Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Soundbar Review

The Sonos Arc is a premium soundbar with a sleek design. It's a solid and heavy soundbar with a sturdy build, and it's available in 'Black' and 'White' color variants.

The Sonos Sub is a large subwoofer with a glossy finish. It has a unique design, with two subwoofers facing each other on the inside, and each of their ports facing out into the rectangular hole in the middle.

The Sonos Era 300 speakers are available as standalone speakers, but you can also pair them to the bar for surround sound. They're rounded speakers with a sleek and stylish design, and the grilles in front help to protect the drivers inside.

The bar is pretty wide, so it doesn't fit between the legs of a 55" TV stand. Still, it won't obscure the screen since it isn't very tall.

The sub is large and heavy but about the same size as a typical desktop computer. It connects wirelessly to the bar, too.

The Sonos Era 300 is a bigger, wider speaker compared to the Sonos One SL speakers. It takes up some space in your living room, but since it connects to the bar wirelessly, you have some flexibility when setting it up.

You can mount the bar and the satellites to your wall. However, you have to purchase the brackets from Sonos separately.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc has an excellent build quality. Overall, it's a premium setup that feels sturdy and solid. The bar and the speakers are both made mostly of plastic, which feels very durable. Each have grilles designed to protect the drivers inside. Plus, the plastic build for the subwoofer feels very strong and solid.

• Get Started manuals
• Cleaning cloth (sub)
• 4x power cables (6.2 ft / 1.9m)
• HDMI to Optical adapter - for soundbar (9cm)
• HDMI cable (4.9 ft / 1.5m)

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc has a great stereo frequency response. This premium soundbar has a room correction tool available only with iOS devices. However, Android users can always use its bass and treble adjustments to compensate for room acoustics changes. Overall, you get a nice and balanced sound suitable for listening to many different types of audio content. The addition of the Era 300 speakers means that stereo content like music plays from all available channels on the bar as well as the satellites. As a result, you notice that audio sometimes sounds over-processed, especially compared to other premium setups like the Samsung HW-Q990C. It's not too distracting, so the sound remains pleasing overall.

We also evaluated the bar's performance when listening to Dolby Atmos Music. It provided a nice listening experience, especially with tracks like "On The Run" by Pink Floyd, since sound is accurately placed in the space around you for an immersive overall feel. With "Bad Guy" by Billie Eilish, the thumpy bass makes her vocals subtle in the mix, but it's not enough to overpower her voice. You get an all-around sound, which sometimes seems a bit fake, but it's not overwhelming enough to take away from the overall listening experience.

The default settings for this soundbar fall without our target range, so if you prefer a more even sound with stereo content, we recommend sticking to them.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc has a great stereo soundstage. The soundstage itself is perceived to be a bit wider than the bar. It tries to use some tricks to make the soundstage seem wider than that, which means that sound effects can seem like they're pushed towards the far ends at times rather than coming from a more natural location in the soundstage. Still, focus is good overall, so you can pinpoint effects to accurate locations in the space around you.

This soundbar gets loud, so it can fill up larger and more open spaces with sound. There's not a lot of distortion when you push it to max volume either, so audio is reproduced with clarity even when you crank up the volume.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc has a discrete center channel designed to improve vocal clarity in the mix. This channel's balanced frequency response means that dialogue is clear and present in the mix, and it's easy to follow along with the action on screen.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc has an excellent surrounds performance. Due to the number of drivers built into the Sonos Era 300 speakers, the 5.1.2 bar transforms into a 7.1.4 setup with two extra surround channels. Pulling the satellites away from the wall also ensures the side-firing drivers have enough space to distribute sound. As a result, you get a really clear and real feel to your audio, and sound effects stretch into the space around you as if you've been dropped right into the heart of your movies. The frequency response on these surround channels is quite balanced, too, so effects reproduce with clarity and detail.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc uses up-firing speakers on both the bar and the satellites to ricochet sound off the ceiling, which creates the illusion of height with Dolby Atmos content. The frequency response on these channels is very even and balanced, meaning that sound effects are clear and accurate in their reproduction, so you don't miss any of the action taking place around you.

For a better sense of the bar's real-world performance, we also subjectively evaluate its soundstage with height content. This setup provides a really good, immersive sound. Sound effects stretch into the space around your couch, giving you a clear and real feel. The sub brings out the rumble in action-packed scenes, too. Plus, compared to the Sonos Arc with Sub + One SL Speakers, the Sonos Era 300 speakers add two extra up-firing drivers to the mix, which adds a bit more height over your head. It's especially noticeable in scenes where a helicopter flies over your head. It's a premium setup that stands out from the crowd.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc has many sound enhancement features. As with most premium setups on the market, it has a room correction tool to optimize the bar's sound based on your room's unique acoustics. It's only available with iOS devices at this time, though. There are some bass and treble adjustments on hand for manual adjustment, though, which is handy for Android users. Compared to the Sonos Arc with Sub + One SL Speakers, the Sonos Era 300 speakers offer additional features, including a tool that sets the speakers to add either an Ambient or Full surround sound. However, this doesn't apply to Dolby Atmos Music.

You can connect the bar to your TV over HDMI or Optical. However, unlike the Sony BRAVIA Theater Quad with Bass Module, it lacks an HDMI In port, so the bar doesn't support video passthrough.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc supports many common audio formats over HDMI ARC. It can playback common 5.1 surround sound formats like Dolby Digital and lossless and object-based formats like Dolby Atmos. You're likely to come across both on streaming platforms and Blu-rays.

Common surround sound formats like Dolby Digital and DTS are supported via Optical. Dolby Digital is the more common of the two, but DTS is often used as a fallback for higher-quality formats on Blu-rays.

This bar has an excellent latency performance via ARC, ensuring that your audio and visuals stay in sync. If you want to manually adjust for delay, you can use the TV Dialogue Sync feature available in the Sonos app. However, only four settings are available, ranging between 75 ms to 2000 ms of delay. It's also worth noting that some apps and TVs compensate for latency.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc has an amazing latency performance when using the HDMI to Optical adapter. Latency is low, meaning the audio you hear is in sync with the video you see on the screen. It's especially great for watching videos and movies. Some apps and TVs may compensate for latency differently, though.

Without an HDMI In port, this bar can't do video passthrough. If this is important to you, you'll want to check out a bar like the Samsung HW-Q990D instead.

As with most Sonos soundbars, the wireless connectivity options are limited. You can stream audio from your mobile devices over Wi-Fi, Apple AirPlay 2, and Spotify Connect. There's no Bluetooth support, though.

While the bar lacks a display, two lights on top of the bar change colors depending on the registered commands. A microphone light also shows when the microphone is activated.

A few controls are on top of the bar to control basic functions like play/pause, the volume, and the microphone.

Sonos soundbars don't come with remotes; you're meant to control them through the S2 app. The app lets you connect multiple Sonos products to spread audio throughout your room and control the sound features on the bar itself. You can see a video here.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc has built-in voice assistant support that you can mute using the included button. If you're streaming with Apple AirPlay 2, you can also set up Siri to control Apple Music.