Sonos Beam Brings Powerful Sound (and Alexa) to the Living Room

Sonos today debuted a new Alexa-supported soundbar built specifically for the living room.

The Sonos Beam will retail for $399 and is designed to be a more affordable alternative to the company's Playbar production, which retails for $699. At about two feet in length, the Beam is too more than meaty than the Playbar.

The other major selling point is its support for Amazon'south Alexa thanks to five microphones that can exist used for vocalization control.

On Wednesday, Sonos executives said the market place has been flooded with smart speakers at throwaway toll points. Simply many of these products are targeting kitchen spaces, claimed Chris Kallai, the company'due south vice president of hardware product management.

Sonos Beam

"Nosotros saw there was a critical room being ignored: the living room," he said.

Sonos is marketing the new product for those with smaller living rooms who want to create a Television set-focused habitation theater setup. For a single speaker, it certainly does pack a punch. Sonos demoed the production at a press event today, and we were impressed; the Beam'due south four woofers delivered some pretty heavy bass, while clips from Wall-E and the sci-fi film Arrival easily filled the room with sound.

During the demo, Sonos showed that the soundbar can be used to plough on a living room's TV and control surrounding smart bulbs with voice commands through Alexa. Only if you're non a fan of Amazon'south intelligent banana, the Sonos Axle too works with Apple tree's Siri through AirPlay 2 on an iOS device. Down the line, it'll also support the Google Assistant.

In addition, the Sonos Axle supports over 80 streaming services, including Spotify. Information technology'll launch on July 17 and you can pre-lodge it today.