Sonos Announces Arc Ultra Soundbar

Well, so much for that new product freeze: Sonos today announced a budget-busting $1000 soundbar with a new acoustic architecture. It’s like that like that little flare-up about its horrible mobile app never happened.

“Arc Ultra delivers the most immersive home theater experience in a soundbar to date,” Sonos explains. “Its spatial audio capabilities extend even further than those of its predecessor, thanks to a total of 14 precisely-engineered speakers that span the full range of audio frequencies, from crisp highs to booming lows. But these speakers don’t work all on their own. They’re nested within an entirely new acoustic architecture that makes Arc Ultra unlike any soundbar you’ve heard before.”

Sonos Arc Ultra is an even more premium version of the company’s Arc soundbar, which it now says is its best-selling soundbar of all time. For $100 more than a standard Arc, the Arc Ultra provides seven tweeters, six mid-woofers, and a new Sound Motion woofer that offers much deeper bass with no vibrations and a 9.1.4 Dolby Atmos experience (nine ear-level channels, one subwoofer, and four height channels) without any additional speakers. (By comparison, the Arc provides a 5.0.2 Dolby Atmos experience.) That said, Sonos is happy to sell you two Era 300 rear speakers and a new Sub 4 too, for “the ultimate in Dolby Atmos surround sound.”

Sonos Arc Ultra also marks the debut of Quick Tune, a new version of Trueplay that is faster, easier, and compatible with Android (Trueplay was exclusive to iOS.) It also offers multi-level dialogue and speech enhancement, and in keeping with a company- and industry-wide shift, the Arc Ultra is far more sustainable than previous Sonos soundbars.

You can preorder Arc Ultra now in black or white for $1000 from the Sonos website.