Product Profile: Sonos Arc Soundbar
Sonos is an American manufacturer that has reinvented home audio. Their Sonos Arc Soundbar is one of our favorite products!
If you are not familiar with their name Sonos, there’s a good chance you have seen or heard many of their products like soundbars, small powered speakers and audio components. Sonos’ primary goal is to make it easy for people who love music to listen to their favorite tunes throughout their home. In that effort, Sonos products network together over your WiFi so they can play the same music simultaneously, or they can each play a different selection. Ascetically, they blend into the décor and day-to-day living of modern household environments.
Blu Glo started selling Sonos products 13 years ago. Back then, iPhones didn’t exist, so Sonos manufactured handheld controllers for their music system. Additionally, residential WiFi networks were not as sophisticated as they are these days. That lack of WiFi technology, made the SonosSystem unreliable and maddening to use for most homeowners, thus we really didn’t sell much of it. We stuck with Sonos and followed their progress through the years even though their customer base was small. It’s our policy to sell only products that we can stand behind long-term, so we could only sell these great products to a small niche of technically individuals.
Fast-forward ten years and Sonos has become the leader in networked music products. Thanks to the iPhone, Sonos no longer needs those awkward handheld controllers, and residential WiFi networks have become the norm in most households. Sonos is now well positioned to turn music lovers into happy customers.
In addition to the Sonos Arc Soundbar that we are profiling in this article, Sonos makes small powered speakers for stand-alone use. Those smaller speakers are great for music listening, music components such as the Port and Amp for more integrated music systems, and other soundbars like Beam.
The reason people are so excited over sound bars is that they deliver high-quality TV sound and music sound without the expense of a home theater surround sound. And home owners love them for the sleek unobtrusive fit into cabinets and shelving. We think of all the sound bars on the market today, the Sonos Arc is the undisputed number one!
Sonos incorporates a sound tuning system in the Arc that uses the microphone on your iPhone to custom-tune the sound of the Arc to your room. If you have a small to medium sized room, this works incredibly well! Speech intelligibility has greatly improved by using the feature. As for sound dynamics, Sonos extracts great sound from a series of small drivers and small amplifiers built-in to the soundbar, but we find that if you add the Sonos Sub to the system, the added bass makes the music & movies come alive!
As a provider of entertainment systems, the single biggest challenge we face is making all the electronics simple to use. To address this reality, Sonos provides installers with control drivers that we can integrate into our RTI (Remote Technologies Inc.) system controllers. With these drivers we can provide a control app on your iPhone (or in a handheld remote) that will operate your TV, set-top box, streaming device (AppleTV, Roku) and the Arc soundbar itself.
Sonos does not provide a remote control for the Arc, so you use the Sonos app to control the volume of the soundbar. That creates a difficult user experience when you have a TV remote, set-top box remote, and an app on your phone for volume. With our RTI controllers, you use one app or remote to control the entire system much more easily.
Cost: Sonos Arc Soundbar $800.00; Sub $700.00. Together for $1500.00 they are the best sounding and most capable soundbar system on the market.
