Sonos Arc: Great sound meets elegant design

If you talk to seasoned audiophiles on the qualities of a good sound system, their common refrain is that bigger always does not mean better. Many consumers assume the larger a stereo is, the more impressive it will sound. That’s not true. Size rarely co-relates with the quality. Also, the source of the audio plays a part in how it will sound over your new music system.

For the past fortnight, this reviewer has been diligently checking out the Sonos Arc, a brilliant-sounding and easy-to-use soundbar that comes with a hefty price tag of Rs 99,999 and is intended for TV shows, movies, music, gaming, and more. A great piece of technology where extraordinary sound meets elegant design—that’s Arc for you, made available by Luxury Personified that is the official distributor for Sonos in India. Arc features 11 high-performance drivers for crisp highs, dynamic mid-ranges, and surprising bass. Its slim profile can be discreetly mounted or placed on furniture. Its audio sounds great at a medium level, it is nice and crisp and more detailed, and also loud enough to be heard across the entire house as experienced by the reviewer who has evaluated numerous sound systems from various brands in recent years and was simply bowled over by the overall performance of Sonos Arc.

You can experience TV shows, movies, and games with the precise and immersive sound of Dolby Atmos. For the uninitiated, Dolby Atmos is an object-based format for surround sound that designates different sounds to specific places in the room rather than channels, creating a more realistic experience by dynamically incorporating height, surround and front channels. Herein, Arc supports increased bandwidth for the higher quality audio of Dolby Atmos. It also includes upwards-firing speaker drivers that act as height channels, reflecting sound off your ceiling for additional dimension. Arc’s advanced processing creates five phased-array channels that deliver sound to your ears from all directions at the exact right moment. Its enhanced Trueplay tuning technology optimises the sound for the unique acoustics of the room, even calibrating the height channels for precise localisation.

The setup is simple and straight forward, it takes a few minutes and the control is simple with the Sonos app that you need to download on your mobile device. Arc requires TV that supports Atmos and Atmos-encoded content. The soundbar streams audio over your Wi-Fi network and does not support Bluetooth. Its LED indicates the speaker and microphone status and adjusts based on the ambient light of the room to be visible but not distracting. Capacitive touch controls lets you tap to play, pause, adjust the volume, and mute the microphones. Swipe right to skip ahead or left to revisit a track.

Moving further, you can connect Arc to your TV’s ARC/eARC port using the included HDMI cable or your own. If your TV does not have HDMI, Arc comes with the Sonos Optical Audio Adapter. At my end, I connected Arc with my Sony TV and customised the system to play some music from Spotify, YouTube Music, etc. I played John Denver, English and Hindi romance hits from 90s and was overjoyed by the audio output. You get to enjoy clear, richly detailed sound that fills the room at any volume. Plus, it produces the sound of each instrument used in the song perfectly. There is 3D sound for TV viewing (you get crystal-clear dialogue) or listening to music—basically it brings all your entertainment to life with its realistic sound.

Technical-speak, Arc’s upward-firing drivers create a multi-dimensional soundstage that then moves around you, rendering every whisper and explosion with dramatic clarity, detail, and depth. There are 11 Class-D digital amplifiers perfectly tuned to Arc’s acoustic architecture, eight elliptical woofers ensure faithful playback of mid-range and vocal frequencies in addition to rich bass, three precisely angled silk-dome tweeters create crisp high frequencies and crystal-clear dialogue. Arc’s Trueplay software dynamically tunes the speaker to the unique acoustics of the room. There are adjustable EQ settings in the app, including bass, treble, and loudness. Its Night Sound feature reduces the intensity of loud sound effects.

Key takeaways: Sonos Arc is a fantastic piece of audio equipment, distinctly small in its physical form but vastly superior in performance, outsmarting even much larger music systems by a huge margin. Truly impressive in terms of appearance and technology, and hence highly recommended.

SPECIFICATIONS

Dimensions: 87 x 1141.7 x 115.7 mm (H x W x D)
Processor: Quad Core 1.4 GHz A-53
Memory: 1GB SDRAM, 4GB NV
Power supply: Auto-switching 100-240 V, 50-60 Hz AC universal input
Ethernet port: One 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port
Connectivity: Connects to your home Wi-Fi network with any 802.11b/g, 2.4 GHz broadcast-capable router
Weight: 6.25kg
Estimated street price: Rs 99,999