Back in mid-October, Sonos introduced the Arc Ultra, alongside minor updates to the Sub 4. After a few weeks of testing with my LG C4 OLED and Apple TV 4K, it’s clear the Arc Ultra is a serious upgrade over the original Arc. Let’s dive into the experience.
The Sonos Arc Ultra continues the tradition of the excellent Sonos unboxing experience, which is similar to Apple in my books. There are clever paper tabs holding together the plastic notch on the sides of the box, holding everything together. There’s no plastic whatsoever in packaging, which will keep treehuggers real happy.
Again, the Sonos Arc Ultra, like other Sonos speakers, comes wrapped up in a light cloth. This protects the speaker and gives the feeling of unwrapping a gift.
Setting it up was super easy with the Sonos app—no hiccups here despite some issues others have mentioned with recent app updates. The design looks a lot like the original Arc, but it’s slightly longer and now comes with matching white cables for the white version, which is a nice touch (they were black before).
You’ll also notice there are now wrap around grilles that extend to the back of the speaker on the top and sides, unlike the original Arc:
Here, you can see the original Arc in the back and the Arc Ultra in the front. Notice now the Arc Ultra is slightly longer. This pic shows a good view of new new wrap around grilles:
Besides touch controls being in the middle (previous, play/pause, forward; just like current Sonos speakers like the Era 100/300), other controls have moved to the left and right sides on the top rear of the Arc Ultra. The left side is a quick touch to mute the soundbar’s mic:
On the right, we have volume up and down.
Here’s a picture of the rear of the Arc Ultra. You have the Bluetooth button, a permanent mic mute switch, the AC cord on the right and HDMI on the left side and the Ethernet port in the middle:
The first thing I noticed after setting up the Arc Ultra? The bass. It’s a huge step up from the original Arc. Sonos completely redesigned the inside, and it shows. The bass is now doubled at 50Hz, thanks to Sound Motion Technology—the same kind of force-canceling tech found in the Sonos Sub, just on a smaller scale.
Watching movies in Dolby Atmos felt more immersive, with clear dialogue and powerful low-end sound that filled the room. Watching Greyhound on Apple TV+ sounded great. Dune 2 was equally great in Dolby Atmos. This was at default EQ with loudness on. Ramping up bass, treble and height audio to 5+ can make sound even spicier.
As for music, acoustic guitars came through beautifully clear. Vocals were rich and warm and again it’s a super wide sound stage. The Arc Ultra sounds great in our living room with vaulted ceiling.
If you’re into shows and movies with big sound effects or just want great bass for your music, Arc Ultra delivers. It just makes you want to keep watching more TV as the sound is just so good.
I didn’t get to set up Sonos Era 300 speakers as rears, as there’s no power outlets behind our couch. Maybe we’ll give it a test with a portable battery pack one day to test.
According to Scott Fink, veteran Product Manager at Sonos (he led the creation of Playbar and was also involved with Arc, Beam and Sub), he explained that everything inside the Arc Ultra was completely redesigned for better bass, clarity, and tonal balance.
The Arc Ultra now supports 9.1.4 Spatial Audio, which means nine horizontal channels, a subwoofer channel and four overhead channels. The original Arc was considered a 5.1.2 setup (five horizontal, one subwoofer and two overhead channels).
Leveraging what Sonos is calling its Sound Motion technology, the Arc Ultra uses a three-way architecture for precise delivery of low, mid, and high frequencies, incorporating wave guides to manage sound with room-wide accuracy. Sonos says Sound Motion is a tech platform and will be leveraged for the next decade or more, to allow for bigger sound in smaller packages. Fink said the bass in the Arc Ultra is a “radical level change” in what people can expect from a soundbar.
Dialogue clarity has also been enhanced through co-located mids and tweeters, offering evenly distributed sound and software improvements for adjustable speech levels. The new Speech Enhancement is way better than before, allowing you to select low, medium and high levels. It’s much more noticeable now. There is no shortcut to Speech Enhancement as you have to go through the Sonos app settings.
Also for the first time, Trueplay Tuning is now available for Android as well, joining iPhone. We’re talking about the manual Trueplay Tuning where you walk around your room, waving your phone like a crazy person. The other option is Quick Tune, which does Trueplay automatically. This is the first time Quick Tune is on the Arc, a feature that debuted on its Era speakers.
Sonos says the best way to tune your Arc Ultra if you’re a self-proclaimed audiophile is to use manual Trueplay Tuning.
The Arc Ultra also gets Bluetooth support and line-in, allowing you to stream from your laptop or other devices, while it supports Wi-Fi 6 for fast connectivity.
As for those attaching the Arc Ultra to the SBXL Sound Bar Adapter XL from MantleMount, the M5 screw holes are a bit deeper now. So that means you’ll need a couple of extra spacers to fill the gap (MacGyver, baby).
The Arc Ultra isn’t exactly cheap as it comes with a price hike to $1,299 (a $200 increase from Arc; but Arc is on sale for $849 right now and is still a solid choice for those on a budget; you could also buy a Sub Mini currently on sale and have cash left over), but the improvements in bass, clarity, and features make it worth it if you’re serious about home audio and want a premium sound bar. There are no sales yet on the Arc Ultra, but they likely will be coming in the future.
We asked Sonos what’s the pitch to customers about the price increase. The company stressed they have improved all facets of sounds in the Arc Ultra, such as spaciousness, clarity, tonal balance and bass. There’s now a more refined design and new options like Bluetooth and an upgrade to Wi-Fi 6, as part of improvements across the board.
Whether you’re gaming, streaming movies, or playing music, Arc Ultra brings theatre-like sound into your living room. The bass is is great and the speech enhancement improvements are excellent. Adding a Sub 4 or Sub Mini to the Arc Ultra will ramp things up even more in the bass department.
If you have a larger TV or just want premium sound, the Sonos Arc Ultra is definitely one to consider (the original Arc is on sale right now).
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I used to really enjoy my Sonos. I have like 10 of them around the house replacing all the old style receivers and big speakers. Now the app just ruins the experience so I put a hold on buying anymore Sonos. I went with a bose sound bar for our most watched TV. I have kept the old Bose Acoustamass 7.2 system in our home theatre room for the same reason. I’m not feeling confident about the future of Sonos since there have been no apparent reversal of the deprovements made to the app. It brings to light how vulnerable an investment in all that hardware is due to a failing app. Fingers crossed Sonos will turn this around. There’s nothing more frustrating than blasting someone in an other room accidentally when trying to put music on in the sunroom. This business locking one room at the top of the list is so counterintuitive. Shame on you Sonos. Give us a sign you’ve got this under control!
Agree with the other commenter. The app is still a hot mess compared to what it used to be. The interface is unintuitive and clearly shows how Sonos catered to its shareholders and shoved the app onto consumers before prime time with a terrible interface that clearly wasn't given propper QA testing.
I still love my Sonos products on the hardware side, but I use the app even less than I used to. What used to require a few taps now requires at least double that. How is that intuitive or an upgrade over what it used to be?
Shame on Sonos for letting their management's greed take over their developers.