Gadgetory

this is the Sonos beam it's a brand new sound bar and it's also a brand new smart speaker it's going to cost $399 and it's going to be available on July 17th so we came to sew noses headquarters in Santa Barbara to find out what this thing is all about because it does a lot of stuff with just one input so the Sonos beam sound bar exists it's relatively small it's smaller than the play bar or the play base it's also an intelligent speaker which means that this isn't just up against other random sound bars it's also up against other smart speakers like an echo like the home pod and like the Google home Mac's there are four full range woofers bang bang bang and bang and there's a center tweeter and then there's three passive radiators for more sound to come out of there and out of all of those speakers they create a array of three channels the center left and right but what's really interesting to me is that the inputs on this are not what you'd expect there's power of course there's a sync button for you know getting everything working together there's an Ethernet port because Sonos always puts an Ethernet port on stuff and then the only singular input on this is HDMI the way the sauce wants us to work is you plug HDMI in here you plug HDMI into your TV and then the standard called HDMI Arc tells the TV hey you've got a sound bar Naro and all sound gets routed to it so if you don't want to give up an HDMI port you can also use optical audio out this thing is going to ship with an adapter that allows you to use your optical out on your TV to the HDMI input on this thing obviously we listen to the Sonos beam in this controlled environment in so Knossos office where we are right now and so I don't want to give you a full review of how I think it sounds but I do have a few thoughts after listening to it today the first is that Sonos isn't like crazy opinionated about how your music should sound it's trying to be accurate and it's trying to be very clear so there's bass about as much as you would expect from something this size maybe even a little bit more but not so much that it's muddy and it blows things out they have incredibly good stereo separation so unlike the home pod they're not trying to do magical things with auto-tuning and blah blah blah through all the channels they're just trying to get to the sound right left right center we can sculpt the sound and maximize the performance of the amplifier of the transducers and basically sculpt the entire sound profile with software and in the case of this project we really wanted to have that lean back experience in the living room and be able to control your TV your music and with voice all the standard Amazon Alexa stuff works the same way as it does on other Alexa products or on other Sonos products but because this is a sound bar and it's connected to my TV I can do lots of interesting things with that too specifically if you have an Amazon fire TV you can do stuff like Alexa play stranger things and what it does is it turns my television on and it's just ready to start stranger things now it didn't actually start playing it because the fire TV LexA integration is not super great yet but if I want to change the volume I can go Alexa volume up and it's a little bit louder now Alexa pause fire TV and it pause the fire TV again it takes another second or two than you want it to but it still works really well it also works with your TV remote control so if I turn the volume up or down here it will turn the volume up or down on the Sonos not on the television and the reason that works is that the thing I talked about earlier it's HDMI and it's specifically HDMI arc and the TV recognizes that there's a sound bar attached and that it should be able to adjust that sound bars volume instead of the TV's volume the other last super interesting thing you get by connecting over HDMI instead of just a standard optical audio cable is that the sound bar is able to turn the TV off which is it's like the holy grail of smart assistants nothing seems to work to turn TV offs with hdmi cec but this thing doesn't Alexa turn off the TV and the heavens open it's amazing for Sonos it's really important that they be this Switzerland of sound I guess I don't know if that's my phrase not theirs but they want to work with everybody at the same time and they don't anybody any preferences that said this thing works with Alexa now and it probably is gonna work best with Alexa at least for the time being because they've had time to customize Alexa software why is it so important to Sonos to work with Alexa and then maybe later the Google assistant or definitely later and the you know maybe some other stuff will come along why do you want to be so agnostic across all of these different voices systems that are just partnering with Amazon and calling it a day so home sound system for us means shares we believe many different people would want to use it and you don't want to dominate what the right control paradigm for people is nor the right assistants we already been here before with folks so you know the yeah sharing your home sound system maybe one person has an Android phone the other one has an iOS phone we never said okay you know we're only going to support iOS and the whole household please go iOS or we only gonna support absent Android the whole house I've got Android we just don't believe that it's very consumer friendly here's the weird thing about so Knossos position in the past it got to create this beautiful garden of perfect music experiences they had a remote they have their own router that had all their own stuff but now they can't do that anymore they have to exist in these other super complicated ecosystems they're connected up to your TV which has an insane tangle of wires behind it and if something fails there they're gonna be part of that and you might blame Sonos even if it's not their fault and that especially applies to digital assistants if Alexa or eventually Google assistant doesn't work it's gonna be your so no speaker that you feel like doesn't work and that could be a problem for them sometimes you don't want to talk sometimes you want to talk she don't want to go through the on screen display and get T yeah right so there's these things where you go like okay where does it make sense to use voice where do we actually want to tone it down a little bit a lot of the early integrations have been focused on making the utterances a simple and intuitive as possible so rather saying Alexa tell so knows to play the Beatles from Spotify in the living room we wanted it to be Alexa diabeetus sono sees a really huge opportunity in the living room they've got the play bar but it's super expensive and so this thing it only four hundred bucks is way more accessible and if you're so knows you want lots of people buying their very first sono speaker because they know in fact they told me today that as many as thirty eight percent of their customers once they have one so no speaker buy another one but that is a lot of upsell and having an accessible home speaker in the living room is a good way to get those people into the ecosystem if Sonos can convince enough people to upgrade to this thing they could radically expand their customer base and that makes this a lot more ambitious than it appears at first glance and if you're Sonos expanding your customer base that sounds pretty good thank you for watching this Sonos video if you liked it subscribe [Laughter]