It is time for Sonos to provide residence theater followers what they have been begging for: the period of big TVs and wi-fi left/middle/proper methods is right here, and it is weird that the most important Wi-Fi speaker maker is being left behind
Sonos has offered the ability to add wireless rear speakers to its soundbars, creating an effective compact surround-sound system, for well over a decade. But this setup really hasn’t changed much from the Playbar to the Sonos Arc Ultra — you can still have the soundbar with two rear speakers, and one or two subwoofers.
For years now, Sonos superfans have been begging the company to expand these options with the ability to use its wireless speakers as true front left and right channels for a home theater setup.
The frustration is width: elite soundbars like the Arc Ultra have angled drivers so that the audio sounds much wider than the soundbar itself, but there are diminishing returns with ‘virtualized’ width compared to the real width of just having speakers on either side of your TV, the way you would in a five-channel surround sound system made from separate speakers. And we just had a reminder from a Dolby exec about how important width is in recreating Dolby Atmos mixes.
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People love the simplicity of a wireless Sonos setup compared to building out a wired separates system, and many are enamored with Sonos’ sound profile. But as time goes on, the failure to innovate in the kinds of setups available starts to look stubborn at best.
Imagine that you have a Sonos Beam 2nd Gen connected to your TV over HDMI, and it receives the Dolby Atmos sound and then streams it out to a Sonos Era 300 to the left of your TV and one to the right of your TV.
These would deliver real width, especially since the Era 300 has left and right drivers, as well as forward-facing. The Beam serves as the center channel for clear dialogue, and the Era 300s deliver powerful side channels and height channels. And, of course, you could combine with wireless rear speakers, as Sonos does already.
People are choosing to buy bigger and bigger TVs, which need wider and wider sound to match their scale. We can’t keep making soundbars bigger to compensate (well, we can, but I’m not sure it’ll really please anyone).
Sonos has been in the perfect position to capitalize on this, and yet somehow Sony beat it to the punch by announcing the Sony Bravia Theatre Trio, an ‘LCR’ (left, center, right) wireless system that’s more or less exactly the setup I described above, but with Sony speakers.
Here’s what really galls the Sonos superfans: the tech already exists, unofficially, to do this, and many have tried it. There is a whole subreddit dedicated to a third-party app called Sonosequencr, and the developer makes it clear that they’re not hacking the speakers to make this possible: they’re tapping into tech already dormant in Sonos’ system, that Sonos has never fully enabled.
Using Sonosequencr comes with tradeoffs, with the main one being that you can’t use Trueplay to correct the sound for your room, so in some cases it’s possible you’re better off sticking with a regular Sonos setup that compensates for your room’s reflections, especially if you have a smaller space — but in some large setups, the addition of real speakers might be the better option. Sonos could also break the third-party app at any time, since it’s all unofficial.)
There were leaks that Sonos was planning to enable this kind of setup using its canceled streaming box as the centerpiece, but this obviously never came to fruition (but the tech that Sonosequencr taps into might be the vestigial remains of it, or an earlier version of it).
I wrote at the time that I hoped it would retain the exact feature I’m talking about today, but there’s been no sign of it since then. That’s probably partly because Sonos spent a year just trying to fix its app’s problems and getting things ready for multiple launches this year (which started with the Sonos Play).
Maybe Sonos is getting ready to unleash a new world of home theater flexibility on us — when I interviewed CEO Tom Conrad, I asked him about Dolby Atmos FlexConnect and its ability to work with really flexible speaker placement, he said: “We’re interested in that entire space, the entire domain of: How do you get the bits from the source to the speakers? How do you position the speakers in three-dimensional space? And how do you render? We’ll continue to work on our roadmap.”
In response to a question about TV makers launching their own wireless speaker tech and pushing Sonos out, Conrad said: “We’re the pioneer in wirelessly distributing audio around the family room, and we’ll have our own things to say about how that evolves in the coming quarters.”
So it definitely sounds like Sonos has something planned for home theater this year, and I really hope it takes the chance to finally unleash extra speaker positions. The fact that Sony got there first really surprised me, but Sonos has a key advantage: price.
Sony’s system costs £2000 (about $2,690 / AU$3,750) for the front three speakers. The closest Sonos setup in terms of Dolby Atmos performance would be the Beam 2nd Gen and two Era 300 speakers, as I mentioned above. At the time of writing, that costs $1,127 / £1,077 / AU$2,297 — but you could swap the Era 300s for a pair of Era 100 SL speakers, and the price would drop to $707 / £657 / AU$1,377.
When I think about the scale of performance you could get from that setup for that price… well, like I said, the whole thing
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