5 years ago, I was floored to discover that the original Sonos Arc is a pretty
competent home theater audio solution, which when you consider that it's a
soundbar, is pretty high praise. I liked it so much that I am still using it in
my downstairs recck room to this day, where it has served everything from
impromptu movie nights for my son and his friends to massive land parties with
like a third of the company packed into my house. which is why I am really
excited to check out the Sonos Arc Ultra
along with the Sub4.
Making a triumphant return is Sonus' ever adorable locking packaging. Ooh,
and aside from the little bits of plastic on the lock, a mostly
eco-friendly solution that can be thrown in the recycling. Love to see as much of
that as possible. Wow, it looks very
similar. I don't know what I was expecting. similar in some ways that I
would prefer it wasn't. On the back, you have a very Spartan IO. And I don't mean
this is Sparta. I mean like this is
Sparta. There's nothing back here. We got our power input. We've got a
microphone switch. I do like to see that. A hard switch for the built-in
mic. An RJ45 Ethernet jack. Bluetooth pairing button. And one, and only one,
HDMI port. That's right, my friends. While the Sonos Arc does use EERC,
what it doesn't have is any kind of HDMI pass through. So, it will take up the
EER port on your TV, which on some TVs can be one of the more fully featured
one with support for higher refresh rates and resolutions and not give you
any additional ports to plug your devices into. Maybe they'll make up for
it with the accessories.
Sorry, I couldn't even say that with a straight face. You get one power cable,
one HDMI cobler. Not too long of one, mind you. You wouldn't want to spoil the
kids. That ain't 5 ft, brother. Oh, okay.
Damn it. Clearly a 3ft cable.
Oh, yeah. I'm 3 and 1/2 ft tall. So, yeah. No, I thought you were 5' one, so
it's like four, four and 1/2 ft. It's a 5ft cable. Before we fire it up,
I feel like we should have a quick listen to something for a before and after since I conveniently have an arc
installed already. It's still a soundbar, but man,
it's pretty dec.
But when you consider how big this room is,
it does pretty okay.
God, this movie is so good.
The main benefit that Sonos is touting for the new Arc Ultra is their new sound
motion speaker design. It's supposed to both sound better with reduced
distortion and be smaller, allowing them to pack more channels into the new
soundbar. So, they're advertising 9.1.4.
So, that's nine surround channels, some of them direct, some of them bouncing
off of stuff, though I don't know what they're planning to bounce it off of in that direction, as well as one sub
channel. and then four height channels.
Now, does it have a 0.1 even if you
don't have a sub? Really? Like, is that what they advertise? They do say that a
major benefit of the new design is dramatically improved bass. But of
course, as always, Sonos can't decide whether they would rather sell you on
the out of the box base of the soundbar itself or if they would rather sell you
on well, but if you wanted the best experience, you'd probably have one of
these. So, I kind of feel like we should try it both ways. It's funny. My notes
say that it's smaller, but the first thing that I noticed is that it's actually wider. So, it's the height that
I mean, yeah, I guess it's a little bit shorter. You know what, Sonos? Sure.
Here's a plus. Regardless of the small differences in size, Sonos has
apparently made the new one compatible with the existing wall mount. If you're
going for just a quick and easy upgrade here, you'll love to see that. It should
be noted, however, that because the new one is slightly lower profile, you may
see the wall mount if you use the existing one. I'm sure there's a lot of
you out there going, "Well, that's that's a very champagne problem." And
you're right. But if you're the kind of person who spends the extra on Sonos for
the aesthetic along with, you know, decent performance, it might be the sort
of thing that you care about. Man, there's something to be said for the
simplicity of this installation. You know, hate on sound bars all you want.
Lord knows I've done it, but I have
upgraded my sound system,
albeit for a lot more money than I would have spent if I just went scrging for
things on Facebook Marketplace, which by the way, we did a great video over on LT
about. What are the odds this is just immediately working? I'm thinking zero.
Cool. Let's fire up the app. Okay, I'm not quite upgraded yet. Hey, look at
that, though. Pops right up. Let's go ahead and add it. This is super painless
so far. Plays a little chime. uses the microphone to decode the pin to connect.
And now it's connecting to my IoT Wi-Fi. I'm putting it in the recck room.
Oh, shoot. Oh crap, I pressed the wrong thing. Oh, okay.
Recruit is the in ceiling. Sonos um VR
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Oh, it's done. Your Arc Ultra has been
added. You can personalize it in system settings. Okay, I will start by putting
it in the correct room. Did I put it? Oh, w room 4. Perfect. Okay, room VR.
Okay, that was painless. Connect to TV. Nice. It's now connected to TV. Would
you like to true play your Arc Ultra? So, this is supposed to do some room
correction and tuning. Sure. I'm going to go stand over here, though. Make sure your room is quiet and your arc is
placed where you want it. Begin tuning.
It's actually a pretty impressive amount of surround that they get. It's
obviously not real surround, but it kind
of sounded like some stuff was behind me. Did you pick that up? Yeah. More
impressively though, it was about the same effect on both sides, which given
the difficulty of bouncing anything off of over there.
All right. Oh, yeah. There we go.
I don't have a sub connected, though. It's not going to completely change your
world if you already have a Sonos arc. And I think Sonos clearly knows that
given the replacement pricing. Both are at $9.99. But I am very impressed by
what this thing can do without a subwoofer connected to it, which really
makes me wonder if the $800
for the sub 4 is going to somehow justify itself. Let's have a look at
this bad boy. Sorry, I was just doubting myself cuz I'm like, that's it's a lot
of bass for just a soundbar. And no, this is not activated. It's not on.
That's pretty cool. In summary, the noticeable improvements would be to
dialogue clarity and then especially to
both the control and the depth of the
bass out of just the soundbar. The question for me now though is with such
strong bass experience, how can they possibly justify telling me, "Okay, I'm
going to spend another $800
on a sub4 here." To be clear, I'm not saying the Sub4 is bad. I haven't even
listened to it yet. I'm just saying that for your typical Arc Ultra install where
I imagine it's, you know, probably in a TV room or like in a an apartment or
something like that. I just wonder if you're going to need it. That's all. I
like the new matte finish. I'll tell you that much. Gloss. I mean, in theory,
it's great. And then, look at it. Another key benefit is that it's
supposed to be well, whatever generation we're comparing to, a key benefit is
that this one's supposed to be smaller. I think Belle, is that right?
Lighter. Lighter. Okay. Cuz it's not smaller. Oh,
seriously? Their old power plug is not compatible.
There's not enough clearance for it to go in. It's fine. It's not like it
doesn't come with a new power cable. Just thought I might be able to drop it
in. You guys ready to be impressed? It's funny because in the early days of
Sonos, I really did not much care for their sound quality. I really liked the
app. Or rather, I never liked the app. What I liked was the seamless
integration with Google Play Music. Since then, it feels like they've done a
complete 180 on both of those things. Now, I really appreciate the sound
quality of their first party speakers and uh absolutely hate the control
experience. It used to be so
awesome. me. Sub best placement is not in corner.
Me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me me. That's where the wife wants it. So
with that said, a key selling point of the new sub 4 is that you can put it
anywhere. They literally advertise laying it down flat and like putting it
under your couch as a use case. And they're like, "Yeah, yeah, it'll like correct for everything." Touch your
mobile device on your Sub 4 with the flashing green and white light. Yep,
sure. Touch your mobile device exactly as shown. This seems unnecessary.
Nice. Oh, it that's weird. It didn't ask me to
tune the room again. I feel like I should, though. Hey,
this is the world's worst progress bar. Check this out. It just starts over and
over and over again. It just goes to completion and then just starts over.
That Sonos is not how progress bars
work. There's a few key app controls. There's bass and treble adjustments for
the Arc Ultra along with the loudness toggle that is just um I don't know, not
working right now. Height audio, you can change the height. Sub audio, you can
turn up and down and change the phase. Volume limiting in case your kids, you
know, are going to turn it up or whatever and your neighbors might complain while you're not home. Speech
enhancement is off by default, actually. Wow, there's a lot more settings in here
since the last time that I played around with this. Got a nice little audio delay
for TV dialogue sync. I wish they explained what some of the stuff was. TV
autoplay, but Bluetooth is new. I'm not sure that
I would ever use that if I have the option to stream via Wi-Fi, which I do.
Um, but that's there. And also, you can
add a voice assistant since it does have the built-in mic. Personally, I might
just leave it off, but hey, there you go. Amazon Alexa and Sonus voice
control. All right, let's finally listen to this thing.
Impressively,
even with the sub absolutely cranked, like all the way to plus 15, it's not
overwhelming or boommy or muddy. It's
sounds great. The only question in my mind is, do I need it? I can't say that
for casually watching movies in the TV room that I would probably spend the
extra $800 versus just having the soundbar itself. Of course, from what
I've seen online, people who are really loving the Arc Ultra are mostly loving
its performance in music. So, why don't we listen to my favorite song?
Okay, here we managed to make it sound a little boommy and unpleasant, but I feel
like I had to really try to get it to do that. In short, if you're looking for
basically the original Ark, but a little bit better, the Ark Ultra looks like a
pretty great choice. It rounds out the performance, especially in the low end
compared to the original Ark. And the setup is as simple as it's ever been. I
mean, we got the whole thing done in
10 minutes, including firmware updates. You can't really complain about that.
Well, you can if you don't like spending $1,000. that video that I alluded to
before that we did on LT, I'd say we ended up with in some ways even higher
performance, especially when it comes to surround performance. And we spent about
a quarter of the price and that included a subwoofer. But of course, there was a
fair bit of hassle and some extra remotes. And it didn't have any of the
modern creature comforts like Bluetooth connectivity or voice assistant
connectivity or I don't even think it had ARC. I think we had to use like an
optical cable old school style. Anyway, that's besides the point. The point is
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