's the first of many "Hmpf" hits I want to hear. In the high frequencies, nylon brooms caress the drums. The singer's voice clearly stands out from the rest of the music. Magnificent. As if the band were playing live in front of me.

I listened to "This is Berk" from John Powell's soundtrack for the animated film "Dragons". I've listened to it dozens of times before, so I know exactly how each passage is supposed to sound: when the bass should purr, when I want it to be punchier.

And yes, I listen to a lot (almost exclusively in fact) of film music at home, in case you were wondering.

The Sonos Arc doesn't let its guard down. The brass play Berk's theme positively. Are those trombones? Or tubas? It doesn't matter. It's powerful. Voluminous. The Sonos Arc makes something vibrate in the pit of my stomach. A clarinet settles in. Or so I think. Then the string instruments. I hear their melody. How the drums gently set the rhythm in the background. A female choir, there in the high register, gives something celestial to the whole.

I love it when music is so rich and complex.

Then minute 1:10. Action passages. Percussion rumbles in the background, keeping things in place. The Sonos Arc's midrange completely fills my living room. Perfect bass. A male choir with deep, rumbling voices plays a wild, untamed role. And I feel like I'm in the middle of a village of Vikings riding dragons.

The connections

One more thing. The Sonos Arc is connected to the TV via HDMI-eARC, the 'enhanced audio return channel'. This way, the sound from the TV is routed via an HDMI cable to an external speaker system or receiver.

Dolby Atmos can only be transmitted losslessly to the soundbar with the high bandwidth eARC. Put simply: in this case, the Dolby True HD format is grafted onto the Atmos information. If your TV only has HDMI ARC, i.e. without the "e" for "enhanced" in eARC, the Dolby Atmos signal is compressed and transmitted as a Dolby Digital Plus signal. What the Sonos Arc then reproduces is indeed Dolby Atmos, but not lossless.

An optical cable socket (Toslink) is no longer available. Sonos includes an HDMI-to-Toslink adapter for this purpose. This is perfect if your TV doesn't have ARC or eARC. But then the maximum bandwidth is large enough for Dolby Surround 5.1. Just so you know.

The real problem, however, is something else: there are no other HDMI inputs to connect external sources such as UHD Blu-ray players directly to the Sonos Arc. I just can't figure it out.

Let me explain.

Sonos puts its Dolby Atmos in the hands of TV manufacturers. And only in their hands. That's because TVs have to meet a basic requirement for the Sonos Arc to actually play Dolby Atmos: they have to be able to pass the received Dolby Atmos signal to the HDMI interface of the ARC or eARC.

Here's an example. LG's OLED C8, which I tested two years ago, has an Atmos-compatible Netflix app. The TV is also capable of playing Atmos on its internal speakers. What the C8 can't do, perhaps this has been sorted out in the meantime, is transmit Atmos to the Sonos Arc's HDMI. It therefore lacks the 'pass through' function. In plain English: the Sonos Arc would then at best have delivered Dolby Surround 5.1 to me.

Do you understand what I mean when I say "put in the hands of TV manufacturers"?

If the Sonos Arc had two or three extra HDMI inputs to which external playback sources could be directly connected , as most other soundbars in its price range do , Dolby Atmos wouldn't be solely dependent on the TV. I could, for example, connect my UHD Blu-ray player directly to the Sonos Arc or use the UHD Blu-ray player's Netflix app.

Concretely, for you, this means that if you want to buy the Sonos Arc because of Dolby Atmos, you must first check that your TV has the "pass through" function. Only then can you send Atmos sound to the Sonos Arc from the smart TV app or from an external source to the UHD Blu-ray player.

By the way, a Dolby Atmos-enabled TV doesn't necessarily have to have a Dolby Atmos-enabled Netflix app. I'm currently testing the first mini-LED from TCL, the X10. Sure, it's Dolby Atmos compatible - for example, if you're watching a UHD Blu-ray - but its Netflix app doesn't handle Dolby Atmos. Only Dolby Surround. Probably a licensing issue with Dolby.

And yes, the whole sound thing is a mess.

Overview: the best Dolby Atmos soundbar I know

The lack of additional HDMI connections is annoying. If I had to put stars on the products I test in my reviews, I'd take one star off the Sonos Arc straight away. Or more.

On the one hand, there's that HDMI Atmos ARC problem, on the other, there's that super-quality sound. Really, I've never seen a better Dolby Atmos soundbar. What's more, Sonos was clever enough not to promise sound from the ceiling. Instead, the Californians guarantee a rich background sound in which audio objects can be placed with extreme precision and don't get lost in an overloaded decor. In my experience, no soundbar has ever done better than the Sonos Arc.

Finally, I'd like to respond to this question from our missaq reader:

@Luca As soon as you have a Sonos Arc to hand, could you test it with and without a Sub to see if it's worth buying one or not?

Privately, I own a Sonos Sub plus two Sonos One speakers. That's why I was able to do the test. The result: the Sonos Arc alone has such a room-filling, voluminous sound that I didn't feel the need to add any other speakers to the system during the test phase. I did at the end, though, in combination with Dolby Atmos, and almost fell over.

So is it worth buying the Sub as well? Yes. Not because the Sonos Arc doesn't sound good without it, but because it sounds even better. But if it's a question of budget, I mean, 999 francs is a lot of money for a soundbar, the Sonos Arc does very well on its own.