 This is the Sonos Beam. It's a brand new sound bar 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 sound bar exists. It's relatively small. It's smaller than the Playbar or the Playbase. It's also an intelligent speaker, which means that this isn't just up against other random sound bars, 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 the standard called HDMI ARC tells the TV, hey, you've got a sound bar now, and all sound gets routed to it. So if you don't wanna 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 wanna 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 sound bar 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. 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 sound bar attached and that it should be able to adjust that sound bar'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 sound bar is able to turn the TV off, which is, it's like the holy grail of smart assistants. Nothing seems to work to turn TV off with HDMI CEC, but this thing does it. Alexa, turn off the TV. 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 best with Alexa, at least for the time being, because they've had time to customize Alexa software. Why is it so important to Sonos to work with Alexa and then maybe later the Google Assistant, or definitely later, and maybe some other stuff will come along? Why do you wanna be so agnostic across all of these different voice assistants that are just partnering with Amazon and calling it a day? So Home Sound System for us means shares. We believe many different people would wanna use it, and we don't wanna dominate what the right control paradigm for people is, nor the right assistant. We've already been here before with phones. So, you know, we're sharing your Home Sound System. Maybe one person has an Android phone, the other one has an iOS phone. We never said, okay, you know, we're only gonna support iOS. And the whole household, please go iOS. Or we're only gonna support apps on Android. The whole household 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 wanna talk. Sometimes you wanna talk, you don't wanna go to the onscreen display and go, T, E, right? So there's these things where you go like, okay, where does it make sense to use voice? Where do we actually wanna tone it down a little bit? A lot of the early integrations have been focused on making the utterances as simple and intuitive as possible. So rather saying, Alexa, tell Sonos to play the Beatles from Spotify in the living room. We wanted it to be Alexa to play the Beatles. Sonos sees a really huge opportunity in the living room. They've got the play bar, 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. Do the anchor, follow the beat. Do it. Thank you for watching this Sonos video. If you liked it, hit subscribe. Subscribe.