Sonos continues to make headlines with its impressive home theater systems and multi-room wireless audio solutions, including soundbars. It has brought up a pretty affordable and compact soundbar, Sonos Ray. The Sonos Ray price of $279 beats all the price records of the company’s products, with each being priced at $400 or more. It is also highly compact, with less than two feet in length and under 2 kg in weight. Still, the sound quality is in the premium range for relatively mid-sized rooms.
This Sonos Ray review contains all the features and updates you want to know about.
Sonos Ray soundbar is more suitable for people who want to upgrade their TV speakers’ sound but don’t care much about room-shaking bass and Dolby Atmos support.
Design
The Ray has a tapered design that is even smaller than the already compact Beam. All its speakers are forward-facing, unlike the other Sonos soundbars. Touch-sensitive buttons are present on top for starting, pausing, and adjusting the volume. Rather than on top, the LED status light is on the front, which is, again, unlike the other soundbars. There is a power jack, Ethernet port, setup button, and optical audio jack on the back of the Sonos Ray.
The connection process is straightforward, especially if you have set up a Sonos speaker before at your home. You just need to plug the Ray into the wall and connect it to your TV through an optical audio cable. Then, finish the setup process in the Sonos app on your mobile. If you haven’t installed one before, you will need to authorize the various streaming services you want to use.
Sound Quality
Next, you can tune the Sonos Ray via Trueplay using the microphone on an iPad or iPhone. It’s a bit of a weird process, but the experience is enhanced manyfold once you do it.
Talking about the sound quality, the Ray has the edge over the built-in speakers of TVs. The dialogue delivery is apparent, evident in dramas such as HBO’s ‘The Staircase.’ The intense and action-filled sequences, such as those in the Marvel movies, are other media to experience their high-quality sound.
Films like ‘Pacific Rim’ and ‘Transformers’ also reflect the Sonos Ray soundbar’s well-balanced mix. Not just for movies, it is a great device for listening to music.
The Ray includes two tweeters with split waveguides, two center mid-woofers, four class-D amplifiers, and a reflective bass system. Although it has much simpler acoustics than the Beam, the Sonos Ray still managed to pull it off well.
For improving bass performance, you can pair it with the Sonos sub just like other Sonos home theater devices of Sonos. To improve the immersion level, you can also use two Sonos One speakers as rear surrounds. You can stream music directly from the options available in the Sonos app, Spotify Connect, or Apple AirPlay 2.
The Sonos Ray continues to have the multi-room audio feature like other Sonos speakers. This is highly useful, where you can play the same or different music on multiple speakers on your wifi network. And you can control the soundbar with the Sonos app, Apple AirPlay 2, or your TV remote.
Drawbacks
Of course, it can’t be a panacea with the price range it offers. It has some drawbacks as well. The foremost of them is that there is no HDMI support. And this makes sense because the Sonos Ray doesn’t support advanced audio formats such as Dolby Atmos anyway. But it supports Dolby Digital 5.1, Linear PCM, and DTS Digital because you can add other Sonos surround speakers.
Even after having a solid stereo presence, it is not at the level of the first-gen Sonos beam. The more extensive and more complex speaker array of the Beam still stands ahead of the Ray, even when the Beam doesn’t support Dolby Atmos.
The Sonos Ray fits well with people who want to upgrade their TC quality sound. But if you want to get a theater-level experience, you might be better off with other robust gadgets.
The voice control is another feature where the Sonos Ray soundbar misses out compared to the others. There is no built-in assistant for your facilitation like Google Assistant, Alexa, or the upcoming voice control feature of Sonos. This is unlike the Sonos Beam and Sonos Arc.
Because the TruePlay option is available only through the iPhone or iPad, its use is limited. After all, this feature is crucial for creating a personalized music experience.
Final Word
The Sonos Ray India will be available from September at Rs. 31,999. And the device is a decent one to upgrade your TV’s audio levels to enjoy some nice music on a medium scale. The Night Sound technology for reducing the intensity of loud effects and the Speech Enhancement technology for greater clarity are made especially for such settings only. But go for the other advanced devices if you want the theater kind of atmosphere. That ends the Sonos Ray review, India.
