Beam

Overview

Beam is the compact Sonos soundbar released in 2018. It is 651 mm wide, 68.5 mm high and 100 mm deep, weighs 2.8 kg, comes in black or white, and can stand on furniture or be wall-mounted.

Sonos lists five Class-D amplifiers, four full-range woofers, one tweeter and three passive radiators.

The TV connects over HDMI ARC with the included HDMI cable. For a TV without HDMI ARC, the included optical audio adapter connects to the TV's optical output. A 10/100 Mbps Ethernet port and Wi-Fi connect Beam to the home network for streaming, AirPlay 2 and the Sonos app.

Beam has an array of five far-field microphones for voice control (Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant and Sonos Voice Control). A touch on the microphone icon turns the microphones off, and the LED shows when they are on. The top has capacitive touch controls, and Beam works with the TV remote. In the Sonos app you can adjust bass and treble and turn on Speech Enhancement.

What the specs mean

• 3.0 speaker setup: three main channels, no built-in subwoofer and no height channels. A Sonos Sub, Sub Mini or Sub 4 adds the subwoofer, and a pair of Sonos or IKEA Symfonisk speakers adds rear surrounds, all connected wirelessly. Sonos describes Beam with a Sub and two rear speakers as 5.1 surround sound.
• HDMI ARC, not eARC: the Audio Return Channel sends the TV's sound to the soundbar over the HDMI cable, and lets the TV remote control Beam. The newer eARC adds high-bitrate formats such as Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Atmos and uncompressed multichannel audio; Beam does not support eARC or Dolby Atmos.
• Audio formats: Dolby Digital, DTS Digital Surround and PCM.
• No HDMI passthrough: Beam has no HDMI input, so a console or streaming box connects to the TV, and the TV sends the sound back to Beam over HDMI ARC.
• Room correction (Trueplay): Trueplay measures how sound reflects off the room's surfaces and tunes the speaker. Sonos states that most of its products need an iOS device for Trueplay tuning.