The Ray is the exact opposite of that: A bright, voice-forward sound with great clarity in a limited soundstage. My reference system is an older Yamaha (also optical) with a great warm sound and compelling virtual surround but, frankly, awful dialogue clarity even with the speech enhancement thing on.
#SONOS SOUND BAR REVIEW BLUETOOTH#
If you’re looking for HDMI, Bluetooth or 3.5 mm (let alone RCA or some such) you’ll have to move on, it’s optical or Wi-Fi only here. Not everyone has been so lucky, but that’s the trouble with “smart” speakers they’re not always smart in the right ways. Setting up the Ray was very easy for me: It’s got an optical connection and my remote (I have a fairly recent Vizio TV) worked with its little training system to get the volume and mute buttons online in a minute or two. You can see it tries to spread its sound out, but ultimately the soundstage isn’t large.
#SONOS SOUND BAR REVIEW UPGRADE#
But if you’re looking for a sound that is in any way big, you might as well open your wallet now and upgrade to the Beam. The Ray is certainly a cheap and practical way to make that happen, and if you are watching dialogue-heavy content in a smaller room, it’s going to be solid. If a buyer is considering a Sonos setup, and the Ray in particular, they’re not looking at Anker and Sony soundbars - they’re thinking about joining this exclusive smart speaker club and wondering what the best way is to go about it without spending a fortune. But the truth is it’s not really competing against standalone soundbars - it’s competing against other Sonos options. But Sonos knows that its customers are willing to pay considerably more for its slick integration and advanced features.Īt $279, the Ray is priced well above other essentially 2.0-channel systems except for the likes of Bose, another brand that generally gets a pass for inflated price tags. Get into the $150-$200 range and you can get a sub as well and some extra features like smart assistant, Airplay and so on.
No one should have to suffer the sound that comes out of TVs these days, especially when you can get a soundbar for under a bill that will be wildly better. But while the Ray performs well, it doesn’t quite earn its premium and leaves one feeling that they should have just gone for something bigger. Sonos went a bit further downmarket recently with the Ray, a smaller and cheaper soundbar than the Beam, itself a smaller, cheaper soundbar than the Arc.
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