New Sonos Arc Soundbar with Dolby Atmos is now available in the market. I am super excited to write this article because one of my favorite audio manufacturers has just released and announced their newest soundbar. Sonos has been one of my favorite manufacturers for quite a while.

The new Sonos Arc Soundbar is priced at $800 and features 11 Class D Amplifiers, 8 Subwoofers, and 3 Tweeters. It delivers an awesome sound quality with wireless connectivity.

Sonos play bar changed the soundbar market because it was a little more expensive than most of the other stuff out there. It just blew everything out of the water; the sound quality was just amazing.

Sonos play bar is about seven years old now so they initially released it on February 12, 2013, so well over seven years now, so it’s time for a change now.

Back in 2018, they released the Sonos Beam, but that wasn’t a
replacement for the play bar because on the beam was $400 compared to the $700 that the play bar was, and then also the

Sonos Beam is a lot more compact. It was not meant to be a full form soundbar; it was meant to be a much more sleek and compact design.

New Sonos Arc Soundbar with Dolby Atmos

So the major difference between Sonos Arc and Sonos play bar is that Sonos art has Dolby Atmos. Sonos finally jump in and make a product that has Dolby Atmos compatible is just cool and awesome, so of course, with Dolby Atmos, we have upward-firing speakers.

Latest Design

So when you look at the design, it has 11 total drivers in it, two or three of which are firing upwards, you have some on the sides, that are firing outwards, that are trying to get the sound to the side of your ear.

So it sounds like it’s a surround sound environment or emulating surround sound environment, now with all of these drivers, there’ are 8 subwoofers, 3 tweeters, and of course, 11 Class D digital amplifiers. Tweeters enhance the sound quality and this soundbar features powerful sound.

Price

Sonos amplifiers are high-quality; this is probably one of the main reasons why that their soundbars are just so expensive it’s because they use high-quality amplifiers and the use of high-quality speaker drivers. It is coming in at $799, so that’s $100 more than both the play bar and play bass when they were released.

So $800 total, which is expensive for a soundbar but knowing Sonos this thing is going to be amazing.

Specifications of Sonos Arc Soundbar

A very new design way different than anything else that they have, it’s a 270 degree curved in front of it. So if you look at the grills, it’s curved completely maybe that’s where they get the name art.

Let’s dive a little more into the specs, so it’s 3.4 inches high, 4.5 inches deep and 45 inches wide. It has a far-field microphone array, so basically, we can use both Google Assistant and Amazon with this soundbar.

Auto Adjustment of Settings

So just like the Sonos Beam, Sonos Arc is going to have these two digital assistants. It’s available it includes their trademark True place software, for this, you have to download their app on the phone, and then the soundbar is going to play audio the app is going to listen to that audio.

It will start tuning the soundbar for your room and the acoustics of your room. It’s just really awesome because this will completely change the sound experience for someone who doesn’t know how to tune a soundbar properly.

You know EQ settings can be complicated for people, and all this to just be handled with a single app on your phone. It will make life so much simpler, and it will make the product
perform way better. It is available in both black and white matte finishes.

Of course, their status LEDs on the front that show the status for both the microphone and the speakers, now what’s cool about this is it adjusts depending on the ambient light in the room. So the brighter the room is, the bright light is going to be, as it gets darker, that light will also dim itself.

So it’s not overpowering or distracting while you are watching TV or movies. The front buttons are touch-controlled, so they are not physical clicky buttons, but they are capacitive touch-controlled, which is a pretty cool nice little feature there. It weighs in at a total of 13.78 pounds, and that’s pretty heavy for a soundbar. So you know they are using some high-quality parts for the soundbar.

Wall Mount

Now out of the box, it can be set on the entertainment center, if you want a wall mount it you, of course, have to purchase their $79 compatible wall mount, but I’m sure if you wait a few months or a little while after it comes out, there’ll be other third parties that make their own mounts that are going to be very fairly priced.

Now, what’s cool about this little soundbar mount though, is that there are some magnetic detectors in the back of the soundbar. So essentially, when it knows it’s on this wall mount, it’s going to adjust the audio, so that the bass is not compromised. So if it’s on the wall and the bass is pretty harsh, it’s going to rumble that wall and vibrate the wall a little bit.

So when it gets on this, it’s going to change the audio frequencies so that it won’t cause a wall to shake and one annoy your neighbors and won’t annoy anyone that’s upstairs in a different room. You should carefully select between single and dual voice coil subwoofers.

Equipped with HDMI E Arc

Let’s go over the various ports on this soundbar. Of course, it has a power input, but what’s probably the most exciting is that it has HDMI E Arc. Now, the difference between E Arc and Arc is that E arc can support a lot more surround sound formats than what Arc can. Arc typically only supports 5.1 channels of audio, but E Arc can support that and much more, and that’s why they need E arc for Dolby Atmos to work.

Dolby Atmos

If you want to use Dolby Atmos features on that, you have to use HDMI inputs because if you are plugging everything into the TV, it’s using HDMI Arc to get that audio back to the soundbar.

It can only send 5.1 channels of audio; it is not able to send seven channels plus the upper two channels or the two upward-firing channels. That is what allows the Dolby Atmos to work, so E Arc is necessary for this, to Dolby Atmos to work correctly.

You don’t want to have to plug everything into the soundbar because that’s very annoying, especially when you’re trying to clean up the cables and all. E Arc, a very nice feature, so thank you, Sonos.

Of course, as a digital optical port and Sonos typically includes Ethernet ports on their units as well, so it has one of those, and it uses 2.4 gigahertz Wi-Fi connection, if you want to wirelessly connected thought it. If your home theater does not support this feature then your soundbar will not work with Netflix.

Wireless Connection

It uses Apple AirPlay 2, so if you want to wirelessly send audio from your iPhone, iPad, or Mac, that’s easily doable with Apple AirPlay. It has an IR receiver on the front of it as well if you want to use a regular remote control that comes with it they say it has a quad-core processor running at 1.4 gigahertz and a 1 gigabyte of RAM.

Compatibility

Now just like all their other soundbars, you know the play bass, play bar, and beam, this one the Sonos Arc is going to integrate with all of your other Sonos products. If you have the sub play 1, play 3, 1 SL, play 5, all of the above, it’s going to integrate and work with those perfectly fine, so don’t worry about that.

Generation 3 Sono Sub

Along with this, they are releasing a new generation 3 Sono sub. So main difference is that it’s just upgraded electronics it’s the same design; you have the force canceling drivers, faster processor, and more memory, etc.

The Sono Sub comes in at $6.99 retail, so pretty expensive for a subwoofer, but you know it’s going to sound great. Now, if you want to put all this together and do a full surround sound system, so you go the Sonos arc, the Sono sub, and two 1 SLS.

Now the 1 SL does not have the microphone built into them, so you use those as wireless speakers that is going to cost you $1856, which is that’s a pretty expensive sound system. You can only imagine what that sounds like because it sounds absolutely incredible.