![]() I've watched this scene, and movie, on various Dolby Atmos systems, including ones that cost more than my house, so I have a pretty good idea of what to expect in terms of the surround sound experience. In it, Ryan Reynolds flies around in an airplane, doing crazy stunts over the ocean until he eventually fakes an engine failure, ejects, and makes everyone believe he died in the plane crash. To get a quick taste of the Dolby Atmos experience, I can recommend the opening scene of the 2019 action film 6 Underground available on Netflix (you need to be a Netflix Premium subscriber to watch it with Dolby Atmos audio enabled). The easiest way to experience Dolby Atmos on the Sonos Beam Gen 2 is to become a Netflix, Amazon Prime, or Disney+ subscriber, as all three services offer an ever-growing list of Atmos-enabled titles. In other words, Atmos-enabled content won't constantly bombard you with sounds from above, but only when it actually makes sense in relation to what's happening in the scene you're watching. ![]() As many of you already know, the key difference between Dolby Atmos and traditional 5.1 and 7.1 surround sound systems, both physical and virtual, is that it offers object-based audio, meaning each object has matching metadata which tells the system where in the sound field to position that individual sound. Of course, this is only true if the scene demands it. In theory, your ears should be tricked into believing that the sound is coming from above and not only from the left, front and center. Sonos came up with an algorithm that does some smart DSP sorcery to create the vertical channels virtually. ![]() Unlike its bigger brother, the Arc, the Beam Gen 2 doesn't have any upward-firing speaker drivers, which are a basic requirement of a proper Dolby Atmos surround system. They are joined by three passive radiators, two at the front and one at the rear, which help with bass reproduction. There are four elliptical midrange speakers on the front and both sides, and a single central tweeter. Sound QualityThe Sonos Beam Gen 2 is equipped with a total of five dynamic speaker units and as many Class D amplifiers. Adding it via NFC is another option on smartphones supporting it. A couple of simple steps later the soundbar will be connected to your home network, ready for use. To add it to the Sonos app, you only have to tap the "Add Product" option and wait for the app to find it, which doesn't take more than a couple of seconds. The same can be said for the initial setup of the Beam Gen 2. Unlike many other smart soundbars on the market, the Sonos Beam Gen 2 never feels fiddly or annoying to use. This is useful if grouping the Beam Gen 2 with other Sonos speaker(s) in your home after activating the "Ungroup on Autoplay" option, the other speakers will continue playing whatever was playing, while the Beam Gen 2 will play TV audio.Īll this combined results in a seamless, logical, and thoroughly enjoyable user experience. There's also an option to ungroup the Beam Gen 2 from other Sonos speakers once it starts receiving an audio signal from your TV. If you don't want it to behave like that, you're welcome to turn off the "TV Autoplay" option in its settings, which has the soundbar play your music until you manually switch it to TV mode. The switch only takes a couple of seconds. Then, as soon as you turn your TV on, the Beam Gen 2 automatically switches to the HDMI eARC input and starts playing the sound it receives from your TV. ![]() When your TV is off, you can simply use the Sonos mobile or desktop app to play music from your preferred streaming services or radio stations on the Beam Gen 2. But what if this is your only Sonos speaker and you simply want to use it as a smart speaker when you're not watching TV and a "normal" soundbar when you are? Well, Sonos has you covered. To fully appreciate everything good about the Sonos Beam Gen 2, one has to take into consideration the stability, reliability, and intuitiveness of the Sonos' multiroom system, which I went over on the previous page of this review. ![]()
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