There's a word to describe the Sonos Arc. That word is "large" because this is a seriously hefty bit of living room sound equipment, available in either a white or black finish depending on your décor preference.
It's 87mm high and 115.7mm deep, which is solid enough, but it's finding the necessary 1,141.7mm of length to accommodate it that may prove a challenge if you want to install the Sonos Arc into any smaller living room or adjacent to any TV smaller than around 65 inches. For my own home set-up, it matched up nicely enough across the entirety of my TV cabinet, but only just.
There's a very solid argument to say that it would be a better match for any wall-mounted TV because you'd then also dodge any issues if your TV stand can't quite clear the height of the Sonos Arc in the first place. My own TV only just managed that feat, and TVs with smaller stands might lose a few base centimetres of screen size blocked out by the Arc unless you're willing to safely raise them up.
For all of its massive size, the Sonos Arc is actually nicely minimalist in design terms. My review model was the black variant with a subtle Sonos logo in the middle that effectively vanishes unless you make a habit of sitting closer than a metre or so from your TV. There's a single front-facing indicator LED that lights up when you make volume changes or to indicate microphone status. It's unobtrusive as it is, but it'll even go a little further than that, dimming relative to the level of light in the room so as to provide minimal distraction. It's smart work because it means that while the Sonos Arc is a large device, it quickly fades into the background of whatever you're watching at the time, which is at it should be.
There are touch controls on the top of the Arc covering play/pause, volume and microphone controls if you want or need them, but as a soundbar, they're not likely to get all that much use unless you sit far, far closer to your TV than you really ought to.
While Sonos's history is in wireless audio, any soundbar has to be able to connect to your TV somehow, and in the case of the Sonos Arc, it's via a single HDMI connection that's designed to hook into either an ARC or eARC compatible HDMI port on your TV. There's a bit of a potential issue there depending on your HDMI layout and specifically how many other HDMI devices you need to connect up. If you are connecting up to a much older TV, there's also the option for an optical adaptor, but you'd be missing out on much of what makes the Sonos Arc really special if you go down that route.
Unlike some competing soundbars, there's no supplied remote control with the Sonos Arc, but that's very much by design because it's built to be part of the wider Sonos ecosystem, which can be either voice or app-controlled from an iOS or Android smartphone. The Arc also supports IR pass-through to your TV, and once it's hooked up to your TV and configured, you should then be able to pass most control functions over to your existing remotes in any case.
Installation
Once you've figured out where the Sonos Arc is going to sit in your living room, it's time to get it set up. The physical side of this is quite simple, but then it's just a matter of finding a power socket and HDMI port, preferably on an ARC or eARC compatible TV. It's then, as with any other Sonos speaker, that you turn to the Sonos App for actual configuration.
The big point of difference here is that the Sonos Arc is the company's first speaker array to use its new S2 platform. Sonos courted a lot of controversy with its fan base over the shift to S2 because some – and to be fair, much older – Sonos gear isn't S2 compatible, and at first it appeared to many that they were going to be left with bricked speakers that were otherwise functionally sound.
That's not quite the whole story – and Sonos's own communication around this at first wasn't all that clear so there's room for confusion – but the key detail here for my own testing and set-up of the Sonos Arc is that it was with a beta version of the S2 Sonos App, sideloaded in my case onto an iOS device.
Actually detecting and configuring the Sonos Arc was an essentially painless experience, and even the most technically challenged should be able to walk through that stage of its set-up process. I chose to use the iOS version of Sonos's platform for one very specific reason. Sonos has a sound tuning system it calls "Trueplay" that uses the microphones on your smartphone to measure tones through the room and dynamically adjust the Arc's output based on what it can detect.
That in itself isn't a unique idea – plenty of home sound systems have used cabled microphone arrays with a similar concept in mind for some years now – but Sonos's take of using a smartphone means you can move around a space in real-time and get a definite improvement in audio quality by mapping out the soundscape space and applying it to the Arc's output. However, just as it was for the Sonos Beam, it's only available for iOS users. Sorry, Android fans – Sonos's position on this has long been that there's too much variance in the quality of Android microphones for them to offer Trueplay outside the Apple walled garden.
Quick tip if you're an Android fan who wants an Arc: Either use an iPad or "borrow" somebody's iPhone to get through Trueplay tuning because it can make a significant difference to your audio experience, especially for movie watching purposes.
While the Arc is designed such that it can work as a full audio system if that's all you want, you can also optionally add the Sonos Sub and other Sonos speakers for a full 5.1 surround sound system. Sonos supplied me with a sub and two Sonos One SLs to act as rear speakers, and I tested with the Arc, then Arc plus Sub, then Arc plus Sub plus rears to form a full 5.1 system, which meant that I had to go through the install process for adding components as well.
This presented a challenge, and to be fair to Sonos, I was working with a beta version of the S2 compatible app. It's feasible that the issues I was hit with might be unique to that environment and by the time they're available to consumers that they may have been ironed out. At the same time, it may be a question of squashing bugs post-launch, and I've no way of knowing one way or the other.
My issues there largely related with adding the second-generation Sonos Sub to the system. Like any sub-woofer, you can place it wherever you like because bass frequencies just love to travel everywhere, but at first, the S2 Beta Sonos App decided it was an S1-only component. It's not in any way, but it took a full app crash and restart before it would "see" the Sonos Sub properly and add it to the system.
The rear-right speaker added neatly, but adding a rear-left speaker took a couple of attempts before the Sonos system would see it. Again, this might be down to the use of beta software, and I hope it was because one of the bedrocks of the whole Sonos system has been the ease of use and installation. It's great when everything works, but frustrating when it doesn't because there's not that much you can actively tweak to get it up and running if the worst happens.
