SONOS BEAM1UK1BLK Smart Compact Sound Bar Beam for TV - Black

The look of the Sonos Beam is quite unassuming, just a reasonably sized, clean looking soundbar. A few touch controls and a couple of LEDs on the top and a handful of ports on the back. It's simple to set up, like all Sonos products and now works with both Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant. When configured to use Alexa, it couldn't identify the TV and therefore couldn't switch it on or off, but it works fine (for us) with Google Assistant. I suspect this is a minor bug and probably won't happen to others. The far field microphone array works perfectly and I can select music to play with ease by talking to either of the available assistants. Unfortunately, it doesn't support two assistants simultaneously, but it is easy to switch between the two via the Sonos app, which is very good. The sound quality is awesome. It makes such a difference when watching something with background noise or music. The clarity also makes it ideal for a great sporting experience; in a cricket match you'll hear every nick. It is incredible how much of a difference it makes. It feels much less like the sound is just coming from a single point in the room, and adding a pair of rear speakers will of course improve this even more. I sometimes find it off-putting, I just don't expect the TV to sound so good. Until you try something like this, you don't know what you're missing! Having tried Trueplay with a Play 1 in the past, I wasn't expecting a great difference. Could I be more wrong? A couple of minutes waving an iPad round the room with the Beam making some slightly odd noises and my viewing experience was transformed even further. The difference is staggering! Make sure you use it (you may need to ask a friend around as it's only supported by iOS devices (iPhones and iPads)), it really is so worthwhile. Whilst it is designed for TV audio, it is perfectly at home playing your favourite music. I really cannot fault the sound; it is awesome. When Sonos say it is for "small to medium rooms", I'm sure it is perfectly adequate for any rooms that aren't considered huge. I've never felt the need to push the volume much beyond halfway, and the room ours is in is a good 5x8m. If you really want loud sound, maybe a playbase or playbar would be better, but this is truly awesome for the price. I really can't see what benefit apart from better bass at louder volumes those products could bring that are worth paying nearly double the price for.

Setup Smaller than I expected. Having Sonos speakers already made it quick and easy to setup. All I had to do was plug it into the mains, connect to the TV's HDMI Arc and follow the Sonos app instructions. I was able to create an Airplay 2 surround sound system with the beam and 2 of my play 1's fairly quickly during setup using the app. I recommend using the HDMI cable provided and adjusting the sound in surround Audio (for TV and Music) and Trueplay to tune the sound for the room; there was a massive difference after tuning it. Overall Impression Purchasing this product depends entirely on where you would use it and what you plan to use it for mostly. It is a 5-star system that is perfect for bedrooms, small or medium-sized living rooms on its own but once paired with two play 1's and a sub for surround sound, it is remarkable. One thing that this product makes clear is regardless of the quality and features of my TV the sound is far better with the beam. It shines during dialogue while watching tv, films, YouTube videos or listening to an Audiobook; the Audio is crisp, clear and distinguishable. It is also good with music, especially when paired for full surround sound if you are after a product that does home theatre and music exceptionally well then I would recommend the play base, it only has an optical connection. In contrast, the beam has HDMI ARC and comes with an optical adapter for older TV's, both can transmit multi-channel Audio like Dolby Digital, but HDMI transmits video and higher resolution audio which cannot be carried by an optical cable. So the beam is more of a future proof purchase. The sound is adjustable in the Sonos app by selecting speech enhancement (Dialogue icon) to the right in the app to make dialogue easier to hear; Night sound (moon icon) enables night sound to reduce the intensity of loud sounds. Troubleshooting The first issue I experienced with it was out of sync audio, and I was able to resolve this by adjusting my LG TV sound settings to Dolby Digital. The volume icon displayed by my LG TV does not show volume level just a + and - so when adjusting the volume, you have no idea by how much unless you use the app. (I believe this might only affect LG TVs) According to the Sonos support site in Setting up Sonos Beam, Audio should not take more than 15 seconds to start once a TV is on, but another issue I had was it sometimes took longer before Audio began, yet to figure out exactly why. Conclusion A small but great looking product, with many features like Airplay 2, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, supports CEC (consumer electronics control) so you can turn on your TV and adjust the volume with voice commands and the app is easy to use. It is Reasonably priced and the best in its price range. I switched to my TVs speakers to compare, and I do not know how I have watched anything without the beam.

I purchased this to accompany a 65” telly in our snug as the in built speakers are generally a joke. I had a few requirements for a potential purchase; be wireless, be airplay compatible and ideally not require a subwoofer. This item fits all those requirements and Black Friday gave me a few pounds off so I decided to go for it. It arrives in a very nice box, hinting at the quality inside. The product itself is nice and weighty, feels solidly built, looks great and didn’t take very long to set up on the floor. I connected it using an HDMI cable to my TV on the ARC channel. It also comes with a small optical to HDMI converter. Not sure how that works as its still in its packet, unused. The set up required the install of the Sonos app and a software update and then it was ready to go. Next challenge, wall mount it. I refused to pay sixty pounds for a sonos wall bracket as I find that obscene for a piece of L shaped steel. I bought some L brackets from a hardware shop and sprayed them black, and with a little ingenuity and measurement I fitted them to the wall first, then secured the Beam to them. Works a treat and only cost me about 3 pounds. The sound quality is great but as I have now owned the speaker for about three months its turned fantastic. They do require some running-in as all decent speakers do and now it sounds even better. It has astonishing levels of bass despite having no subwoofer. It can be controlled either using the HDMI cable from the TV, a Sky Q touch remote or the app on your phone. The latter is handy when my little one has the TV too loud and I can hear it upstairs, I can knock the volume down from my phone. When playing using Airplay the sound easily fills the room, but I have noticed that when combined with my B&W Zeppelin the sound can get slightly misaligned timing. This is more likey to be the Zeppelin than the Sonos because of it’s age and lack of ongoing firmware development from B&W. I shall be adding some more Sonos units in the future, such is the quality of this. It’s very impressive.

I’d been watching this soundbar since the initial expert reviews came out, I am not disappointed. When it was out of the box it was bigger than I first thought, probably because all of the photos I’d seen were with huge tv’s, any way it’s was easy to set up, and once the HDMI ARC cable was connected I was sat in front of the tv using it within 15 minutes. The Alexa voice control is awesome, if like me you haven’t used it before, it will turn the tv on/off, volume up/down. You can ask Alexa to play music from your favourite artist, and ask it all the other questions it was built for. The sound is brilliant, voice is super clear and the bass is heavier than I thought it would be. I also have a couple of Play:3’s and the sound is easily on par. All in all very impressed with this soundbar, decent price for a premium unit as well. UPDATE: I've been using the Beam now for a couple of weeks, and I am still very impressed with it, music sounds great and films/TV programmes have loads more clarity than the TV speakers or indeed any other soundbar I have owned. Make sure you install the Sonos app and use the Trueplay speaker tuning, this will ensure the sound is spread throughout the room. I can honestly say that wherever I sit in my living room, the sound is the same all over, no dead spots. My only crticism is that the height of the soundbar, whilst in front of the TV partly obscures the Infra red receiver for the remote, so I find myself aiming high when changing channels etc. The TV isnt small either, its a 46" LG, dont know if any other users have noticed this?

I had a Bose Solo 5 soundbar for about 2 years and since our house has more and more smart home gadgets (Controlling the TV using Harmony, Hue lights, cameras etc…) we use Alexa to control everything most of the time. I’ve been looking for a soundbar that has Alexa and could turn the sound down if I asked Alexa something (or control the TV) as most of the time my Echo wouldn’t hear me if the TV was on. I found myself having to say “Pause the TV” many times before Alexa actually heard and did it. Sonos solves that issue 95% of the time. It hears pretty well thanks to its 5 mics even when the TV volume is loud, as advertised in the description. Now, the other reason why I wanted to upgrade of course is the sound. We had only 2 internal speakers with the Bose Solo 5 whereas with Beam there is a center channel with two woofers, two more woofers for left and right channels and a single tweeter. Big difference. It can be tricky to get Dolby Digital 5.1, you’ll have the adjust your TV, box and console settings to get it on everything but if you’re not sure if you’re getting it you can check in the app, go to System > About My System, right at the bottom it will tell you which signal the soundbar is getting. If it says Dolby Digital 5.1 then you’re good to go. Your source has to support it of course, but I find that most recent films and series do, if setup properly. When you get the sound working properly it’s amazing, we now finally have a proper surround sound and I’m looking to improve our setup even more by getting 2 Sonos One SL as rears in the future. The Night Mode and Speech Enhancement are great features. We have neighbours that live right above us so we have to put the volume to a minimum not to upset them, I found that the dialogues can be quite hard to hear sometimes, the sound effects will be much louder so we leave Speech Enhancement turned on all the time and it’s been better, but sometimes the sound effects and music are still much louder. Be ready to jump and adjust the volume quite often. The EQ is very basic, just bass and treble, I’ve turned the bass off a little bit due to our living room being quite small but I wish they were giving us more EQ bands to play with. TunePlay was easy to setup although I haven’t tested without it so I can’t really talk about the difference. After having owned the soundbar for 2 weeks and testing it extensively, I like it very much and I’m happy with it overall but one major disappointment however was the lack of Alexa routines from Sonos, which is why I took 1 star off. There is no way to setup routines to schedule Night Mode or Speech Enhancement. At this price, there is no excuse. Other cheaper smart home products like Hue lights support it so why not this? Especially when one of its strongest selling points is Alexa. So it means that if you have neighbours very close to you like us, you’ll either have to turn on Night Mode manually every night and not forget to turn it off the next day which is honestly a pain OR, the good news is, there is an app from an independent developer called SonoSequencr that does all of that. You have to buy it and subscribe to use time triggered sequences or IFTTT actions but it’s very cheap and reliable. I highly recommend you to check out that app if you’d like to create Alexa routines, currently that’s the only way to do it.

Received as a Christmas present this year so still relatively new. So far the sound is very impressive - using it with 2 x Sonos One SL speakers in a reasonably large room and the projection and levels are good and my wife is pleased to be able to get rid of the wires from my previous 5 x speaker surround sound player. The bass-treble range is good enough for a non-expert with me and I've tried it with a few Blu rays which I usually use as a quick test (Hurt Locker opening, Apocalypse Now Wagner scene, House of Flying Daggers etc) and it sounds great. The Alexa interface works pretty well so far: although it can be a little selective when commanding while a film is playing the general sound for playing music is impressive and again, using music I often use as a test (Robbie Robertson first album, Blue Nile, Glen Gould Goldberg, Cowboy Junkies) it picks up everything I want sympathetically. Now for the niggles and accepting that this may, in part, be some user error. Set up was a pain. It SHOULD have been easy: I downloaded the Sonos app as required and got started. The wireless network was picked up and off we went. At that point, I hit a snag where the system couldn't connect. The UX on the app makes it difficult to go back at certain points - so once we'd got to the point where it was saying I had to use an ethernet cable to connect I had to pause. One ethernet cable dug out later and it still wasn't having any of it. Being Christmas Day helpline was no use and instead, I was just repeatedly referred to use the app to do things. Uninstalled app, reinstalled, no go. Left for a couple of hours and was told there was an app update. Reset factory settings on everything tried again and it worked with very little fuss. So, either there was a change in the meantime or I did something different. (I don't think I did). The other issue was that I had to buy a new Blu ray in order to get any sound from discs. Granted it was a few years old and was the aforementioned home surround system but that meant it wouldn't accommodate the Sonos. My wife had bought me the Sonos as a surprise and had checked with the online Messenger support who told her it would work with all Blu rays. Well - not quite. And again, that might be to be expected given my old model was a surround sound itself so I mention it here as a point to check for anyone, not an AV familiarist rather than a criticism of the system itself. In the week since I've had it I've been impressed with the sound: the speakers do make a difference compared to my Bose soundbar: I'll wait until I've used it a bit more as to whether I think its the couple of hundred pounds more the system cost amount worth the difference.

I bought this as a way to improve my TV's sound quality after a friend got one and recommended it. It was immediately obvious that the sound quality had improved dramatically. Set-up was beautifully simple. The HDMI ARC is easy to use: you just plug the Beam into the HMDI marked "ARC" and the TV automatically recognises it and starts using it instead of the internal speakers. True you are "losing" one HDMI port to do this, but the advantage is that the Beam responds to your original TV remote volume controls without any additional steps. Using the Sonos app is very simple and straight forward to get up and running. The sound quality is amazing. In TV operation the speech is much clearer (and has a dedicated speech boost mode if required). The bass is much better even without a sub-woofer speaker. The rest of the audio is a lot clearer and crisper. Much higher fidelity and an immediate improvement. It really does fill the room with audio. In music operation, the player is fast and responsive, and controlled either through Alexa to play Amazon Music or playing music off your phone the experience is simple and the sound is great. Cons: Only a couple. The Alexa integration is great, but you cannot change the wake word. It will only respond to "Alexa", and lacking a light it will always ding when it hears the wake word. Additionally, the rest of the Alexa system does not see this speaker as part of the multi-room audio options, so you cannot make the system play music on the Beam and Echo at the same time. If you pause what you are playing for a few minutes then resume, the Beam will take a second or two to "wake up". Overall, I can thoroughly recommend this if you are looking for a way to immediately improve your TV's sound. I love the fact that you can add more speakers later to create a surround system and I can see myself doing that at some point.

Like many others I had considered the playbar ( too old, too big) , the playbase ( too expensive ) so when the beam was announced I was very intrigued. I already had two Sonos play 1s, and although I loved the functionality had never been blown away with the sound quality. I previously had the Canton DM 50 but had always been a little underwhelmed with the sound quality of it. Encouraged by the good reviews both here and in various magazines I decided to get the beam and have not been disappointed. Set up was very straightforward and I paired it with the two Sonos ones for surround sound 1 TV dialogue is Crystal clear. Netflix, Amazon prime and Google play ( built in TV apps) are fantastic and play in Dolby 5.1 no problem with great sound effects. The main channels play in Dolby 2 no problem, with the odd channel 4 program in Dolby 5.1. The bass is surprisingly good and I feel no need to buy the separate Sonos bass box 2 Music as usual from Sonos is first class. Delighted to discover that I can even play Blu-ray audio via the Blu-ray player. Sgt pepper sounds great in Dolby 3 Alexa works okay. But of a gimmick but good fun. We have a Sony TV which has an Alexa app built in. TV on/off works fine, as does pausing and restarting streaming programmes. The other functions like changing channels are a bit more hit and miss Anyway if you've been thinking of getting this, then do so.

Soundbar is fine but Alexa doesn’t work and nobody advised that this function wasn’t available in UAE. Very disappointing

I've been surviving on my TV's speakers for a while since my problematic Pioneer's gave out a few months ago. Couldn't decide on a new one, was so close to getting a Samsung Q60R when it was on flash sale on Shopee for $449. Just couldn't bring myself to spending so much on a soundbar. But I have a Sonos One for more than a year now and enjoyed it, so I thought the Beam would be a perfect fit for my small living room. Honestly, we couldn't be happier! Grabbed it at a sale price of $599, which is still pricey but honestly, after trueplay, we tried out various Dolby tester sounds and watched Spiderman on Netflix. For such a small speaker, it made truly decent bass and sounds. Even sounded decent for music, and we had to tone it down to not affect our neighbours at night. Would I love to have a sub? Sure. But it sounded better than my $500 Pioneer set with a sub. I think the small living room works with it, but we're really happy. Setup was a breeze, took me no more than 10 minutes, and that's considering I had to hide cables and stuff. Overall, love it and would probably buy again. Though the fabric cover isn't my favourite because I'm terrified of getting it dirty, but I lint roll it every week. Super fast delivery from Amazon as well, and on time and flawless. Thank you!

Great product. Works excellently together with my pair of Gen 1 Play:1' as satellites in surround mode. Best thing is that music sounds great too. If you're not buying into the Sonos ecosystem with further speakers, it's probably better to opt for another soundbar and get more for the money. But if you're going for the Sonos system setup with more than this speaker only, this is a great buy, albeit slightly expensive.

Gorgeous minimalistic product that gives excellent sound quality. Clear audio definition and soundstage. Great for small to medium size living room. Amazed by its power and soundstage. bass can do a bit with more depth and oomph but ok. Easy to setup although pity it has only 1 HDMI port.

It’s not connecting to Alexa at all but in description they wrote works with Alexa. Seller knows that it Sonos can’t pair with alexa in India but hiding truth n selling product