Improved stereo. Again, why? For being a sound bar and limited by it's physical shape and dimensions, it's already excellent. Buy separate speakers if you want true stereo separation. Connecting the Arc is easy. Simply connect to the mains then plug in your TV via HDMI. An optical digital input is also standard. For streamlined control, an Infrared sensor syncs with your TV’s remote, giving one-remote convenience. Experience shows, films, and video games with the precise and immersive sound of Dolby Atmos on Arc. The upwards-firing drivers create a multi-dimensional soundstage that moves around you, rendering every whisper and explosion with dramatic clarity, detail, and depth.

The Arc's own status light consists of LEDs that shine through four holes above the subtle Sonos logo (fun fact: there are 76,000 holes in all the grilles combined). By default, these LEDs remain off most of the time and their brightness is tailored to the ambient light in the room even when they are lit (when adjusting volume, for example), so as not to appear too bright. There’s two rear reinforced holes to wall mount the 13.78 lb (6.25 kg) unit for a forward facing mounting setup, but naturally the bass response is a little more concentrated when it can reflect off a tabletop surface. We tested it in a room with a 20 foot (6 meter) vaulted ceiling and a nib wall behind the sofa, which makes it essentially impossible to bounce audio around behind you.So while we were able to experience excellent height and left/right soundscape movement, we definitely didn’t get the same surround sound experience as a multi-speaker array.

Sonos gets better when you add more speakers. Play a movie in your living room, a podcast in the kitchen or the same music across all your Sonos speakers – flexibility is key. The latest Sonos components link via your home Wi-Fi but for very best results, linking one component to an Ethernet connection gives the most stable solution.So what about this financial year? Again, it's looking unlikely considering we're only weeks from the end of Sonos's. Plus the company has fairly recently, in March, announced the Era wireless speakers. We would imagine something else will appear before the end of the year, mind – though whether that would be an Arc sequel, Move sequel or indeed a brand-new product like headphones (Spence has promised Sonos's expansion into a new product category...) is anyone's guess. General stereo TV sound was great. Everything from old reruns of Midsomer Murders and NCIS to Match of the Day sounded exactly as it should: clear, crisp and full. The Arc’s dialogue clarity was truly top notch coming across sounding natural and clear at all times. Not once did I have to turn up the sound to hear what was going on, and that was without the Arc’s dedicated Speech Enhancement mode. Do not install near any heat sources such as radiators, heat registers, stoves, or other apparatus that produce heat. Use your voice to control your Sonos system with any voice-enabled Sonos product—play and control content, turn the volume up or down, and more. Using ARC rather than HDMI pass-through, as home cinema receivers do, means the Arc suffers from the same problem plaguing all soundbars that connect this way: lipsync issues, where the sound and picture are out of sync. Once noticed, lipsync issues are thoroughly vexing and difficult to solve, despite most devices having a way to delay the audio to try to compensate.

The Arc's Dolby Atmos sound field is generated by 11 Class D digital amplifiers that power 11 custom drivers. Eight of those drivers are elliptical woofers evolved from those in the Beam (four along the front, two on top and one in each end), while the other three are silk-domed tweeters that are all built into the front but with two firing diagonally into the room. The Arc has top-notch vocal clarity and excellent separation of tones, instruments and vocals. Play The Who’s Baba O’Riley and you’ll be able to make out every overlapping note or hear fingers on drum skins and guitar strings in the live version Hotel California by the Eagles.Another much-longed-for addition for the Arc (Gen 2) would be HDMI passthrough ports, allowing users to connect source devices direct to the Arc. Sonos has always steered clear of extra inputs, citing a desire to keep its users' home cinema set-up as streamlined as possible. Still, with growing numbers of input devices hogging TV HDMIs, it's a feature often found on equivalently priced products.