Sonos Arc Ultra review: Scaling it up

The Sonos Arc Ultra is an update to a product I was very impressed by when it was first released. The original Arc soundbar was pretty much perfect from a sound quality standpoint and integrated seamlessly into the brand’s multi-room ecosystem. As a standalone soundbar, there wasn’t much to improve. The only thing I disliked about it was its limited number of inputs.

Alas, this latest iteration of the Sonos Arc hasn’t fixed that particular gripe. On the rear of the soundbar, the only audio connection is a single eArc-enabled HDMI 2.1 port. The only other connections are an Ethernet port and the bar’s figure-of-eight power input.

The Sonos Arc Ultra is a big upgrade, however, boosting the number of drivers inside the chassis, the number of channels the soundbar is capable of handling and the general design. It’s a better-sounding soundbar as a result, delivering more detail, better bass and more convincing surround sound, but it also costs a great deal more, the price rising to £999 from the original Arc’s launch price of £799.

Sonos Arc Ultra review: What you need to know

At first glance, it doesn’t look as if there’s all that much difference between the Arc Ultra and its predecessor. The general design language is similar, with its oval “racetrack” squashed-tube profile, and it’s built with a super-sturdy plastic chassis wrapped in a perforated metal grille.

It is 36mm wider than the Arc but slotted in nicely in front of my 55in LG C1 OLED TV without obscuring the bottom portion of the picture. For context, it’s 75mm tall (12mm shorter than the Arc) and 111mm deep (5mm less than the Arc).

Sonos has also changed where the physical controls sit on the Arc Ultra, moving them to a stubby plastic bracket that sticks out at the rear. This means the look isn’t quite as clean and elegant as before – bizarrely, Sonos says it’s there to “prevent visual distraction” – but it does mean you’re far less likely to activate the controls by accident when you’re dusting or when the cat decides to walk in front of the TV.

Sonos has made all the most meaningful changes on the inside, where it is incorporating its brand-new Sound Motion driver technology for the first time. It’s a technology that’s capable of squeezing out more bass from smaller drivers – twice as much if what Sonos said when it launched the Ultra and Sub 4 is to be believed.

That’s thanks to the new, integrated dual-motor Sound Motion woofer, but isn’t just the bass that’s been improved. Sonos has also upped the total number of drivers from 11 to 14 and the channel count from 5.0.2 to 9.1.4. There’s improved speech handling according to Sonos, and a rearrangement of the sideways-firing drivers, designed to enhance the way the bar steers audio around your room. As before, the Sonos Arc Ultra supports the Dolby Atmos surround sound standard, either lossless via Dolby TrueHD or lossy, via Dolby Digital Plus, but not the DTS:X (only DTS Digital Surround is supported). 

It connects to your home wireless network to integrate into a multi-speaker home audio system that’s managed via the Sonos app. You can also upgrade it from a standalone soundbar by adding a subwoofer or wireless rear speakers. The Sub 3 (£589), new Sub 4 (£799) and Sub Mini (£399) are all supported, as are the ERA 100 and ERA 300. There’s also support for Amazon Alexa and Sonos Voice Control, but those who prefer Google Assistant will have to look elsewhere.

Sonos Arc Ultra review: Price and competition

The big news, aside from the technological, audio and design changes, is that Sonos has bumped up the price of its premium soundbar and not by a few quid. Where the original Arc cost £799 when it was first launched, the Sonos Arc Ultra will set you back a whopping £999.

While we’ve seen premium standalone soundbars cost even more – the Sennheiser Ambeo Plus at £1,299 immediately springs to mind – £999 is still a fair chunk of change, and if you want to go for the “proper” Atmos system, that price rises to £2,426 for the “Ultimate” package. This includes two ERA 300 rear channel speakers and a Sonos Sub 4 wireless subwoofer.

If you’re not willing to stump up that much cash – and I certainly understand if that’s the case – here are two eminently capable options that pack a huge punch for a lot less:

• For a mere £569 you can pick up a Samsung HW-Q930C, which comes with a subwoofer and separate rear channel speakers with height drivers in the box. It isn’t the greatest thing to listen to music on, but delivers 14 channels in a 9.1.4 configuration, just like the Arc Ultra.

• Further up the chain is our favourite soundbar at the moment – the Samsung HW-Q990D – which ups the channel count to 16 in an 11.1.4 configuration and also includes rears and a subwoofer in the box. Initially launched at £1,699, you can grab one for £955 at the time of writing. That’s £40 cheaper than the Sonos Arc Ultra and gets you a whole lot more soundbar for your money.

Sonos Arc Ultra review: Design and features

There’s no doubt the Arc Ultra looks fabulous. Whether you buy it in white or black, its clean lines and unfussy yet elegant looks will fit into any living room. It’s a lot easier on the eye than the aforementioned Samsung models; indeed, along with the Sonos Arc, I think it’s the nicest-looking soundbar around.

In terms of its dimensions, it’s best suited to TVs of 55in or larger; I found it was the perfect fit for my ageing but still lovely LG C1. Even though it isn’t quite as tall as its predecessor, its 75mm height may still be too tall for your setup if you’re going to be popping it on your media unit in front of the TV.

As mentioned above, the controls for the Arc Ultra are now situated on a slim block attached to the rear of the bar instead of being integrated into the top surface. This has two benefits: first, it’s much easier to find the controls; second, it’s far easier to understand what the various controls do.

A track to the right of the block lets you adjust the volume – just drag your finger up and down it. There are touch-sensitive buttons in the centre for play/pause and skip and on the left end of the block is a button for enabling and disabling the digital voice assistant.

Otherwise, the Sonos Arc Ultra’s features are as before. Physical connections, such as they are, are found in a small cutout in the rear centre of the bar: one eARC-enabled HDMI port set into the right side of the cubby, the power connector into the left and an Ethernet connector in the centre.

The rest of the bar’s connectivity is wireless, via Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.3, with most settings and features managed via the Sonos app. This includes TruePlay – Sonos’ room tuning feature – and the new speech settings, which now let you set low, medium and high levels, where previously you could only have dialogue enhancement on or off. As before, there are two ways to set up TruePlay.

Advanced Tuning is supposedly the most accurate and involves you walking around the room waving your phone up and down while the soundbar plays back a series of test tones. The phone records how the sound reflects off the room’s various surfaces and relays that information back to the soundbar, which calibrates its EQ to suit. Quick Tuning uses the microphones in the soundbar itself instead of your phone, and is quicker to carry out but, according to Sonos, less accurate.

For this review, all tests and comparisons were carried out with the Sonos Arc Ultra and Sonos Arc tuned using the Advanced method.

Sonos Arc Ultra review: Sound quality

As detailed above, the Sonos Arc Ultra has taken a significant step forward when it comes to driver arrangement and technology over the original. There are 14 physical drivers in the Arc Ultra compared to 11 in the Arc, driven by a total of 15 digital amplifiers, and it can handle 9.1.4 Atmos content where the Arc was limited to 5.0.2.

The most significant number here is .1, which represents the bass channel, handled in the Arc Ultra by its new Sound Motion woofer. This is a rectangular, box-shaped driver with four motors, twin membranes in a push-push configuration and the capability to deliver, so Sonos says, “double the bass output of the Arc”, which was no slouch in this department.

In addition to the Sound Motion driver, the Ultra has a total of six midwoofers and seven silk-dome tweeters arranged around the chassis of the soundbar in a slightly different way from the original Arc. Two of the tweeters are on the top of the bar to look after Atmos height effects and two fire sideways out of the end of the bar, while three clusters of drivers (a pair of midwoofers and a tweeter in each) deliver the sound emerging from the front.

The good news is that the Arc Ultra sounds significantly better than the Sonos Arc. Starting with music, there’s more bass and it’s much cleaner and better defined than with the Arc. I fired up Max Cooper’s bombastic Perpetual Motion to start and it became instantly clear just how much control and power the Ultra is capable of producing at the low end. It sounds rhythmic and tight – far from the woolly, overbearing mess most standalone soundbars end up producing. It’s the sort of bass that doesn’t dominate, either, with the rest of the track’s instruments separated beautifully from the regular low-frequency pulse.

With something more acoustic, the Arc Ultra continued to deliver. I often use Declan Zapala’s Philomena as a quick way to assess how natural a speaker system sounds, its agility in the mid-bass zone and its ability to handle the nuanced details in the high frequencies. On all counts, I was very pleased with the results here. Textures and resonances of Zapala’s Spanish guitar were evident throughout, the zipping of his fingers along the strings clearly audible, while the impact of his guitar body slapping later on in the piece was delivered with a solid, room-vibrating impact.

As far as multi-channel content is concerned, the difference between the Ultra and outgoing Arc is even more stark. I began with the Dolby Atmos Blu-ray demo disc and ran through all the movie and music clips in sequence on both the Arc Ultra and then the Arc. I was immediately struck with how much three-dimensionality this soundbar is capable of delivering. I found the soundstage far deeper and taller than the standard Arc was capable of delivering, and that effects were more clearly defined and positioned in 3D space. In particular, the way the system presented height in the mix was hugely impressive.

You don’t get the hemispheric envelopment that you do with physical rear speakers. No matter how many channels Sonos says the bar is capable of handling, everything still very much sounds like it comes from in front of you. But there is a width, height and depth to the sound that transcends any standalone bar I’ve ever listened to.  

Critically, the dynamic range and sheer scale of the sound the Arc Ultra produces ensure it’s a far more convincing listen than the Arc is. The one caveat I would issue is that when things get really busy and sound effects are cascading out of the mix in acoustic torrents, things can get a little raucous. That’s something that having a proper surround system with discrete rear speakers will iron out, but you won’t get that with the Arc Ultra unless you spend a huge amount boosting it with a Sub 4 and Era 300 speakers.

Otherwise, I feel the Ultra handles centre-channel audio better than the Arc, but there isn’t a huge difference in clarity. It’s certainly nice to have three levels of adjustability, though, and the enhancement is more subtle than the Arc, which tended to sound a little artificial with speech enhancement enabled.

Sonos Arc Ultra review: Verdict

The Sonos Arc Ultra is clear evidence that the company still knows what it is doing when it comes to hardware design. It sounds brilliant, with better bass and much more convincing multi-channel audio reproduction. It is more expensive than the already pricey Arc but does just about enough to justify that extra premium. 

The trouble is that when a piece of hardware is so closely tied to its software, as Sonos gear is, it only takes a small problem with the app for consumer confidence to suffer a big knock. This year, Sonos has suffered several issues with its new software that have seriously upset the sort of customers that might be tempted to pick up an Arc Ultra to replace an older Sonos Play Bar or maybe even a Sonos Arc.

Sonos has acknowledged this and has been slowly fixing the problems, but there have been issues reported with the Arc Ultra, too, specifically around the TruePlay tuning feature when linking the Arc Ultra with other speakers. This isn’t something I experienced when I paired it with the Sub 4 or the Sub Mini from my existing setup but it’s something to be aware of – and to prepare for – if you do decide to take the plunge.

Ultimately, though, my opinion of the Sonos Arc Ultra is very similar to that of the Arc. It will be good enough for all but the most picky people to use as both their main living room speaker for music and it’s a superb standalone soundbar for movies. However, although it can sound amazing in a full surround sound system, there are other systems available that deliver better value and broader compatibility. The Samsung HW-Q990D, for instance, not only delivers superb audio quality and full surround audio with a discrete subwoofer and rear channel speakers but does so with support for Dolby Atmos and DTS:X and for under £1,000.