Is calibration really necessary for a standalone Beam?

Trueplay tuning calibrates the speaker to the room and will improve the sound quality regardless of surrounds and subs.  I would say it’s definitely worth it in my opinion.

I will probably borrow an iPhone and try it, otherwise I will always be wondering.

For me it made a massive difference in a couple of rooms and less so in the rest. Worth trying, once done you can switch it off and on at will.  If you have a room with a sub it makes a massive difference in my experience. 
worth a try, but don’t let the neighbours catch you or they’ll think you’ve lost the plot   😉

For me, although not on a Beam, it’s made extremely little difference at all. Not sure if I’m compulsively skilled at placing my speakers, or just lucky. But I’ve always considered the feature as a “nice to have/neat marketing” and never a ‘requirement to do’. If it was required, I’d think Sonos would come up with a method for Android users. 

I do think it helps some folks, just not everyone. 

OK, I tried it out and there was a difference, not huge, but noticeable. The sound had a bit more solidity to it without muddying the dialog. I can’t A/B because my brother took his iPhone back home with him :-)

Same here, in problem rooms it really helps, in decent sounding rooms it is a bit of an improvement.

You can A/B. There should be an option now in the “room” that you TruePlayed to turn it off and turn it back on. 

If you know folks with Apple gear ask around, many of them have a device good enough to TruePlay with sitting in a junk drawer. Swap them a pizza and beer for their help transferring it to you or even kick in a few bucks.

Supported devices: https://support.sonos.com/s/article/3222?language=en_US

Do not depend on the “coming soon” as devices listed there don’t always make the final cut.

Bruce, tooka look and I saw the TruePlay had been added.

Only ‘problem’ there is it only stores one profile, so if you end up leaving it on, and you move the speakers, you have to redo the process. On the other hand, if you find it doesn’t make a significant difference, it’s easy to turn ‘off’.