Sonos has been selling home theater products for a long time, but in recent years the company has made the living room even more of a priority. He started with Sonos Beam, a smaller, cheaper version of the flagship Playbar soundbar. Then in 2020 he presented Sonos Arc, the first soundbar with Dolby Atmos technology. Now Sonos has decided to upgrade its Beam soundbar, with a new second generation model (Gen 2) which supports the Dolby Atmos.
Sonos Beam Gen 2, the new model supports Dolby Atmos
The new second generation Beam soundbar (Gen 2) is on preorder for 499 euro, € 50 more than the first generation, in line with the other price increases announced by Sonos recently. The good news is that the new Beam is packed with new features and has generally been improved, so the price increase may be justified.
The new model looks almost identical to its predecessor, apart from a new perforated polycarbonate grille instead of the fabric front featured on the original. It also has the same speakers inside: a center tweeter, four woofers, and three passive bass radiators. The difference is that the new processor inside the Beam is 40% faster.
Photo: Sonos
Specifically, the Beam 2 gen supporta Dolby Atmos, for movies, TV and music (the latter in a limited way, for now). Scott FinkSonos product manager who worked on the new Beam says the power of the new CPU has enabled the company to increase speaker arrays. The new Beam has five arrays, compared to the previous model’s three, and Fink said the addition is dedicated to surround sound.
The Beam supports the same home theater audio formats as the Arc (including Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus, Multichannel PCM, and more), which costs twice as much as the Beam soundbar. In addition to the increased processing power, the new Beam has HDMI eARC to facilitate these new formats. Sonos says the speaker should have better dialogue clarity thanks to the additional audio processing power.
The soundbar will soon support formats Ultra HD e Dolby Atmos di Amazon Music. It is currently unknown whether this technology will also be ported to other music services, such as Apple Music.
As with other Sonos products, the Beam connects to the company’s other speakers for multi-room playback; you can also use other Sonos speakers as surround sound. You can tune the speaker in your room to enhance the sound using Trueplay, assuming you have an iOS device. Beam also has far-field microphones so it can receive voice commands via Alexa o Google Assistant. The new soundbar is equipped with NFC to make configuration even easier. Obviously there is no shortage then Apple AirPlay 2 e i touch controls to adjust playback.
As anticipated, the second generation Sonos Bem (Gen 2) is already available for pre-order on the official Sonos website a 499 euro – in white or black color – with availability from October 5, 2021.