Sonos' new soundbar is taking on the HomePod with Alexa

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- This is a Sonos Beam.
It's a brand new soundbar and it's also a
brand new smart speaker.
It's gonna cost $399, and it's gonna be available
on July 17th.
So we came to Sonos' headquarters
in Santa Barbara to find out what this thing is
all about because it does a lot of stuff
with just one input.
So the Sonos Beam soundbar exists.
It's relatively small.
It's smaller the Playbar or the Playbase.
It's also an intelligent speaker,
which means that this isn't just
up against other random soundbars,
it's also up against other smart speakers,
like an Echo, like the HomePod,
and like the Google Home Max.
There are four full-range woofers,
bang, bang, bang, and bang.
And there's a center tweeter,
and then there's three passive radiators
for more sound to come out of there.
And out of all of those speakers,
they create a array of three channels,
a center, a left, and a right.
But what's really interesting to me is
that the inputs on this are not what you'd expect.
There's power of course, there's a sync button,
for you know, getting everything working together,
there's an ethernet port because Sonos always puts
an ethernet port on stuff,
and then the only singular input on this is HDMI.
The way that Sonos wants this to work is you
plug HDMI in here, you plug HDMI into your TV,
and then this standard called HDMI ARC
tells the TV, hey you've got a soundbar now,
and all sound gets routed to it.
So if you don't want to give up an HDMI port,
you can also use optical audio out.
This thing is gonna ship with an adapter
that allows you to use your optical out on your TV
to the HDMI input on this thing.
Obviously we listened to the Sonos Beam
in this controlled environment in Sonos' office
where we are right now.
And so I don't want to give you a full review
of how I think it sounds, but I do have a few thoughts
after listening to it today.
The first is that Sonos isn't like crazy
opinionated about how your music should sound.
It's trying to be accurate and it's trying
to be very clear.
So there's bass, about as much as you'd expect
from something this size.
Maybe even a little bit more,
but not so much that it's muddy
and it blows things out.
They have incredibly good stereo separation,
so unlike the HomePod, they're not trying
to do magical things with auto-tuning
and blah, blah, blah through all the channels.
They're just trying to get the sound right.
Left, right, center.
- We can sculpt the sound and maximize the
performance of the amplifier of the transducers,
and basically sculpt the entire sound profile
with software.
And in the case of this product,
we really wanted to have that lean back experience
in the living room and be able to control your TV,
your music, with voice.
- All the standard Amazon Alexa stuff
works the same way as it does on other
Alexa products or on other Sonos products.
But because this is a soundbar,
and it's connected to my TV, I can do lots
of interesting things with that too.
Specifically, if you have an Amazon Fire TV,
you can do stuff like, Alexa, play Stranger Things.
- [Alexa] Getting Stranger Things from Fire TV.
- And what it does is it turns my television on,
and it's just ready to start Stranger Things.
Now it didn't actually start playing it
because the Fire TV-Alexa integration is
not super great yet.
But if I wanna change the volume,
I can go, Alexa, volume up.
And it's a little bit louder now.
Alexa, pause Fire TV.
And it paused the Fire TV.
Again, it takes another second or two
than you want it to, but it still works really well.
It also works with your TV remote control.
So if I turn the volume up or down here,
it will turn the volume up or down on the Sonos,
not on the television.
And the reason that works is that thing
I talked about earlier.
It's HDMI and it's specifically HDMI ARC.
And the TV recognizes that there's a soundbar attached,
and that it should be able to adjust
that soundbar's volume instead of the TV's volume.
The other last super interesting thing you get
by connecting over HDMI instead of just a
standard optical audio cable,
is that the soundbar is able to turn the TV off,
which is, it's like the holy grail of smart assistance.
Nothing seems to work to turn TV off HDMI CEC.
But this thing does it.
Alexa, turn off the TV.
- [Alexa] Okay.
- And the heavens opened.
It's amazing.
For Sonos it's really important
that they be the Switzerland of sound I guess.
I don't know if that's my phrase not theirs.
But they wanna work with everybody.
At the same time and they don't wanna give
anybody any preferences.
That said, this thing works with Alexa now,
and it probably is gonna work the best with Alexa
at least for the time being because they've had
time to customize Alexa's software.
Why is it so important to Sonos
to work with Alexa and then maybe later the
Google Assistant or definitely later in the,
maybe some other stuff will come along.
Why do you want to be so agnostic
across all of these different voice assistants
that'll just partner with Amazon
and calling it a day?
- So home sound system for us means shared.
We believe many different people would want to use it.
And we don't want to dominate what the
right control paradigm for people is,
nor the right assistant.
We've already been here before with phones.
So you know, the sharing home sound system,
maybe one person has an Android phone,
the other one has an iOS phone.
We never said, okay, now we're only going
to support iOS.
- [Dieter] Right.
- And the whole household, please go iOS.
Or we're only going to support apps on Android.
The whole house have got Android.
We just don't believe that it's very consumer friendly.
- Here's the weird thing about Sonos' position.
In the past it got to create this beautiful garden
of perfect music experiences.
They had their own remote, they had their own router,
they had all their own stuff.
But now they can't do that anymore.
They have to exist in these other
super complicated ecosystems.
They're connected up to your TV,
which has an insane tangle of wires behind it.
And if something fails there,
they're gonna be part of that,
and you might blame Sonos, even if it's not their fault.
And that especially applies to digital assistants.
If Alexa or eventually Google Assistant doesn't work,
it's gonna be your Sonos speaker
that you feel like doesn't work.
And that could be a problem for them.
- Sometimes you don't want it to work.
Sometimes you want to actually,
don't want to go through the on-screen display
and get T-V.
- Yeah, sure, right.
- Right, so there's these things
where you go like, okay, where does it make sense
to use voice, where do we actually want
to tone it down a little bit?
A lot of the early integrations have been focused
on making the iterances as simple
and intuitive as possible.
So rather saying, Alexa, tell Sonos
to play the Beatles from Spotify,
in the living room.
- Yeah, yeah.
- We wanted it to be, Alexa, play the Beatles.
- Sonos sees a really huge opportunity
in the living room.
They've got the PlayBar but it's super expensive.
And so this thing at only 400 bucks
is way more accessible.
And if you're Sonos, you want lots of people buying
their very first Sonos speaker.
Because they know, in fact they told me today,
that as many as 38% of their customers,
once they have one Sonos speaker,
buy another one.
That is a lot of upsell, and having an accessible
home speaker in the living room is a
good way to get those people into the ecosystem.
If Sonos can convince enough people
to upgrade to this thing, they could radically
expand their customer base.
And that makes this a lot more ambitious
than it appears at first glance.
And if you're Sonos expanding your customer base,
that sounds pretty good.
(snaps)
- [Crew Member] Do the end card.
Follow the beat.
Do it.
- Thank, you, for, watching, this,
Sonos, video, if you, liked it,
hit Subscribe.
(laughing)

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Sonos' new soundbar is taking on the HomePod with Alexa

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