Sonos Ray Review - Finally, A Better Budget Soundbar!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enlet's review the sonos ray welcome everybody to apple insider it is andrew here and i'm excited about the sonos ray like this is a new move for sonos they'd already come in on the high end of the soundbar market and the mid-tier of the soundbar market with the beam and the arc the arc even is able to produce pretty incredible dolby atmos 3d surround sound in your living room with just a single speaker but if you were looking for something that didn't cost you north of 500 you didn't have an option inside of the sonos market and you were left turning to cheaper third-party alternatives like vizio jbl and many many many more that flood the pace of amazon so how does the sonos ray stack up to those other options and is it really better well i'm pretty excited about this speaker there's a lot of stuff to love but there's also a few downsides that i think you should be aware of so let's go ahead and start just at the beginning the sonos ray is an affordable sound bar from sonos comes in at less than 300 270 if you want to be precise and it comes in two different colors the black model that i have here but there's also a white color way that you can opt for immediately after picking the product up i was excited because sonos had been transitioning to this really great sustainable packaging it's a small thing and many of you may not care but i think it's important to have such a sustainable packaging for your product it's super compact takes up less space costs less to ship and there's not a lick of plastic anywhere here just all recyclable paper and cardboard the hand's pretty great when you open it up you'll find the ray itself wrapped in this piece of cloth material that helps protect it and the grill from any damage during shipping and handling there's physical controls on the top and there are technically four drivers on the inside it'll produce stereo audio so no dolby atmos or anything like that but your standard stereo audio left and right the four drivers include two mid woofers as well as two tweeters and then it's pushed all the way to the edges using some physical wave guides that'll help move that audio to the outside and improve or increase the overall perceived sound stage of the speaker while this is technically a stereo speaker you can always improve it by adding on additional sonos products that's what makes sonos successful in many ways because you can start off with that single product and slowly grow your sonos lineup adding more and more devices so if we're looking at the rey soundbar in your living room what would you want to add well you could add a couple additional rear speakers pick up a couple of sonos one sls or any of the ikea symphonic speakers this guy here is actually one of the ikea symphonic speakers and is one of my favorite it's basically can be wall mounted and it has so no speakers on the inside and it's crazy affordable plus you can replace that fabric on the front with a variety of different options from ikea and from third parties that create their own art to put on these so they can just blend into your house and it's an easy way to add some rear speakers and get a more immersive playing experience if you want you can also add a subwoofer though i'll come back to the subwoofer situation in just a few one of the few things that irks me though is that the sonos ray is only able to connect to your television via an optical audio cable this has some problems so optical audio isn't bad and it definitely has some pluses and i've never noticed any delays when playing games to my playstation everything just came out great but it will only accept controls from remotes that use ir there are many remotes out there on the market many tv manufacturers that only include rf remotes or bluetooth remotes and a lot of times with those you'll be out of luck in controlling the sonos the sonos ray it's a huge problem for people that don't have a compatible remote you'll need to look at buying a third-party ir remote that you can use to control the array or you're left using the physical controls on top of the box that's not an ideal user experience the beam and the arc both are able to connect over hdmi arc or e-arc so that arc or audio return channel is just a special version of hdmi and it'll pass over controls via cec so i can press and do things to the television and it'll pass commands to that hdmi to the sound bar to respond to and it makes it much more compatible with a broader array of televisions and remotes fortunately for me as an apple user it is possible to use the apple tv remote with the sonos ray that was one of the first things that i had to test and unfortunately i was good to go but not everybody is going to have the same experience so use the sonos guide that they have put there's a link to it down below in the description that will help you determine which remotes will work and which ones won't work with the sonos ray before you go to pick one up that brings us to audio quality i've listened to a lot of audio on the sonos ray i started off by watching just your typical tv shows and everything sounded good i then moved to some movies watched a lot of big blockbusters that had a lot of explosions things like catching up on thor before seeing the new movie watching youtube videos just all sorts of stuff i also played some audio through the sonos app as well as through airplay too and even music it all sounded great everything about the speaker actually sounds really nice for a less than 300 speaker and is better than most of the other budget sound bars that i have tried out the biggest concern would probably be the base which is just it's good it's not great but it's good and it definitely made me feel like i would like to add a dedicated subwoofer at some point in the future and that's a little bit of a pain point for me because many of the other 300 speaker setups include a subwoofer in the box at the moment sono only sonos only offers the 749 dollar third generation sono sub to pair with your 279 speaker there's a huge difference in price it'll cost you almost three sonos rays to afford one subwoofer to pair along with it now if it makes you feel any better there are a lot of prevailing rumors that sonos is getting ready to introduce a new mini sub this new mini sub sounds ideal to me being able to pair a much more affordable subwoofer to a much more affordable sound bar i would really prefer if sonos did that but nothing is official these are all just rumors so take that for what it's worth before committing to making a purchase but the biggest thing that i thought was good with the audio is that the dialogue just popped other reviewers have noticed this as well and just despite having no dedicated center channel the dialogue comes through loud and clear if you're listening to your tv speakers they can often just sound muddied and kind of hard to parse but it sounded so much better on the sonos ray than a television speaker and many other budget sound bars they did a very good job at isolating that audio and making sure that it was crystal clear whether it was playing games and there's dialogue going or watching a movie or a tv show frankly this thing just has great audio for the price point for apple users another benefit is that this supports airplay 2. airplay is apple's wireless way to cast audio around your home and it means you can pair your sonos speakers with other third-party airplay speakers so if you have some home pods in your house or other airplay speakers you can send multi-room audio to all of them at the same time so i can send some audio to my safe and sound in the ceiling i can send it to my home pod at homepod minis and i can send it to the sonos rey all at the same time and play music in sync in all those locations it's pretty cool you can also go to of course other sonos speakers whether you're using airplay 2 or you're just using the sonos app where you can group speakers together and other fun things but because this is also airplay 2 and works with homekit it can show in the home app and you can even include it in shortcuts and scenes playing audio on your speaker at predetermined times like if you want to create a workout scene and you'll turn on some lights to whatever you like and start playing your workout playlist on the sonos ray right in your living room it's pretty handy and if you're a smart home aficionado like me it's definitely a benefit because many other budget sound bars that are in that two to three hundred dollar price range don't include any wi-fi audio and instead use bluetooth where you have to be much closer and deal with a tedious pairing method each and every time so let me know what you guys think i think this is a great option for sonos and i'm very excited that more people will be able to get into that sonos ecosystem and slowly start to build it out they make great products and the ray is no different let me know what you guys think down below in the comments or on twitter at andro underscore osu if you'd like to pick up a sonos ray for yourself there is a link in the description where these things are still available they've been selling out pretty quickly uh other than that stay tuned to a lot more videos coming your way youlet's review the sonos ray welcome everybody to apple insider it is andrew here and i'm excited about the sonos ray like this is a new move for sonos they'd already come in on the high end of the soundbar market and the mid-tier of the soundbar market with the beam and the arc the arc even is able to produce pretty incredible dolby atmos 3d surround sound in your living room with just a single speaker but if you were looking for something that didn't cost you north of 500 you didn't have an option inside of the sonos market and you were left turning to cheaper third-party alternatives like vizio jbl and many many many more that flood the pace of amazon so how does the sonos ray stack up to those other options and is it really better well i'm pretty excited about this speaker there's a lot of stuff to love but there's also a few downsides that i think you should be aware of so let's go ahead and start just at the beginning the sonos ray is an affordable sound bar from sonos comes in at less than 300 270 if you want to be precise and it comes in two different colors the black model that i have here but there's also a white color way that you can opt for immediately after picking the product up i was excited because sonos had been transitioning to this really great sustainable packaging it's a small thing and many of you may not care but i think it's important to have such a sustainable packaging for your product it's super compact takes up less space costs less to ship and there's not a lick of plastic anywhere here just all recyclable paper and cardboard the hand's pretty great when you open it up you'll find the ray itself wrapped in this piece of cloth material that helps protect it and the grill from any damage during shipping and handling there's physical controls on the top and there are technically four drivers on the inside it'll produce stereo audio so no dolby atmos or anything like that but your standard stereo audio left and right the four drivers include two mid woofers as well as two tweeters and then it's pushed all the way to the edges using some physical wave guides that'll help move that audio to the outside and improve or increase the overall perceived sound stage of the speaker while this is technically a stereo speaker you can always improve it by adding on additional sonos products that's what makes sonos successful in many ways because you can start off with that single product and slowly grow your sonos lineup adding more and more devices so if we're looking at the rey soundbar in your living room what would you want to add well you could add a couple additional rear speakers pick up a couple of sonos one sls or any of the ikea symphonic speakers this guy here is actually one of the ikea symphonic speakers and is one of my favorite it's basically can be wall mounted and it has so no speakers on the inside and it's crazy affordable plus you can replace that fabric on the front with a variety of different options from ikea and from third parties that create their own art to put on these so they can just blend into your house and it's an easy way to add some rear speakers and get a more immersive playing experience if you want you can also add a subwoofer though i'll come back to the subwoofer situation in just a few one of the few things that irks me though is that the sonos ray is only able to connect to your television via an optical audio cable this has some problems so optical audio isn't bad and it definitely has some pluses and i've never noticed any delays when playing games to my playstation everything just came out great but it will only accept controls from remotes that use ir there are many remotes out there on the market many tv manufacturers that only include rf remotes or bluetooth remotes and a lot of times with those you'll be out of luck in controlling the sonos the sonos ray it's a huge problem for people that don't have a compatible remote you'll need to look at buying a third-party ir remote that you can use to control the array or you're left using the physical controls on top of the box that's not an ideal user experience the beam and the arc both are able to connect over hdmi arc or e-arc so that arc or audio return channel is just a special version of hdmi and it'll pass over controls via cec so i can press and do things to the television and it'll pass commands to that hdmi to the sound bar to respond to and it makes it much more compatible with a broader array of televisions and remotes fortunately for me as an apple user it is possible to use the apple tv remote with the sonos ray that was one of the first things that i had to test and unfortunately i was good to go but not everybody is going to have the same experience so use the sonos guide that they have put there's a link to it down below in the description that will help you determine which remotes will work and which ones won't work with the sonos ray before you go to pick one up that brings us to audio quality i've listened to a lot of audio on the sonos ray i started off by watching just your typical tv shows and everything sounded good i then moved to some movies watched a lot of big blockbusters that had a lot of explosions things like catching up on thor before seeing the new movie watching youtube videos just all sorts of stuff i also played some audio through the sonos app as well as through airplay too and even music it all sounded great everything about the speaker actually sounds really nice for a less than 300 speaker and is better than most of the other budget sound bars that i have tried out the biggest concern would probably be the base which is just it's good it's not great but it's good and it definitely made me feel like i would like to add a dedicated subwoofer at some point in the future and that's a little bit of a pain point for me because many of the other 300 speaker setups include a subwoofer in the box at the moment sono only sonos only offers the 749 dollar third generation sono sub to pair with your 279 speaker there's a huge difference in price it'll cost you almost three sonos rays to afford one subwoofer to pair along with it now if it makes you feel any better there are a lot of prevailing rumors that sonos is getting ready to introduce a new mini sub this new mini sub sounds ideal to me being able to pair a much more affordable subwoofer to a much more affordable sound bar i would really prefer if sonos did that but nothing is official these are all just rumors so take that for what it's worth before committing to making a purchase but the biggest thing that i thought was good with the audio is that the dialogue just popped other reviewers have noticed this as well and just despite having no dedicated center channel the dialogue comes through loud and clear if you're listening to your tv speakers they can often just sound muddied and kind of hard to parse but it sounded so much better on the sonos ray than a television speaker and many other budget sound bars they did a very good job at isolating that audio and making sure that it was crystal clear whether it was playing games and there's dialogue going or watching a movie or a tv show frankly this thing just has great audio for the price point for apple users another benefit is that this supports airplay 2. airplay is apple's wireless way to cast audio around your home and it means you can pair your sonos speakers with other third-party airplay speakers so if you have some home pods in your house or other airplay speakers you can send multi-room audio to all of them at the same time so i can send some audio to my safe and sound in the ceiling i can send it to my home pod at homepod minis and i can send it to the sonos rey all at the same time and play music in sync in all those locations it's pretty cool you can also go to of course other sonos speakers whether you're using airplay 2 or you're just using the sonos app where you can group speakers together and other fun things but because this is also airplay 2 and works with homekit it can show in the home app and you can even include it in shortcuts and scenes playing audio on your speaker at predetermined times like if you want to create a workout scene and you'll turn on some lights to whatever you like and start playing your workout playlist on the sonos ray right in your living room it's pretty handy and if you're a smart home aficionado like me it's definitely a benefit because many other budget sound bars that are in that two to three hundred dollar price range don't include any wi-fi audio and instead use bluetooth where you have to be much closer and deal with a tedious pairing method each and every time so let me know what you guys think i think this is a great option for sonos and i'm very excited that more people will be able to get into that sonos ecosystem and slowly start to build it out they make great products and the ray is no different let me know what you guys think down below in the comments or on twitter at andro underscore osu if you'd like to pick up a sonos ray for yourself there is a link in the description where these things are still available they've been selling out pretty quickly uh other than that stay tuned to a lot more videos coming your way you\n"