Sonos Arc review: all-in-one Dolby Atmos soundbar for movies, music, and games
The ultimate home theater soundbar
🏆 Review score: 5 out of 5
🏅Editor’s Choice
Pros:
✅ 🔊 All-in-one soundbar for Dolby Atmos surround sound
✅ 😌 Immersive Dolby Atmos surround lets you skip getting surrounds
✅ 🫨 Strong bass removes the need for a subwoofer
✅ ⚡ Impreccetable lag
✅ 🧰 Simple initial setup
✅➕ Easily expandable with Sonos wireless surrounds and sub
✅ 🎧 Unique wireless connection with Sonos Ace wireless headphones
✅ 🛜 Stream Bluetooth and line-in audio from other Sonos speakers
Cons
❌ 📏 It’s freaking thicc
❌ 🤑 Pricey
❌ 🚫 Lacks built-in Bluetooth for easy streaming
❌ 🤖 Android users lose out on TruePlay
❌ 🔌 No passthrough HDMI 2.1 port
Shortcut Review
The Sonos Arc is truly an all-in-one soundbar that can give you a Dolby Atmos surround system for music, movies, and games. It’s a fully featured 5.0.2 channel unit with a huge center speaker for dialogue, front- and rear-oriented side speakers, plus two up-firing speakers that bounce off your ceiling for another dimension of audio. The $899 price ($829 lowest price) of this soundbar might bring you back to Earth, but believe me, the audio quality of this soundbar can’t be beat.
The Sonos Arc breathes new life into movies and music. I can actually hear what movie characters are saying (what a concept, I know!) thanks to this soundbar’s large center channel while packing enough bass that you can skip getting a subwoofer. The surround sound quality is immersive, putting you at the center of your own personal theater or recording studio, so you don’t need satellite speakers. The tonal balance and clarity of this soundbar have even revealed elements of songs I never could hear before.
There isn’t a smarter soundbar on the market. Setting up and adding more speakers to the Sonos Ace couldn’t be simpler. It’s also the only soundbar that lets you push audio to a pair of wireless headphones, the Sonos Ace, to privately enjoy Dolby Atmos surround sound without waking your housemates. The Trueplay tuning makes adjusting the EQ and sound field to match the acoustic of your living space dead simple.
Full Review
🔊 All-in-one Dolby Atmos soundbar. The Sonos Arc technically creates a 5.0.2 channel sound on its own, effectively giving you a surround sound system consisting of a front left, right, and center with a rear left and right, plus two up-firing speakers that bounce audio off the ceiling for Dolby Atmos. This is all thanks to the Arc’s 11 Class D digital amplifiers and custom drivers. There are three silk-domed tweeters pointing forward, while another two fire diagonally to produce the rear side channels. Lastly there are eight elliptical woofers to add bass without the need for a separate subwoofer.
📢 Full-on spatial sound. All of those drivers translate to an expansive soundstage that’s exceptionally good for left and right movements like the plane flybys and kaiju roars in Godzilla Zero. The Sonos Arc also creates a notable, though not incredibly impressive, sense of height. While watching the race scene in Ready Player One, I could hear King Kong rampaging above me, but I could tell the impact of him tearing through buildings was only coming from in front of me.
Adding a pair of Sonos Era 300 speakers as rear surrounds added much more directionality to the sound field above me. The only other speaker system to give me as much, if not more, immersion has been the $2,499 Sony Bravia Quad. That’s a three times more expensive sound system, but its four textbook-sized units give you the equivalent of 16 wireless speakers.
🗣️ Clear dialogue. Whisper, quiet dialogue is one of the biggest problems with modern cinema, but Sonos Arc thankfully elevates voices to a more than audible level. The Sonos Arc, first and foremost, is a massive center speaker with three angled silk-dome tweeters pointing forward at slight angles. The Sonos Arc makes voices so clear you can even clearly tell what the background characters are saying in the intro of Casino. Voices also sound like they have more gravitas, and you can literally feel the power of character’s voices, like in the back and forth between the two replicants at the start of Blade Runner 2049.
🫨 Pump up the bass. While Sonos says the Arc doesn’t have a subwoofer, I’m always surprised by how much bass it can produce on its own. You can feel the boom from every movie explosion and thump in an R&B song. The lower frequencies don’t feel overwhelming either, they’re well-controlled, and I’ve never heard any of the wobble that too much bass can induce. You can really get away without getting a Sonos Sub Gen 3, Sub Gen 4, or Sub Mini unless you need that cinematic rumble only large drivers can deliver.
🎵 Immersive clarity for music. The Sonos Ace also has superb audio clarity. My girlfriend was surprised to hear new ethereal elements of Coldplay’s ∞ even after listening to it dozens of times. Voices and lead instrument clarity is fantastic, largely thanks to the Sonos Ace’s tonal balance making it a better music player than most soundbars. The default EQ mix also offers a warm and brilliant dynamic range and incredibly detailed sound.
🎛️ Trueplay room correction. Another thing that makes the Sonos Arc sound so good is Trueplay, which allows the soundbar to hear back how it sounds and automatically tune its sound field to the layout of your room. The Trueplay setup only takes a few minutes, but it requires an iOS device (sorry, Android users). When activated, the Sonos app will analyze multiple audio pings from the Sonos Arc to adjust the soundbar’s EQ and sound field to best suit your listening environment.
📦 Better when you buy more. The Sonos Arc only sounds better with a subwoofer and a few surround speakers. Adding the Sonos Sub Mini gives the Arc bass you can actually feel in the room with action scenes and bass-heavy music. I also tested the Arc with a pair of Sonos Era 300s that add even more directional sound, especially for added height. It’s a truly immersive experience, especially for chaotic scenes like when the machine gun trap goes off in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2; gunfire reverberated all around me like I was in the movie myself.
🎧 Sonos Ace wireless headphones. The Sonos Ace is also unique as the only soundbar that connects to the Sonos Ace wireless headphones. I can use TV Audio Swap on the iOS and Android Sonos app to wireless stream any TV audio to my headphones. It’s fantastic for whenever I want to watch a movie or play games and still enjoy all the same Dolby Atmos spatial audio from my full Sonos surround system.
🛜 No Bluetooth by default. The Sonos Arc disappointingly doesn’t support Bluetooth or line-in on its own – but it’s easy to add both features if you have other Sonos speakers. You can play audio over Bluetooth through a separate Sonos smart speaker like the Sonos Era 100 (or the Era 300) or even the portable Sonos Roam 2 by sharing audio through the Arc setup. The tricky thing is any Era 100 or Era 300 speakers setup as a surround for the Arc lose their Bluetooth connection.
Everything is the same for pushing line-in to the Arc through any of the speakers I listed above. Sharing line-in audio works for any speaker in your Sonos system, not just the Arc. Plus, you can play sound from another source on the Sonos speaker you’re using as a line-in transmitter.
🧰 Easy setup. Thankfully the initial setup of the Sonos Arc is much more straightforward than everything above. There are only two cables for power and connecting to a TV through eArc, plus an optional ethernet cable if you don’t care for Wi-Fi. After that, you simply have to go through a few prompts on the iOS and Android Sonos app, and you’re all set to play music, games, movies, and TV shows.
🧠 Big smarts. Beyond Sonos’ own proprietary multi-speaker networks, the Arc supports plenty of Apple devices with AirPlay 2. It also has three voice assistants, including Sonos’s own, Amazon Alexa, and Google Assistant, to control your speaker hands-free.
📏 The thicc-est. For all of the Sonos Arc acoustic excellence, you’d be right to expect it to be massive. This is a thicc soundbar measuring 3.4 inches tall, and it’s about as wide as a 55-inch TV. It’s not so tall that it blocks the bottom part of my TVs (a Sony Bravia 7 and Samsung S95C), but it is a little distracting to have such a large soundbar on my TV stand. Other brands like Samsung and Sennheiser have developed slimmer soundbars that sound on par or just below the Sonos Arc. The new Sonos Arc Ultra is another slimmer soundbar that also promises double the bass and better Dolby Atmos audio too.
Should you buy the Sonos Arc?
Yes, if…
✅ 🔊 You want an all-in-one soundbar for Dolby Atmos surround sound
✅ 📢 You already own other Sonos speakers or the Sonos Ace wireless headphones
✅ 👂 You want to hear what TV and movie characters are saying without subtitles
✅ 🫨 You want to feel the bass from movies and music
No, if…
❌ 🤖 You only have an Android device that can’t access Trueplay Tuning (get the Sonos Arc Ultra)
❌ 🤏 You want a slimmer soundbar (get the Sennheiser Ambeo Plus)
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.