When we think about Atmos sound mixes the first thing that comes to mind is the added verticality. We still find spatial audio and music very hit-and-miss. Later this year Sonos will unlock support for Amazon Music Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos Music, though how significant the latter addition is remains to be seen. You can access music services like Apple Music through the app, while Apple AirPlay 2, TuneIn and Spotify Connect are also supported. Alexa and Google Assistant are both supported, with the far-field microphones doing a really impressive job of picking up your voice commands, even when the soundbar is making a fair old racket. Naturally, the onboard Wi-Fi connectivity means you can wirelessly connect the Beam Gen 2 to any other Sonos speakers or Subs you might own, making a physical surround sound setup possible.Īnd once again the Beam excels as a standalone smart speaker too. The app is also where you’ll find Sonos’ Trueplay functionality, which asks you to spend a few minutes patrolling the room and politely waving your phone about so it can calibrate the soundbar and optimise its output accordingly.
Once connected to your TV’s ARC or eARC port you’ll be able to control it using your regular TV remote, but because it’s a Sonos product, you’ll also need the Sonos S2 app (indeed it is required for setup), which tells you the current sound format being received and allows you to toggle features like Speech Enhancement and Night Sound. Sonos throws in an HDMI-to-optical adapter but this won’t solve any Atmos-less woes.īeyond the above, the Sonos Beam Gen 2 offers the same excellent feature set as its predecessor. Put simply, if you have an older TV that doesn’t support eARC and therefore doesn’t support Dolby Atmos decoding, then you won’t be watching anything with Dolby Atmos audio. Atmos is the headline-grabber, but you should know going in that because there’s no HDMI passthrough you’ll absolutely need your TV to do some of the work. It’s all part of the Beam and its successor’s simplicity-first ethos, which is nice and all that, but another HDMI port really would have been appreciated this time around.Īs we mentioned, the Sonos Beam Gen 2’s single eARC HDMI 2.1 port means it now has the bandwidth to support higher quality audio streams such as Dolby Atmos, in addition to content badged as Stereo PCM, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, Multichannel PCM and Dolby Multichannel PCM. The soundbar will require one of the presumably precious HDMI ports on your TV and you can’t plug anything else into it to save space. That means that like the Beam before it there’s no HDMI passthrough on offer here.
There’s a power port, a single HDMI port, which has been upgraded to eARC to ready it for that Atmos goodness (more on that shortly), and an ethernet port. We’re not sure we prefer it, though.įlip the soundbar around and once again you’ll see a very minimal arrangement of inputs. The original Beam’s fabric grille has been swapped for a polycarbonate grille that lends it a more Sonos Arc-y aesthetic and will probably be less prone to wear and tear over time.
Look a bit closer though, and you will spot some subtle differences. And like the Beam Gen 1, you can choose between white and black models. The dimensions (25.6in x 2.7in x 3.9in) remain the same, as does the weight, and it has the same touch-sensitive playback controls on the top.