So FireTV Cube arrived today and I've been playing with it for awhile. Overall it's a rather amazing product. I'm going to enjoy using it. It changes things quite a bit. I'm trying to look at it from three different perspectives. The first being on how it operates alone, how it operates when your tv is hooked up to a playbar or playbase, and how it may compare to a beam.



The setup was pretty set forward. After connecting, it walks you through setting up control of your tv and soundbar. After that, it says you're done. You have to look around a little fit to see how to set up cable control, blue ray, and others.



Turning on/off the tv is pretty straightforward. However, it always turns on to your firetv input no matter what input you were on previously. The on/off command is going to work from any Alexa in your home for some reason. I'm not sure why, or what happens if you have more than one cube in the house.



FireTV commands work as they did before with Alexa. What's interesting is that you can pair a different Echo with your cube, so that both Alexa devices control firetv operation. That can have some useful operations.



The new commands, such as switching inputs or changing the channel on cable sattellite work well. They will only work on the cube, not any other echos in the home,



It get's rather confusing in that the cube will sometimes respond to you with it's own speaker, and sometimes it will speak through the soundbar. For example, if I ask about the weather while watching cable, the audio will duck (most of the time) and the cube will tell me the weather. If I ask the same while watching firetv, it will pause, show me the weather, and speak through the soundbar.



If you request music while the tv is off, it will turn on the tv and play the music through the tv.



In regards to use this in a setup with a playbar or playbase, I don't feel like it's ideal. It's still very early, but because the cube will sometimes use it's own speakers and sometimes through the playbar (as I have it setup), I won't hear the response when I'm using Sonos for a non-tv source. I've been messing it for awhile, and that's happened a few times. I'm not sure if it would happen much in real world type scenarios.



As far as playback of music, I'd rather the music stream directly from Sonos, instead of through the cube to tv to Sonos. For one thing, my rear speakers are still in surround mode, not full audio. I also don't want to have to have the tv on in order to play music. As it stands now, I'm going to continue make music requests through the Sonos skill...which quite often means the cube thinks it can still talk through the playbar, but the playbar is off tv mode. Not good.



Right now, I'm feeling like I'd want to have a second echo in the room for most commands, and just use the cube (with a different wake word) for tv related commands. That begs the question though, would it be better to get a logitech harmony setup instead of the cube for that?



Overall, is combining a Sonos playbar/playbase with a firetv going to be wife friendly?



Lastly,speculating on whetther it would be better to get a cube for voice control/tv control vs getting the beam...it's hard to say. Both will turn on the tv, switch inputs, and control firetv. The cube has the advantage in controlling cable. I'm pretty sure the Beam is going to have an advantage in controlling music There shouldn't be any scenarios where you don't hear the Alexa response.. As far as ease of use, I think the cube will be easy tois use with non-sonos, single input soundbar (maybe receiver, don't know). Mix the cube with a sonos soundbar and it gets complicated. I think the beam will be easy to use as well, but if there is a cube connect to the tv, it's going to get complicated.