Sonos Arc Ultra Soundbar Promises Double The Bass, But Is It Wasted On Movies?

On Tuesday, Sonos announced its latest soundbar, the 9.1.4 channel Sonos Arc Ultra ($999 MSRP), as well as the newest wireless Sonos subwoofer, the Sonos Sub 4 ($799 MSRP), which both ship on October 29. In a press release, Sonos focused on its new "SoundMotion" technology, its trademarked name for a miniaturized transducer that still succeeds at "supercharging" the speakers' bass response, which it claims can offer bigger sound out of a smaller package.  "Driven by our hunger for innovation, we created Sound Motion™ to break the boundaries of what's possible by a single speaker, bringing this industry-first transducer technology to home theater where demand for extraordinary sound is equal to designs that fit modern living spaces," said Patrick Spence, CEO of Sonos, in a statement.

Even before we get into the features of the soundbar proper, the announcement notes a pretty significant development in that TruePlay, Sonos's app-based room correction technology, is no longer iOS exclusive and is now available on Android. The Arc Ultra also includes a new center channel speaker architecture and software-based Speech Enhancement feature that lets you tweak the dialogue clarity on multichannel content. Sonos has also worked with recording engineers in the fields of music (Chris Jenkins) and movies (Onnalee Blank) to, in the press release's terms, "fine-tune Arc Ultra for Dolby Atmos content playback and assemble a studio-worthy experience that rivals professional sound systems." But as a Sonos product, should it be looked at as a music system or a home theater speaker array first?

Though Sonos is marketing the Arc Ultra the same way most soundbars are marketed, as a home theater device first, Sonos has generally been a music-first company throughout its 20 year history. It started with the ZP100 Digital Music System in early 2005, while the signature smart speakers came around in 2009, with soundbars not arriving until 2013's Playbar. Sonos speakers have long been lauded for their high quality of music playback even at the lowest-priced side of the line, like the Play:1 speakers that were introduced in 2013.

So, when you get a Sonos product, you can be reasonably sure that it's been fine-tuned for music playback even if it's marketed as a home theater product first and foremost like the company's soundbars are. The soundbars, of course, can also be integrated into any whole-home Sonos system, as well, for features like simultaneous multi-room playback. If we take Sonos's claims about which audio mixing engineers it consulted with seriously, the Arc Ultra has been fine-tuned for both music and movies.

That said, the key features Sonos is advertising for the Arc Ultra are movie-centric, like the heavy emphasis on clear center channel dialogue. Even if you're listening to a lot of multichannel music, you're unlikely to want to overemphasize the vocals compared to the rest of the mix the way you might want to with movies, where dialogue can often get buried. Between Sonos's history with quality music reproduction on existing Arc soundbars, an emphasis on new, movie-centric features, the rise of multichannel/spatial Dolby Atmos music streaming, it looks like the Arc Ultra should be a solid all-in-one pick.