Sonos has offered dwelling theater merchandise for a very long time, however the firm has made the lounge much more of a precedence in recent times. It began with the Sonos Beam, a smaller and extra inexpensive model of the flagship Playbar soundbar. And 2020’s new flagship, the Sonos Arc, was the corporate’s first soundbar able to Dolby Atmos playback.

Today, the Beam is getting a serious improve. The new, second-generation Beam goes on sale today for $449 and shall be obtainable on October fifth. That’s $50 greater than earlier than, according to the opposite value will increase Sonos introduced final week. The excellent news is that the brand new Beam is extra succesful than its predecessor in a variety of methods. We’ll must assessment it earlier than we are able to actually say if it’s price the additional $50, however there are a variety of notable new options right here.

The new Beam seems to be practically equivalent to its predecessor, apart from a brand new perforated polycarbonate grille as a substitute of the material entrance discovered on the unique. It additionally has the identical speaker elements inside: a middle tweeter, 4 woofers, and three passive bass radiators. What’s completely different is that the brand new processor contained in the Beam is 40 p.c sooner, which opens up a number of new audio codecs.

Most notably, the gen-two Beam helps Dolby Atmos, for motion pictures, TV and music (the latter in a restricted trend, for now). Scott Fink, a product supervisor at Sonos who labored on the brand new Beam, says that the horsepower from the brand new CPU let the corporate enhance the speaker arrays — not the precise speaker elements, however, as Fink explains, “the set of software that coordinates the playback and interaction of all the speakers together in the soundbar.” The new Beam has 5 arrays, up from the three within the older mannequin, and Fink stated that the extras are devoted to encompass sound and top data.

All informed, the Beam helps the identical dwelling theater audio codecs as the Arc (together with Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus, Multichannel PCM and extra), which prices twice as a lot because the Beam. In addition to the elevated processing energy, the brand new Beam has HDMI eARC to facilitate these new codecs. Sonos says the speaker ought to have improved dialog readability due to the extra audio processing energy, one thing that ought to make the currently-available speech enhancement function work higher than earlier than.

The {hardware} additionally helps further music codecs, as nicely. The Beam (in addition to the Arc) will quickly assist the Ultra HD and Dolby Atmos codecs from Amazon Music. Some Sonos audio system have labored with a handful of HD music companies for some time now, however that is the primary time {that a} 3D music format will work with the corporate’s merchandise. I requested if there have been any plans to assist Dolby Atmos on Apple Music, and unsurprisingly the corporate wasn’t prepared to say but. But, there shouldn’t be any technical motive, it’s only a matter of Sonos and Apple working collectively to get extra Apple Music codecs supported.

As with different Sonos merchandise, the brand new Beam connects to the corporate’s different audio system for multi-room playback; you can too use different Sonos audio system as surrounds. You can tune the speaker to your room to enhance the sound utilizing Trueplay, assuming you could have an iOS machine. The Beam additionally has far-field microphones so it could obtain voice instructions by way of both Alexa or the Google Assistant, however that’s not required (there’s a mic mute button proper on high of the Beam, too). Like another current Sonos audio system, the brand new Beam has NFC to make setup even simpler — taking part in your cellphone operating the Sonos app close to it can robotically join it to your WiFi community.

Based on what Sonos has stated to date, the new Beam might be not an important improve for many, until you’ve been itching to get Dolby Atmos into your setup with out spending a ton of cash. But provided that the Beam is already the best-selling compact soundbar (in response to NPD knowledge), these upgrades ought to assist it maintain its lead over the competitors — even with that $50 value hike.