New Sonos Beam Owner Feedback

I suppose the Beam is for smaller rooms and apartments were bass is not welcome, needed, or allowed! If you want good home cinema, good surround, good bass, you’re probably more of a playbar customer. Basically it’s two different markets.

My living room is 16x20 feet and the beam is more than adequate, I am not an audiofile who dribbles at the thought of something being the best of the best to be honest, there is more to worry about in life.

The audio seems fine for TV and decent enough for music, the added bonus of Alexa is brilliant as we have Philips Hue everywhere so a single device can act as a wireless speaker, soundbar and control for the house.

New to the Sonos world so this is my first purchase to replace an aging Yamaha AV receiver and floorstanders, the wife is happy with the extra space she now has!

Bought from John Lewis with the benefit of the 2 year warranty.

Very impressed so far, was a breeze to setup. Using HDMI ARC and we can control the volume of the Sky Q box.

Alexa works well, we can also replace our Echo Dot in the living room which is handy.

Seems to work fairly seamlessly, the downside is I now want the rears and the sub :)

How did you set up Beam with your Sky Q box and do you get sound throughput.

Sky Q into a HDMI port on the TV.
HDMI-ARC Port on the TV into the Beam.
I then went into the Sky Q menu and selected Sonos as the TV control.
I have disabled my TV's built in speakers in the menu also.

All just seemed to work fine, perhaps I was just lucky with my TV combination?

Happy Beam owner reporting from downunder..

Hooked up to my 'aging gracefully' Panasonic VT60 (VT65 in the UK) plasma and ARC works perfectly.

In fact, the ARC handshake is infinitely more reliable (hasn't had a failure yet) compared to my previous soundbar, the Philips Fidelio B5 (HTL9100). The Philips works 50% of the time and every now and then would not detect the signal ('unbonded' from TV) necessitating a power cycle. I would assume Beam works better because it's always on state.. rather than the usual / other AV products which go into standby / on cycle.

Tour De France is much more enjoyable and I'm finding it easier to stay up late now with the Beam :)

The only downside is that I prefer music to come out only from the rear surrounds (in this case, two Play 1s), not the Beam. There's no easy way / setting to do this other then completely 'unbond' the surrounds which takes minutes. Anyone has any tips on this?

The only downside is that I prefer music to come out only from the rear surrounds (in this case, two Play 1s), not the Beam. There's no easy way / setting to do this other then completely 'unbond' the surrounds which takes minutes. Anyone has any tips on this?

You can change the behaviour of the rears to play full stereo rather than ambient while playing music - I think it's in the Room settings somewhere. Yes, the Beam still plays, but with each speaker in the group giving 100%. I think it actually sounds awesome. The setting doesn't affect TV audio.

Perhaps Sonos could add an additional option where only the rears play music? Maybe some people would prefer that.

I would love as well full stereo even for TV audio on TV stereo signals rather than having surround silent.