Sonos Arc Soundbar Review – The Sonically Sensuous 45-inch Super Soundbar Supreme

Sonos has created some impressive speakers over the years in their quest to be one of the best purveyors of wireless kit in the market. We’ve had the pleasure of experiencing some of their best gear including the original PlayBar in 2013, the unique Playbase in 2017 and the more mainstream Beam in 2019. 

For 2020, they’ve decided to literally raise the bar with their new premium Sonos Arc soundbar that aims to pack in a premium wireless experience for music, movies and gaming alike beefed up with Dolby Atmos support while keeping to their original goals of seamless, slick wireless connectivity.

Sonos Arc Build, Design and Setup

Intended as the culmination of their latest streaming and audio tech with lessons incorporated from the early Playbar and Playbase, the Sonos Arc sports a pearl white tubular case that’s as wide as the latest Smart TVs at 45-inches while remaining sufficiently compact enough at 3.4-inches high and 4.5-inches deep to perch underneath one without issue. 

The Sonos Arc can alternatively be acquired in a matte black paint job to match your home decor and can be mounted on a wall if you’re short on space though the mounting brackets are sold separately.

The speaker comes in a surprisingly long box with a carry handle and a detachable top held in place by two sliding locks. Remove the locks, pop the top and you gain access to the Arc itself that’s wrapped in a length of white cloth. Just beneath it in a box, you get a UK-style 3-pin cable to power it, a HDMI to HDMI cable and a digital optical to HDMI adaptor.

Once you’ve gotten it out of the casing and protective cloth wrapping, the Sonos Arc in white makes for a classy looking addition to a living room. Fortunately, it’s still relatively man portable at 6kg or so and can still be hauled around by a single man.

Up close, the Arc adopts a more rounded, curvier design over its predecessors. Where the original Playbar was more of a rectangular rounded block, the Arc is almost like a flattened, rounded metal tube of sorts with a similarly high level of craftsmanship.

Much like its predecessors, almost the entirety of the chassis has hundreds of tiny drilled holes across its length and sides in order to offer better acoustics for the plethora of speakers crammed into it.

The play/pause as well as the volume control buttons are emplaced on the top side of the Arc above a set of LED indicator lights with a modest Sonos badge just below it facing front. On the right side of the soundbar is a discreet virtual assistant button that turns the mike on or off if you don’t particularly want Google Assistant or Alexa to pipe in on a conversation. 

The underside sports a series of rubber feet to keep it from skidding or sliding around while a recessed bay, just behind and beneath the main controls topside contains a jack to keep it powered, a HDMI port, an Ethernet port and a power button. The Ethernet net port is really only necessary if your WiFi connection is horrific. For the most part, you’ll be relying on the Arc’s WiFi 802.11b.g connectivity.

Sonos Arc Specifications

The Sonos Arc packs impressive sonic firepower. Under the hood of the Sonos Arc are a whopping 11 Class-D drivers. Of the total, 8 of the drivers power elliptical woofers with two of them pointed upwards and one each to the sides while the remaining three power silk-domed tweeters with one pointing towards the left, right and center-forwards for all-around coverage.

That’s a staggeringly impressive amount of sound to light up a room especially when compared to its predecessors. All these speakers aren’t there just to increase the volume and driver count – the plethora of top firing and side firing drivers all there to create a three-dimensional sound stage. On its own, the Sonos Arc is technically capable of creating a 5.0.2 setup though you can optionally add in the Sonos Sub and a set of Sonos One SL speakers to create a true 7.1 surround sound experience.

Price	RM4,499
Speakers	11 Class-D amplifiers (8 elliptical woofers, 3 silk-dome tweeters)
Connectivity	HDMI ARC port, optical audio, Ethernet port, 802.11b/g 2.4GHz WiFi
Size/Weight	87 x 1141.7 x 115.7mm / 6.25kg

In keeping with the Sonos emphasis on minimalism, there’s a dearth of controls on the Arc and it doesn’t ship with a remote control. Controlling the Arc is via a downloadable S2 app on your phone which is also used for setting it up. If you’re a traditionalist, you can also control it via your connected TV’s remote control using the Audio Return Channel (ARC). 

Audio is received via your HDMI ARC port and the Sonos Arc also integrates baked-in support for Apple Airplay 2, Spotify Connect, YouTube Music and a host of other podcast and music applications.The speakers also have virtual assistant support for Alexa and Google Assistant too to play tunes via voice command or answer basic inquiries though  bothAlexa and Google Assistant aren’t officially supported here without significant jury-rigging.

As part of a new generation of wireless speakers, the Sonos Arc works best with TVs of recent vintage with the appropriately encoded Dolby Atmos content which isn’t particularly common as yet. On the bright side, you’re future-proofed for the wave of Dolby Atmos content that’ll be eventually making its way to us later on in the future.

Sonos Arc soundbar setup and performance

Like its predecessors, setting it up is a doddle albeit with some prerequisites. Seeing the dearth of connections, most of the setup is done wirelessly. Once you’ve plonked this beast down and plugged it in, you’ll need to download Sonos’s free Sonos S2 app for iOS and Android that helps you establish a wireless room speaker network. 

If you have additional Sonos speakers lying around in other rooms in your house, you can establish separate speaker networks unique to each room, each with differently tuned acoustics. Unfortunately, the Sonos system doesn’t work with non-Sonos gear so you can’t add third party speakers to the setup. Still, it’s by far the easiest setup process we’ve seen and that counts for a lot.

After the obligatory sign-up rigmarole, you can then hook it up to a TV. Once all that’s sorted out, you can then finetune the acoustics via Sonos’s Trueplay Tuning app which scans the room you’re in via your iPhone and via a spot of echolocation magic, help to create a soundmap to finetune its sound for better performance.

Unfortunately, the TruePlay Tuning function is only available on an iPhone. This sore point still hasn’t been resolved even since the days of the Playbar. We’ve spoken to Sonos on this and it’s alas an understandable issue on account of the fact that there are dozens if not hundreds of Android phones out there. Tweaking the app as well as accommodating for updates for all of them would be a challenge.

 If you have a mate with an iPhone, now is a good time to borrow it. It’s well worth the trouble to do so but you’ll need to do it all over again if your home setup or the furniture placement changes. Still, it’s way better than fiddling for hours yourself or having to get someone in to tune it for you.

Once all that is sorted out, you can hook it up to your TV’s HDMI ARC port via your bundled HDMI cable or if it’s of older vintage, via the optional optical to HDMI adaptor. Almost everything you want to play passes through your TV and to the Arc or via the Sonos S2 app as the speakers don’t support Bluetooth streaming from devices so you can’t, for example, pair it up and play music or audio straight off your smartphone.

Instead, you’ll have to go through the Sonos S2 app to access your phone’s offline music library or Spotify account. If you’re on a TV, you’ll play audio via the HDMI ARC passthrough for anything hooked up to the TV like your console.

Fortunately, all this takes less than 15 minutes with everything on hand and after setting it up at a friend’s living room with an appropriately sized TV of recent vintage, we got down to work and to say we’re floored is an understatement of epic proportions.

We started it up nice and slow with some tunes from our standard tracklist and the Sonos Arc came out swinging. Our usual go-to tracks were handled in an amazing fashion. Joanna Wang’s simple yet intricate ‘Vincent’ sounded exquisite with sound staging akin to an intimate personal concert with her singing right in front of us.

We also took the track ‘Far from Any Road by the Handsome Family up for a whirl and the grittiness of the lyrics immediately evoked images of dusty vistas, fedoras, swirls of cigarette smoke and femme fatales with its clear vocals and distinctly frenetic guitar strumming. 

We also took it for a whirl in the Mad Max: Fury Road Blu-ray, a cinematic and acoustic masterpiece of sound staging where it really knocked our socks off. For a single soundbar the Arc’s ensemble of speakers with its ability to bounce noise up on the ceiling and around the sides is capable of displaying an impressively vivid sound stage with distinct left-right separation and clear dialogue too. If you’re a movie buff, this adds a new visceral level of immersion in your movies.

Even without the suggested Sonos Sub add-on for added bass, the Arc itself was more than capable of kicking out sufficiently rumbly bass to terrify the neighbours. We played it at most at 65% volume and it was still loud enough to fill the house with clear audio without any hint of distortion or tearing. Any louder and we’d risk getting a noise complaint from the neighbours.

There’s also a unique series of modes ideal for specific circumstances like Night Mode which dials down really loud percussive noises like explosions and gunfire so you don’t wake the neighbours and the rest of the house as well as a Voice Enhancement mode that helps to increase dialogue volume. 

Sonos Arc Verdict

If you’re looking for a simple to deploy and powerful single wireless soundbar solution with excellent sound staging and quality including Dolby Atmos support, the Sonos Arc is a clear winner. It’s certainly not cheap and there are still a few quibbles, in particular its Trueplay Tuning being exclusive to iPhones, but these are minor annoyances at best, and you’re ultimately getting one of the best wireless soundbars that money can buy.

What we liked Rich and detailed sound, excellent sound stage, beautiful design, easy setup and deployment, easy expansion with other Sonos speakers, Dolby Atmos support
What we didn’t No Android phone support for Trueplay Tuning, not cheap
We Say The Sonos Arc sets a sensationally high bar with outstanding sound quality for music and movies alike, offering fantastic sound staging, clear and rich vocals as well as Dolby Atmos support. Setting it up is as easy as it gets with the option of adding other Sonos speakers to your home theatre network though it works just fine on its own. This is not cheap by any means but the Sonos Arc is currently one of the best soundbars that money can buy.

Review unit courtesy of Tat Chuan Acoustic. Available for purchase on their website at https://trysonos.my/  . To experience the Sonos Arc yourself, swing by the Harvey Norman outlets at the Ikano Power Centre, Midvalley megamall and Pavilion from 28th August onwards.