The SONOS Beam is one of the company’s hot-selling products as we saw many people on community groups talking about how much they love this soundbar.
SONOS improved upon the first generation Beam and we now have the SONOS Beam Gen 2. There are a few upgrades and new additions here and there, so let’s talk about it.
Design
The SONOS Beam Gen 2 is available in two different colors – either in black or white. The sides are rounded and it has a lot of holes acting as speaker grills.
The top of the speaker comes with a few touch control buttons and the ports at the back are pretty similar to the Sonos One Gen 2 that I’m using in my bedroom – just that we now have an HDMI eARC port on the Beam Gen 2.
That eARC port means that you can use this one cable and connect it to your TV (if supported) and control audio with just your TV. Unfortunately, that means you’ll have to sacrifice one HDMI port on your TV since the Sonos Beam Gen 2 doesn’t come with a HDMI passthrough port.
But, with HDMI eARC means that you can get much higher audio bandwidth and higher sound quality overall with more channels. That is why the Beam Gen 2 supports a lot of audio formats – ranging from stereo PCM, Dolby Digital, Dolby Digital Plus, Dolby TrueHD, Dolby Atmos (both the Digital+ and TrueHD versions), multichannel PCM and Dolby Multichannel PCM. Sonos also said they’ll be adding DTS digital surround later via software.
To utilize this, you’ll need source media that takes advantage of this. Sonos also says that there’s some sort of environmental noise cancellation to ensure the sound perceived is more directional, hence creating the illusion of a larger space.
Sound quality
The sound quality coming out of the Sonos Beam Gen 2 is just excellent. Be it movies or TV shows or anything in between – the sound quality is excellent.
It’s very loud to the point that the entire studio/office area can listen to the music properly and there is no distortion even at supremely high volume. The bass is amazing and we can feel the bass vibrating the office.
Software
Other than that, the software is still the same as any other Sonos products that we reviewed. It connects via the Sonos S2 app and we can do everything that we can do things like Okay Google, play music remotely via Spotify and YouTube Music, all of that stuff.
If you are using an iOS device – be it an iPad or iPhone – you can use the TruePlay feature in the Sonos S2 app to tune the Beam Gen 2’s sound to accommodate the room.
Should you buy the Sonos Beam Gen 2?
This is actually my first time encountering the Sonos Beam family of soundbars and I genuinely like the small footprint of the speaker and I can also wall-mount it if I want to. Whichever the case may be, this Sonos Bean Gen 2 surprised non-Sonos users – like John, our main camera guy.
The price here in Malaysia though, is a premium. It’s at RM2,699 which is a big price hike over the direct conversion of the USD $449 (less than RM2k) price tag.
Whichever the case may be, the Sonos Beam Gen 2 is a fantastic soundbar that looks good, sounds good, and also takes up just a rather small space in the living room.
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