Sonos Arc Ultra brings cinema-quality spatial sound to your living room
Sonos has finally launched its newest soundbar, the Sonos Arc Ultra, alongside a freshly-redesigned Sub 4 to bring what it calls “cinema-quality” sound to your home.
New devices have been long-rumored to be coming out of the Sonos camp and they managed to make it before the holiday season. This comes as Sonos continues to improve its mobile app experience.
Headlining the news is the Sonos Arc Ultra, which looks quite similar to the existing Sonos Arc. The Arc Ultra delivers louder and more precise 9.1.4 spatial audio — up from 5.1.2 spatial audio — to your living room.
The speaker maker is touting what it calls Sound Motion, which is a new technology that produces bigger sound from smaller components.
The new internals of the Sonos Arc Ultra
This allows them to pack a larger soundstage while giving the soundbar a sleeker appearance. It has 14 audio drivers built in that can be tuned with Sonos’s Trueplay feature available in its mobile app.
Enabled via the app, Sonos has a new Voice Enhancement feature. This builds on its previous dialogue boost to bring clarity to the central channel, similar to Apple’s new addition in tvOS 18.
It also supports Bluetooth audio input alongside AirPlay and control via the Sonos app. You can choose Amazon Alexa or the Sonos Voice Control for its voice assistant.
There’s a continued focus on environmental standards with the new speaker too. Sonos saying they are using more screws and less adhesive, decreasing packing size, and reducing idle power consumption.
To pair with the new Arc Ultra is the Sub 4. It was redesigned but carries over much of the old gen-3 aesthetic.
It’s a rounded square with a hole in the center for the dual custom force-cancelling drivers. The outside has a new matte finish to better blend into your home’s interior.
The updated Sonos Sub 4
Internally, Sonos has updated the wireless radio for improved performance with your other speakers. Plus increased processing power and memory are intended to help future proof the sub.
Finally, Sonos has more updates to the Sonos app. Starting on October 15th, the Sonos mobile app will have improved queue management, music library indexing and reliability improvements, and a few Android-specific tweaks.
