Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Sonos’ new soundbar is taking on the HomePod with Alexa”.
This is a Sonos Beam., It’s a brand new soundbar and it’s also a brand new smart speaker.. It’S gon na cost $ 399 and it’s gon na be available on July 17th.. So we came to Sonos’ 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, soundbar exists., It’s relatively small., It’s smaller, the Playbar or the Playbase.. It’S also an intelligent speaker, which means that this isn’t just up against other random soundbars.
It’S also up against other smart speakers, like an Echo like the HomePod and like the Google Home Max.. 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: a center, a left and a 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 that Sonos wants this to work. Is you plug HDMI in here you plug HDMI into your TV, and then this standard called HDMI ARC? Tells the TV hey, you’ve got a soundbar now 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 gon na ship with an adapter that allows you to use your optical out on your TV to the HDMI input on this thing.. Obviously, we listened to the Sonos Beam in this controlled environment in Sonos’ 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’d 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 HomePod 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 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 product we really wanted to have that lean back experience in the living room and be able to control your TV, your music 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 soundbar 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.
[, Alexa ], Getting Stranger Things from Fire TV. 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-Alexa integration is not super great yet.. But if I wan na change the volume I can go, Alexa volume up. And it’s a little bit louder. Now. Alexa pause Fire TV. And it paused 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 thing I talked about earlier., It’s HDMI and it’s specifically HDMI ARC. And the TV recognizes that There’S a soundbar attached and that it should be able to adjust that soundbar’s 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 soundbar is able to turn the TV off, which is it’s like the holy grail of smart assistance..
Nothing seems to work to turn TV off HDMI CEC., But this thing does it. Alexa turn off the TV. [ Alexa ] Okay. And the heavens opened. It’s amazing. For Sonos.
It’S really important that they be the Switzerland of sound. I guess.. I don’t know. If that’s my phrase, not theirs., But they wan na work with everybody.
At the same time and they don’t wan na give anybody any preferences.. That said, this thing works with Alexa now and it probably is gon na work, the best with Alexa, at least for the time being, because they’ve had time to customize Alexa’s software.. Why is it so important to Sonos to work with Alexa and then maybe later, the Google Assistant, or definitely later in the maybe some other stuff will come along.? Why do you want to be so agnostic across all of these different voice? Assistants that’ll just partner with Amazon and calling it a day So home sound system for us means shared.. We believe many different people would want to use it. And we don’t want to dominate what the right control paradigm for people is, nor the right assistant. We’ve already been here before with phones..
So you know the sharing home sound system. Maybe one person has an Android phone, the other one has an iOS phone.. We never said. Okay, now we’re only going to support iOS., [, Dieter, ], Right. And the whole household. Please go iOS.
Or we’re only going to support apps on Android.. The whole house have got Android.. We just don’t believe that it’s very consumer friendly., Here’s the weird thing about Sonos’ position. In the past. It got to create this beautiful garden of perfect music experiences.. They had their own remote, they had their own router, they 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 gon na, 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 gon na be your Sonos speaker that you feel like doesn’t work., And that could be a problem for them..
Sometimes you don’t want it to work.. Sometimes you want to actually don’t want to go through the on-screen display and get T-V., Yeah sure right. 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 iterances as simple and intuitive as possible.. So rather saying, Alexa tell Sonos to play the Beatles from Spotify in the living room. Yeah yeah.. We wanted it to be Alexa play. The Beatles.. Sonos sees a really huge opportunity in the living.
Room. They’ve got the PlayBar, but it’s super expensive., And so this thing at only 400 bucks is way more accessible. And if you’re Sonos, you want lots of people buying their very first Sonos speaker. Because they know. In fact, they told me today that as many as 38 % of their customers, once they have one Sonos speaker, buy another one.. 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. ( snaps, ), [ Crew. Member ] Do the end. Card.
Follow the beat. Do it.. Thank you for watching this Sonos video.
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