350 bucks will get you in a walled garden that'll ruin your life i'm
obviously incompetent oh that's not working i'm going to cry
what do i have to do to make this work turn that up
what do you mean that your eighth of an inch thick OLED tv has terrible speakers
what if we could fix it today we have the sonos ray a sound bar that you can
stick in front of your tv to make it sound less
look at that that's kind of cool looks like it comes with a little box of
accessories as well this is all looks like recyclable cardboard i don't see
any plastic which is actually quite nice can't have straws but we can still get
giant black tubes that we throw out in three
weeks when they update the app and no longer support it
sonos that's the problem with these app compatible speakers sometimes you know
maybe the company goes under and then you can't use it for your tv anymore uh
we'll figure out if this one can even work without the app i know that the
iphone app has a lot of features that the Android app doesn't like home
surround sound testing type of thing so if you get multiple speakers you can
take your iphone around and it'll measure all of the space to get the best
sound possible not available on Android it seems it comes with an optical cable
and it comes with a power cable and that's it look at that
oh i have it upside down oh no their logo can go either way so for
connectivity we don't really have too much we've got a pairing button i guess
we've got a power cable which goes in here
and we've got toslink optical and Ethernet that's it that's all you get no
HDMI no arc none of that this is their entry level model which is sort of on
the cheap end of their main center sound bars the level above this would probably
be your arc which i think is about a thousand bucks 1100 that sort of thing
this is much more designed as a cheap entry into their ecosystem of connected
speakers if it doesn't sound very good you can always modify it with satellites
or a subwoofer that sort of thing it does have some reflex ports over here
and some mid drivers and i think it's got a couple tweeters in the middle something like that four d-class amps
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lab today how does it look in front of the tv quite nice actually toslink is
like an answer to an upgraded analog
audio it's all digital but it still carries audio and you can transfer like
a lot of different channels over it it's not quite up to the level of the newer
HDMI standards which is probably why it's going to be phased out soon you
don't get any analog interference you don't have to worry about grounding any
of that because again it's just it's optical it's a plastic cable with a
little led at the end rather than a laser like in fiber optics i mean it's
still fiber optics but you know whatever one of the problems with only having
fiber optics compared to HDMI is
now we don't know if the tv is going to be in sync unlike that really nice sony
speaker which didn't make you make an account to use a piece of audio
equipment the sonos one does but thankfully it's already found it which
is phenomenal so i now have to let my app record audio
that's really basic this might actually not be terrible it's already connected
so just place the sound and then it's fine turn on your tv plug in the optical
cable i already did that what's wrong with you no signal detected another good way to check toslink don't do this with
fiber because you'll die but you can see if it's got a little red light which it
does let's make sure we plugged it in right i'm going to cry i'm seeing
optical activity coming off of the back of the toslink cable you know the red
light's on but the sonos isn't detecting the tv or the tv's not sending audio
properly to the sonos welcome to my other living room well we got it hooked
up to optical on this tv and it just worked immediately so i think there's an
issue with that other tv rather than the sonus itself lg you do do it's nicer tv
anyway hey no i want one no
okay i have one too this is a nice volume
it sounds like it's coming from right there though it's not very wide which it
obviously isn't but i don't hate this
i hate this song it's always great
oh there's the too much bass
it doesn't keep up okay i take back everything i said it's
good no what it's not good at low volumes the highs
and mids are like quite reasonable you know the start
of that song was actually really nice it was crisp you could hear the clicky
clackities but as soon as the bass dropped it just
explodes really really thumpy the whole room's shaking and it's
missing that nice crisp i don't know 200 to 300 all the 60s and the 80s of the
kick drums are just very boomy and then as we increase the volume up to like 100
the highs and everything start to crisp
up and clip and it just kind of turns to
bad unfortunately i think for a center channel this is quite a reasonable
product most of your speech is going to be coming from a center channel which is
probably where this fits into their ecosystem you know it's a nice cheap
300 dollar addition to
cheap well i mean you know hifi stuff can get really really stupid to me it
sounds almost like the speakers are being overwhelmed with the bass and
they're freaking out go back to our drop we can hear when the bass starts and
then i'll turn off loudness and we can start playing with it
doesn't change it too much there's a little bit of a character adjustment
let's turn the bass down though bass at negative 10 sounds bad
no i was hoping for more controls with
equalizer the treble adjustment seems to move like the
10 000 hertz kind of areas whereas the bass also doesn't seem to hit the right
areas for me loudness doesn't adjust things quite enough so they're quite
versatile if you have an iphone unfortunately i don't get the privilege
of using chromecast so i switched to jono's phone let's have a listen to one
of my reference tracks uh the wheel by saw come on
johno i need your face ow
oh turn that up
really nice crisp car
as a center channel four movies and tv i think this would be quite phenomenal the
highs are nice and crisp the mids are nice and balanced but as soon as you
have anything in there with bass everything just explodes and goes
uh very disappointing honestly maybe a pair of satellites so now you're
into it for two thousand bucks subwoofer another 300 bucks
is it worth it for a 350 center channel
that you can only listen to speech or
hi hats on one thing that we might find is that all the frequencies sound really
nice when they're played individually which is this is doing explain one
frequency at a time when you get into a music or speech or a movie situation
you get multiple going on at the same time and it might fail at that
to get it to disconnect from apple jono land we had to power cycle it which is
irritating especially when all of these are interconnect connected and you could
potentially have seven in your room plus four in the ceiling i'm gonna set the
volume down at around half because we're gonna die if we have it any higher
i am hearing some gentle murmurs at around you know this hurts really started right
there around 30.
oh did you hear it get all quiet there it went and then went away so it's got a
massive boost right around 30 and now we're coming back up around 60.
it's not really that directional actually
it's got a nice wide sound field
wow you can hear it vibrating right
like the unit itself is going when it's
i guess sympathetic resonance so it's probably
maybe not built like it should be
is this irritating for everybody yeah
nice and even through the 1000s
slight dip around 3k
this is sort of that missing mids that i was hearing but now we're getting into
that nice high band and this is all sounding very nice and even it's
probably going to get painful in a second big dip around six see this is
where sort of human speech is and then another big dip around eight
nine let me know when you can stop hearing this
10 11. these are all nice and crisp and clean
13 14 15. me too oh no they're about six
anybody else you still here at about over six
good boys yeah you're younger aren't you that was actually pretty enlightening
there's a really nice sound stage from the early 1000's all the way up to
you know when we can stop hearing things at around 16 to 17. and i
is dolby cinema it's where the most advanced cinematic
technology you've ever experienced begins
the speech there is just so nice it's so pure uh the problem is there's lots of
bass hits and stuff in this demo and they just ruin
everything i hope we can disable that i i think you know if you're watching tvs
or shows or movies this is going to be lovely maybe not action movies you want
to watch a master chef or a drama or
you know Linus tech tips we have another channel that you might not be aware of
probably perfect honestly sympathetic resonance coming throughout the whole
unit shaking it vibrating it you can hear the internal clicking of it and big
dips like i'm talking 10 maybe 5 db like
unnecessarily large it does have really good low end output
but it's all over the place which is probably why crabrave sounded so bad and
all the music sounded so bad when the bass came in everything else without
bass was absolutely crisp and beautiful and it sounded really even even in that
sign suite for me i don't think the ray is going to be living in my living room
i think if you had a small apartment or a smaller tv or just wanted a little bit
more background noise or music in your
place then this would be a good buy only if you're an iphone user and only if you
can't find something for 350 bucks that's
maybe more your style this isn't particularly versatile for a single
channel like this i would probably just go for stereo speakers you're going to
have a better experience you're going to be able to fit more stuff in here but as
an entry point into a multi-channel home audio system i think this is
fine for somebody out there i guess thanks for
watching if you want to look at other really stupid audio products that jonno
makes me review sorry that genre makes me not review check out the sony lpx
glass tubie thing it was also expensive and bad it was very a product