Sonos Ray: two minute review
The Sonos Ray is the cheapest soundbar in the Sonos lineup, cutting much of the price of the Sonos Beam in exchange for losing some features and fitting into an even smaller frame that fits the room better.
Sonos says it's designed for the nine out of 10 people around the world who still use their TV's built-in speakers, so for this Sonos Ray review, that's how we primarily tested it, not as a replacement for a sound bar. giant sound under a new 65-inch TV, but with a secondary 50-inch TV from years ago.
Many of today's best soundbars aim to deliver great Dolby Atmos in a home theater setup, but Sonos Beam is more about making sure you can actually hear what people are saying and that soundtracks get enough detail and bass to sound like them. they're supposed to do, which TV speakers just can't handle.
And there is no doubt that here he achieves it. For something so small that it's at home with a 24- to 50-inch TV, it produces a pretty surprising amount of sound, balancing heavy bass with detail in speech.
It doesn't use an HDMI ARC port to get sound from your TV (it uses an included optical cable instead), and that's a double-edged sword. The optic will work with pretty much any TV, so that's fine; but that means the Sonos Ray has to learn how your remote works. However, the Sonos app walks you through this and makes it so easy it's almost foolproof, though you do need to know how to disable your TV's built-in speakers.
The Sonos Ray may be the company's cheapest soundbar yet, but it's still not the cheapest soundbar, and its price isn't really far off some soundbars that include subwoofers and Dolby Atmos for a more dynamic and cinematic sound. If that's what you want, the Sony HT-G700, Sony HT-S400, and Sonos Beam (Gen 2) from Sonos might be better buys.
But they're all bigger: if the Sonos Ray's compactness is any draw, then nothing else offers such great sound for the price. And as a bonus, it's also great with music, and naturally incorporates full Sonos multi-room streaming technology.
- Sonos Ray at Best Buy for $279.99 (opens in a new tab)
Sonos Ray review: Price and release date
- Costs € 279 / € 279 / AU € 399
- Cheapest Sonos soundbar yet
- Launch June 7
The Sonos Ray will be available to buy from June 7, 2022 and costs €279 in the US, €279 in the UK and AU$399 in Australia.
This is a pretty big saving compared to the Sonos Beam (Gen 2), which is the cheapest soundbar in the Sonos lineup and costs $449 / £449 / AU$699. The Sonos Beam is an upgrade in many areas. over the Ray, but it might have features people don't mind missing out on, like Dolby Atmos support, built-in voice assistants, and HDMI ARC. .
However, there are plenty of other cheaper soundbars out there, including well-regarded options like the Yamaha SR-B20A. You'll also find soundbars that drop to under $100/€100 - it's really just about adding volume rather than a lot of quality, and the Sonos Ray is certainly a step up from that.
The biggest danger to the Sonos Ray in the UK is the Sony HT-G700, which can be found for the same price but adds a subwoofer and impressive Dolby Atmos sound. In the US, the Sony HT-S400 is the spoiler, bringing a subwoofer and HDMI support for the same price as the Sonos Ray. But that means it's also much bulkier.
Sonos Ray review: Features
- Optical digital connection only to your TV
- Full Sonos wireless support
- Four speakers, plus bass ports
Let's start with connectivity: The Sonos Ray uses an optical digital connection to connect to your TV, and that's the only way you can connect. There is no HDMI ARC port and no 3,5mm jack. Don't worry if you don't already have an optical cable: you have one in the box.
The advantage of using an optical connection is that virtually all televisions have it, including models dating back to the early days of HD, and it delivers high-quality sound. The downside is that it's a pretty dumb connection: you have to tell the TV that you want sound to come through to the soundbar, and it doesn't do things like let the TV control the soundbar's volume. If you want to control the soundbar's volume, you need a dedicated remote or program your TV's remote to work with it.
That's partly why HDMI ARC is the most common way to connect a soundbar these days: It automatically routes audio from your TV's speakers to the bar, and you use your TV's remote to control it. soundbar volume without any additional settings.
As mentioned above, the Sonos Ray doesn't have an HDMI port, but the good news is that, being a Sonos product, it sets up the Ray using the Sonos app and walks you through a process of controlling your Ray on your own. Remote control. We will discuss this in more detail in a later section.
Being a Sonos product also means the Ray acts as a full Sonos wireless speaker, like everything else in the company's lineup, as well as a soundbar. You can stream music from the Sonos app options, or use Apple AirPlay 2 or Spotify Connect to stream directly from a music app. As with all Sonos speakers, there's no Google Cast support. You can connect to your network via Wi-Fi or your Ethernet port.
You don't get a built-in voice assistant here, unlike the Sonos Beam or Sonos Arc. No Alexa, no Google Assistant, and no Sonos voice control. There is no microphone at all.
You don't get Dolby Atmos support, unlike the Sonos Beam and Arc. You get support for Linear PCM, Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS Digital Surround - these are the main 'basic' sound formats in use today. La raison pour laquelle il prend en charge les formats surround est que, bien qu'il ne s'agisse que d'un haut-parleur avant, vous pouvez ajouter d'autres haut-parleurs Sonos pour creer un son surround sans fil, si you want it. It's a nice option to have, we'll talk about that a bit later.
As for the speaker setup itself, Sonos calls it a 3.0 system. There are four speakers: two full-range center speakers, with two tweeters on the sides. There are also two bass ports, for extra bass sound. The tweeters feature an innovative "acoustic lens", which splits the sound, pointing some to the side to add width and others to the front.
The entire speaker layout is designed to focus sound forward, so the Ray can be placed inside a TV cabinet; many modern soundbars have speakers angled sharply to the left, right, and up, and enclosing them like that is a bad idea. The Sonos Ray fits him well.
From the Sonos app, you can tweak Ray's equalizer (to add or remove bass and treble), or turn on the speech enhancement and night mode features. Speech enhancement is designed to make voice heard more clearly compared to other elements, while night mode flattens the range from silence to speaker volume: whispers become more audible, explosions become less audible. It's for listening while the family sleeps, so you don't have to constantly adjust the volume to keep them from waking up.
You can also use Sonos' TruePlay tuning feature from the app, which measures how sound bounces around your room and adjusts Ray's sound profile to compensate, adding precision and clarity. However, this only works on iPhone, unfortunately. They all get sound out of the box.
Sonos Ray review: Sound quality
- Massive, Massive TV Speaker Upgrade
- Good bass and clear dialogue.
- Not much positional sound
The Sonos Ray is something of a pocket rocket. For a small box, she's not interested in small sound - she's here to rock and we love her for it. One thing is important to know right away, though: We like it better if you can use the TruePlay setting, and not everyone can.
Let's start with what it looks like out of the box. It wants to be full and serious, and for a speaker this small, it is. 99% of the time, that's a good thing: it feels meaty and deep in a way that almost any TV speaker could touch. But when a soundtrack goes really thick with a low-end sound, throwing out bass-heavy sound effects along with a booming deep soundtrack, it can feel like it's bottoming out and creating something softer than bass. It's not a common occurrence, but it really caught our attention in the spinning docking scene in Interstellar, where the soundtrack and crashes of debris on the ship merged into noise rather than sound.
But that's not so bad in most uses. Dialogue is much more advanced in movie soundtracks than TV speakers can handle, which adds a lot of clarity and helps the speech stand out.
We also tested Speech Enhancer to push it even further, and oddly enough, we found that it helped much, much more on talkative dramas with soft, creepy background music than it did on complex action soundtracks, which is interesting. Speech Enhancer appears to shift the sound profile up, away from the bass and towards the treble. Seeing Reacher made an immediate and clear difference in helping tough guys who were muttering a bit to come out more clearly, pulling them out of a toned background.
But in the action sequences of Mad Max: Fury Road, he removed the emotion of the bass without making speech noticeably clearer between swirl effects and crescendo music.
Based on our tests, we actually suggest that people who have a bit of trouble speaking try heading into the EQ and adjusting the Treble up to +3 or +4 and the Bass up to +3 or +4. -4. It had a similar effect, but didn't limit bass as much, so you always get more cinematic.
We just use the default...