Sonos Ray may be managed with the identical very good Sonos companion app on iPhone, Android, iPad, Mac and Home windows. This allows you to construct a queue of tracks with albums and playlists from over 50 totally different streaming providers, together with Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, TiDAL, Spotify, and plenty of extra. The app additionally helps audiobooks, podcasts and dwell radio stations, so you will nonetheless get loads of use out of your soundbar – even when the tv is turned off. Apple’s AirPlay 2 normal is supported out-of-the-box too.
And since this can be a product from Sonos, we would anticipate a thriving marketplace for mounting brackets, stands and different equipment for this well-balanced soundbar within the coming months. That degree of help is out there with each different speaker from the US firm and is not accessible from lesser-known soundbar manufacturers you may stumble throughout on Amazon.
However whereas the Sonos Ray has scored actually extremely with us …it is not good. It solely helps an optical connection, which is not as handy as HDMI ARC and eARC know-how. Plus, there is no far-field microphone array inbuilt (one thing that privacy-conscious patrons may see as one other optimistic for the soundbar) which implies Ray would not help Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa out-of-the-box. As a substitute, you will have to hook up the Sonos Ray to an Echo Dot or Google Nest Mini to have the ability to request songs, management playback, ask for updates on the information and climate, and set the quantity utilizing solely your voice.
In our thoughts, these are fairly minor gripes. When you have quite a few Sonos or AirPlay 2-enabled audio system at dwelling already (or are pondering of shopping for some within the close to future), the Sonos Ray is an ideal and inexpensive place to begin to equipment out your own home with very good wi-fi sound. To not point out, the intelligent Speech Enhancement and Night time Sound modes will make sure you will not should repeatedly regulate the quantity throughout your newest boxset binge or blockbuster film night time.
In a packed lineup of fantastic audio system, Sonos’ all-new soundbar nonetheless manages to actually shine.
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