This year I’ve been padding out my home theatre with a projector and a great sound system, and after testing out the new Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar for a few weeks, I think I’ve landed on my favourite option. I’ve been incredibly impressed with it right from the start, and once I added a Sonos Subwoofer and rear surround channels to the mix, it blew me away when I could find content to take advantage of Atmos-verified surround sound.
Like the original Arc, the long soundbar provides excellent stereo separation, but this time, there’s also a new center channel design that makes it easier than ever to hear dialogue when watching at medium to low volumes. The Arc Ultra is a bit slimmer than the old model and uses a new woofer tech called ‘Sound Motion’ to provide a lot of bass with a smaller design which allows for even more speakers to be jammed inside, and better sound overall.
When you combine it with a Subwoofer and rear surround speakers, it gets even more impressive and watching movies or playing games with this level of surround sound has been a treat.
What it’s like to use
When I first set up the soundbar, I immediately watched the 2019 version of Apocalypse Now, which has been remastered with Atmos. Then I watched Masters of The Air on Apple TV+, which also has fantastic Atmos surround sound. Both of these are about wars and have all kinds of action scenes that go crazy with the sounds of gunfire and planes flying around. It was pretty solid with just the sound bar, but I have a large beam in the centre of my living room ceiling, so the upward-firing Atmos speakers can’t bounce perfectly off my ceiling.
When I added two Era 300 speakers as rear surrounds, the sound came alive with a whole new dimension. The Era 300 also have up-firing speakers, so when combined with the Arc Ultra (or even a regular Arc), this surround sound system envelops you in a dynamic bubble of sound. The other day, I was playing A Plague Tale: Requiem on my Xbox, and when I was running around outside in the opening level, it was amazing to hear the grass crunching under my feet and the bugs buzzing around me. Further into the game, when sneaking through an old house, you could hear the home creaking around you and the sounds of people talking in the distance off to one side. It was incredibly immersive and something I’m looking forward to testing with even more games.
However, there isn’t that much content mastered with Dolby Atmos. More is coming out all the time, but it’s not something that’s super available, and if you like to watch old movies like me, often the best you can find is regular 5.1 surround sound. 5.1 still sounds great with the Sonos system, but be warned that not everything can take advantage of all the wonders of this Atmos. To check and see what your soundbar is playing, you can see it in the Sonos app’s now playing screen.
That said, even with just the soundbar, the simple fact that it’s so wide and bass-heavy makes it a really robust movie-watching tool. The stereo separation is fantastic, and the clear centre channel combined with Sonos’ voice optimization software makes it really easy to hear all the sounds in a film, and the dialogue. This year, the Arc Ultra Sonos upgraded the software with three levels of voice isolation that you can control via the Sonos app. The first is really subtle and just brings the voices forward a bit. The second level is more in line with Sonos’ existing voice enhancement tech on its other soundbars, and level three really makes sure the voice is front and centre, but it does degrade the background noise a bit by doing this. I think you can think of level three as a tool for enhancing the news or as an accessibility option.
Speaking of software, there’s also an option to turn on ‘Night Sound,’ which levels the volume a bit more so scenes with stuff like cars crashing or gunfire won’t be super loud in contrast to dialogue. I live in an apartment and often worry about keeping my neighbours up at night, so I found this feature super handy, and I use it most nights.
This speaker also allows for two forms of Sonos’ digital tuning tech called True Play. There is a simple version you can do with iOS and Android, but if you want to do the full sound mapping of your whole space you’ll need to use an iOS device. It’s also worth noting that in my experience with the Arc Ultra, it really seems like Sonos has finally ironed out its app, I didn’t have any issues with app crashes, missing features or any of my speakers disappearing from my setup in months. To set up the soundbar and the Era 300s, I needed to plug them into my TP-Link modem with a USB-to-ethernet adapter. For some reason, they wouldn’t connect to my modem wirelessly until I plugged them in and updated them. I had the same problem with the Sonos Move 2 earlier this year and worked through troubleshooting it with Sonos then, so it is a bit disappointing to see that it’s still a problem and would be very frustrating for anyone without an Ethernet adapter.
Overall, the Sonos Arc Ultra is a fantastic soundbar that lives up to its high price tag. If you want to take your movie or video game space to the next level, it lives up to the hype. If you already have the original Arc, I’d recommend investing in Era 300s for the rear surround instead of replacing the soundbar. You can definitely get cheaper surround sound options, but if you want the best of the best and you want it to work wirelessly, the Arc Ultra combined with Era 300s is hard to beat.
The Sonos Arc Ultra is $1,299, and if you want to get it with the ultimate immersive set that includes the Sub 4 and two Ero 300s, it costs $3,042.
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