Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra Soundbar Review

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra is sturdy and sleek. It has rounded edges, and the body is covered in perforated plastic grills. Indicator lights shine through the perforations, but depending on the angle, they're a bit difficult to see. There aren't physical buttons, creating an elegant, uninterrupted shape.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra comes with the Sonos Sub 4. The subwoofer is matte plastic with a port on the side in the center. It has a pairing button on the front to connect to the soundbar and an Ethernet port around the back. The stylish, sleek design matches the rounded look of the soundbar. According to the manufacturer, you can place it upright or on its side. Our testing was performed with the sub upright.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra kit includes two Sonos Era 300 speakers. They're mostly plastic, with a semi-matte finish and a rounded shape. You can mount them or stand them on their tiny legs located on the undersides.

This soundbar is too wide to sit between the legs of a 65-inch TV stand. However, because it's low profile, it won't block the TV screen.

The Sub 4 is relatively narrow and as tall as it is deep, like a small desktop tower. It has the same dimensions as the previous Sub 3.

The Sonos Era 300 speakers are fairly chunky for satellites, and they can connect wirelessly to the soundbar.

You can mount the soundbar and satellites using the built-in holes for mounting hardware. That said, you need to supply your own hardware and brackets (for the bar and for the satellites), which aren't small added costs, especially if you choose the Sonos-branded mounts.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra has amazing build quality. The bar itself is hefty and made of sturdy plastic, covered entirely by a rounded perforated grille with tight seams. The same can be said for the Sub 4 and Sonos Era 300 speakers, which are made from premium and dense plastic. The included cables are molded to fit flat against the soundbar, but if you use generic cables instead, they'll stick out more.

• 4x power cables (6.2 ft/1.9 m)
• HDMI cable (5.25 ft/1.6 m)
• Warranty info
• Setup guides

The stereo frequency response sounds impressive. We used TruePlay, the manufacturer's room calibration tool, and set Surround Sound mode to 'Ambient' under the Music Playback sub menu because that mode plays back stereo audio. We didn't make any other changes or activate any other sound enhancements. Compression was left on 'Automatic.' The sub was placed upright and parallel to the wall, as shown in the manufacturer's advertising materials.

The stereo response outputs a solid amount of deep bass with good low-end extension, and it doesn't overpower the fundamentals of the mid-range, like speech. The mids aren't exactly flat, though. Depending on the pitch, the low-mids sound a bit uneven, with a dip that thins out bass harmonics. A peak and a dip in the mid-mids means instruments like cellos can sound present or distant depending on the notes being played. However, melodies and vocals are still easy to make out. Trebly elements, such as harmonics from vocals and cymbals, sound clear and brilliant without becoming sharp.

You can play with the sound enhancement tools to alter the frequency response to your taste, but the default stereo settings don't require additional tweaking to sound balanced.

The stereo soundstage is great—it extends beyond the edges of the bar without holes in the stereo image. Focus within the soundstage is concise and easy to locate and only diffuses towards the extremes of the left and right edges of the soundstage.

The soundbar's stereo dynamics are amazing. It gets loud enough to fill most rooms at max volume while retaining the audio's punch and clarity. Only the lowest frequencies exhibit compression when listening at high volumes.

The center channel is very good, but it definitely trends toward bassy and a bit excited in the treble range. This extra bass pushes down the mid-range somewhat by comparison, which can cause voices to sound very slightly hollow, though still detailed. The bass emphasis adds fullness to the sound, but it can also obscure the mid-range somewhat.

Because the soundbar employs the subwoofer with the center channel driver, it sounds considerably bassier than the standalone Sonos Arc Ultra with its integrated sub. The extra bass can overwhelm the higher frequencies of dialogue a bit more than the all-in-one, which trades off in other ways, such as surround sound. Fortunately, you can EQ this or use the 'Speech Enhancement' tool if it's not clear enough with busy mixes.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra's surround performance is very good. The soundbar has side-firing drivers at either end of it, and the satellites do, too. They also playback rear-facing channels out of the dedicated directional drivers to create a more immersive surround experience. Using the subwoofer as well, the kit outputs a full and somewhat excited sound that's tuned virtually the same as the center channel frequency response. The boosted low-end adds a lot of thump and rumble to surround mixes that you can feel, while the treble range is bright with crisp details.

The soundbar includes four up-firing drivers for object-based audio formats like Dolby Atmos—two in front and two behind you—to create a more immersive sound. In combination with the sub, the sound is rather balanced, with a good amount of rumble during action scenes. However, if you're a basshead, you might want more low-end. As is, the bass is controlled and dialogue remains clear over explosions. Sharp and metallic sounds come across as bright but not piercing.

Subjectively, elements are easy to separate within the height dimension, and they don't sound artificial or overly compressed. Only side-to-side movements that also ascend and descend seem less clearly defined in space and a bit harder to track. Compared to the standalone Sonos Arc Ultra, the set's Sonos Era 300 satellites make a noticeable improvement in the impression of verticality, though.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra includes several sound enhancements for customizing the experience to your needs. The Sonos app uses TruePlay to calibrate the soundbar to your space's acoustics. However, it can only do a quick calibration (a short test tone plays, and the sound adjusts accordingly) with Android devices. iOS devices can use the advanced mode, which walks you through the process by calibrating the sound at various places in the room.

There are modes such as 'Night' to compress loud and quiet sounds to playback at similar volumes so you don't wake up the household. 'Speech Enhancement' has three strengths and helps boost poorly mixed content to make dialogue easier to hear. While there isn't a proper equalizer, you can alter the bass and treble sliders to taste. You can also select modes in the Surround Sound menu to apply a digital signal processor (DSP) to conventional stereo music mixes to simulate a surround mix or choose modes like 'Ambient,' which plays back your audio in stereo. Unlike the all-in-one Sonos Arc Ultra, the extra sub and satellites come with the ability to adjust their heights within the app.

The soundbar's inputs are minimal: a single HDMI eARC port and an Ethernet port. If you want HDMI 2.1 In passthrough, consider something like the Sony BRAVIA Theater Quad with Bass Module. Sonos sells an adapter for connecting older devices via Optical, but the soundbar doesn't have an Optical port built-in.

The soundbar supports a wide array of audio formats, including Dolby Atmos, Dolby Digital Plus, and DTS. These are correctly implemented without downmixing. While the bar can playback DTS:X and DTS-HD MA content, these are downmixed, and technically, the manufacturer doesn't claim to support these formats.

You don't get an Optical port on this soundbar, though you can purchase an adapter from the manufacturer. The downside is that the adapter uses your only HDMI port.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra's audio latency via the eARC port is great. Audio and video playback in sync across supported formats. Formats with more processing, like Dolby Atmos, exhibit higher latencies than PCM formats (which is usually expected), but generally, you won't notice lip-sync issues. However, if your visuals are out of sync with the audio, the companion app features Dialogue Sync to manually adjust the delay so they match.

The soundbar lacks a dedicated Optical port and requires purchasing the brand's HDMI to Optical adapter separately. This is a departure from the previous generation Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc, which comes with the necessary adapter.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra adds Bluetooth to its suite of wireless connectivity, which was absent on the previous Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc. You also get Wi-Fi and Apple AirPlay 2, but there isn't Chromecast support.

If you already have the Sonos Ace Wireless headphones, you can connect them to the bar to seamlessly play back your TV's audio on your headphones instead. This requires that the headphones' 'Wearing Detection' be enabled. That said, there's a mix of positive anecdotal reports and users reporting out-of-sync audio, so your experience may vary. In our testing, there was a lag across all audio formats when using the Ace Wireless with the soundbar's TV Swap function, ranging from 116 ms for PCM Atmos audio to 165 ms for Dolby Digital Plus audio.

The soundbar's interface consists of three front-facing LEDs that flash to indicate that the soundbar registers a command.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra has several touch-sensitive controls across the top of the bar and towards the back. These controls address play/pause, tracking skipping, a volume slider, and a speech bubble icon to prompt your voice assistant. Around the rear of the bar, next to the HDMI port, you'll find a Bluetooth pairing button and a physical mic mute toggle. While the Sonos Era 300 speakers have controls, they're disabled when grouped with the soundbar.

Like the previous Sonos Arc, the Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra doesn't include a physical remote. Instead, you control the soundbar using the companion app. You can manage connectivity, playback, various listening modes, and grouped products on the same network around your home. The app works with iOS and Android devices, though you can't perform the advanced TruePlay room calibration in the Android version. Because the app is used to manage other Sonos products, its organization and sub-menus aren't the easiest to navigate.

The same app is used across different Sonos products and was revamped in May 2024 with stripped-back features, which Sonos acknowledged frustrated many users. Most of these functions have subsequently returned to the app, but this raises a point about the volatility of relying entirely on an app for your experience of the soundbar.

The Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set with Arc Ultra supports Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant/Gemini. If you prefer greater privacy, there's a physical mic mute around the back of the soundbar next to the HDMI port.