Sonos Arc Ultra reviewed: a stunning upgrade

TVs are getting bigger and so is cinema sound at home. The latest soundbar from Sonos takes it up a notch, as the Sonos Arc delivers big spatial in one speaker.

It’s been a while since we graced a proper cinema with our presence, and there’s a great reason why: the technology in our homes can often rival that of the classic metroplex.

Sure, the big screen is always better, and it’s difficult to compete with a theatre’s gigantic projection display. But thanks to brilliant 4K TVs and laser projectors, not to mention all the awesome colour-enhancing technologies found within, your TV at home can put deliver a tremendous visual experience for movies at home.

Movie services add to that, with film release times anywhere between three months and three weeks to come home from the cinemas. You don’t have to wait long at all these days.

All that’s left is to get a sound system worthy of those pictures.

These days, you typically want to venture beyond the two channel world of stereo, and even beyond the five other seven of surround. Height channels are where it’s at, with spatial audio able to deliver front, back, centre, left, right, and up, providing a sound that encapsulates you in a bubble.

Spatial sound systems vary in size, and if you have the money, you can go for a fully integrated speaker system found inside your ceiling with speakers around the couch. Or you can consider an alternative: a soundbar with the lot, offering everything inside.

In the Arc Ultra, that’s exactly what Sonos is trying to do, building an upgraded take on the original and excellent Arc, a soundbar from 2020 we keep using to this day.

Is the Arc Ultra even better, and is it worth upgrading to?

Design and features

The biggest new speaker from Sonos definitely comes packing, even if you might not know it from looking at it. A simple look dripping with pure minimalism, Sonos isn’t looking to mess up the aesthetics of your home with the Arc Ultra.

Black or white with little pin-prick dots, the Arc Ultra looks like the longer cousin of its Arc sibling, and doesn’t change the formula too much. There are differences upon glancing, but you might not notice them.

For one, the Arc Ultra is longer, even ever so slightly so. You can definitely see the length when comparing the two side-by-side, but Sonos has also changed how the controls look.

Instead of just a simple touch button for each element, there’s now a rear bar of sorts at the back, giving you a much easier slide controller for volume, with touch buttons for the other main elements. It’s a look that feels right out of the Sonos Era 300, and makes it that much easier to control.

Inside, the speaker configuration isn’t the same, either. If you were to pry the housing from the body (and you definitely shouldn’t), you’d find five tweeters for front and surround, two up-firing tweeters, six mid-woofers, fifteen Class-D amps, and a unique configuration for bass with the Sonos proprietary “Sound Motion” technology made up of a four-motor two-membrane woofer able to move air inside of a small box to create more air and subsequently more bass.

The whole soundbar weighs 5.9kg and includes a small amount of ports, with just an HDMI eARC port and a figure eight power port. Wireless options are all the other connection features, covering 802.11a/b/g/n/ac/ax WiFi 6, Bluetooth 5.3, and AirPlay 2, with support for voice control via Sonos and Amazon Alexa.

In-use

While you can talk to the Arc Ultra to control it, using the Arc Ultra could see you using those physical controls at times, too. However, most of the joy in using a Sonos comes from the app on your phone and tablet.

And now that most of those frustratingly annoying bugs have been dealt with following the app’s refreshed launch this year, using a Sonos is close to being back to normal again. Folks, it’s mostly good, even if some features aren’t quite there, such as properly advanced playlist control and saves.

For Sonos Arc Ultra owners, most of what they need in the app is there, including the setup process.

Whether you’re new to the line-up or upgrading, set up is easy: plug the soundbar in and let the app find it. From there, it’s a pretty straight run at getting the speaker up and running. Once connected to your network, kick in either the basic or advanced True Play set up (depending on the type of device you have), and let the soundbar configure itself to your room.

Your TV will likely be the main source for the Arc Ultra, but it doesn’t need to be the only source.

Like all other Sonos speakers, it will play nicely with the vast assortment of music services accessible via the Sonos app, including the likes of Apple Music and Spotify, with support for Bluetooth and Apple AirPlay 2 both here. You can also connect services via Amazon Alexa here, because there’s a microphone built-in, allowing you to trigger services outside the app just using your voice.

Performance

The most important aspect of any speaker of soundbar is how it performs, and fortunately, we have a way to work that out: sound tests. Plenty of them.

Music

We’ll start this test the way we do with every speaker and headphone: music. For that, we turn to two sound tests, the Pickr Sound Test and the Dolby Atmos Sound Test we have for soundbars that can play along in spatial audio.

Granted, you probably won’t be using a soundbar for music listening, but the option is definitely there, and we’re going to take advantage of the technology and give it a good test.

We won’t spend as long in music for this reason, but our tracks did give the system a work out. For instance, you can hear the beautifully solid stereo recreations of The Beatles with the Arc Ultra, the sound going far and wide and providing literal room-filling sound.

It’s a similar vibe in rock, with an equally expansive sound playing back Muse and the Deftones, while the jazz of Dave Brubeck pulls off a wide and clear sound with excellent bass.

The only sour point is with FKA Twigs. We specifically choose this track for our playlists because of the flexibility in bass and the guttural bass. While the Arc Ultra has no problem rendering a loud low, the guttural bass isn’t quite as impactful.

Things get interesting with out Atmos spatial music playlist, which you can listen to for yourself if you have an Apple Music account and a compatible speaker or soundbar (or a pair of spatial-supported headphones).

Take the sound of an Atmos-mastered “Don’t Dream It’s Over” from Crowded House: it’s wider and appear everywhere, with a solid thump from the Sound Motion bass driver basically hollowing an emptier vibe than the song has really delivered from a single-unit speaker in the past.

From the punchy lows and screaming sound of Dire Straits’ “Money For Nothing” to the sub-bass delivery in Luniz’s “I Got Five On it”, where it seems like the variance in bass just won’t stop, effectively turning your entire living room into a hip-hop club.

From rock to jazz to classical and then some, every song is different, but the delivery in Atmos is excellent on the Arc Ultra, and music engineered for Atmos really shines.

Movies

Movies are where things really turn it up a notch. That should come as little surprise: most soundbars are made for listening to the sound of movies, as engineers and manufacturers find a way to bundle in the big sound of a cinema into a pint-sized package.

We have a few films we use as part of our soundbar testing list, complete with timecode so you can try the out for yourself.

As such, the Sonos Arc Ultra movie test begins with Spider-Man: Across The Spider-verse, where the Sonos Sound Motion tech really starts moving and making bassy waves. It’s impactful and strong, while the highs of dialogue and action elements just land in the right places: above you, around you. This is a directional spatial experience done right.

It’s much the same from the martial arts and gunshot fight from John Wick 4, while the expansive sound of dinosaurs in Jurassic World is so large, you may be convinced a massive animal is roaring next to you.

Even the drums in Whiplash sounded better. The obvious rat-a-tat-tat of Miles Teller smashing a full kit at the behest of J.K. Simmons, you can feel the tension and yells and aggression dripping down the drumsticks. The detail is stunning.

Listening to the Arc Ultra, it’s stunning to realise that you don’t actually need a subwoofer. Sound Motion does such a stellar job, improving on the already excellent bass reflex abilities of the standard Arc.

Will a proper sub be better? Very much so, but the amount of bass you can get from the Arc Ultra is genuinely surprising. It’s an upgrade on the already solid Arc, and we didn’t understand how the bass worked as well from that model, either.

One thing Sonos talks about is the way spatial works on the Arc Ultra, delivering a level of rear speaker sound from the single bar. The good spatial soundbars all have up firing speaking capable of creating point two sound (.2), which translates to height speakers at the front. The Arc Ultra deviates from this with point four (.4), translating to height channels in the front and rear, something that seems physically impossible without the use of rear speakers. And it is, to an extent.

However, the way Sonos has controlled the sound means at times, you can get a front and rear height sound feeling from Atmos titles.

Testing the idea with our movie playlist, we didn’t get it most of the time. We intentionally switched off the Era 300 rear speakers to test this out, and couldn’t find it: the earthy grunt from the roars of engines were all up and front in Max Max: Fury Road, while Bohemian Rhapsody‘s stadium sound kept the cheers up front when the sound was normal.

Turn the volume up, however, and that rear sound delivery starts to work. The crunch of gears and cars and engines starts to take on a new life, and it’s almost as if your ears and walls and ceiling are overloaded with that delivery of sound. Hollywood’s recreation of Freddy Mercury at Live Aid echoed with the roar of human cheers, and a single speaker sounded like a full spatial system.

Over in the sci-fi take on Groundhog Day, in Edge of Tomorrow, the massive world of a futuristic failure of a war was big and expansive at regular volumes, but even more encompassing with increased sound.

If your living room can handle it and agitating the neighbours is fine, turning the sound up will get you as close to a full spatial surround experience without rear speakers. A couple of Era 300 speakers in the back will do a better job — again, it’s like adding a proper subwoofer to the package — but you can get a fully realised spatial from the single unit, and it’s impressive.

Value

The price is right for a premium soundbar with more than psychoacoustic sound, which the Arc Ultra clearly transcends.

Priced at $1799, only $300 more than the $1499 standard Arc, the Ultra is stunning package for the price.

Premium spatial soundbars typically near or go above the $2K price, and Sonos has managed to fit an immense amount of immersive for under that price tag. It is great value overall.

What needs work?

There’s a lot going for the Arc Ultra. It’s wide, expansive, and packs more of a punch than a soundbar typically does. At high volumes, the resulting sound is just so big, we could harp on about it for ages.

It can be too big a sound, that said. Not everyone likes that much volume just to get a better sound, and you’ll never hear this reviewer argue that louder sound is always the answer. It’s not.

Better sound, not louder sound, much like better cameras over more megapixels.

But we wish the Arc Ultra had more in the way of ports. An extra HDMI port wouldn’t go astray, allowing people to use it as a source directly, as opposed to just the audio return channel of eARC for the TV.

That’s mostly fine — it’s certainly not out of kilter for a Sonos soundbar — but you also don’t get the optical converter in the box anymore, so will miss out on that.

Folks upgrading to the Arc Ultra will definitely want a recent TV from the past three or four years, ideally something that supports eARC.

Slightly older models miss out on the extra bandwidth of the return channel, and so audio will be a fraction delayed, making it seem like dubbing can go out. You don’t get a lot of control for that — the Sonos app has timing changes, but the numbers seem arbitrary and hardly relate to actual millisecond times — so if your TV isn’t super up-to-date, your audio experience won’t be, either.

What we love

Despite this, the bass is genuinely impressive, as the Sonos Sound Motion technology really shines.

It’s not originally a Sonos technology, the company having acquired Mayht’s transducer technology back in 2022.

But it doesn’t matter that Sonos didn’t invent the transducer tech being used for Sound Motion. What matters is Sonos has integrated the clever idea with its excellent soundbar, and delivered a massive impact of bass in such a compact way.

The Arc Ultra shouldn’t deliver bass as well as it does. And yet, it does. It is totally and unashamedly impressive.

Arc Ultra vs the competition

There is still a catch, however: the competition.

Sonos isn’t alone in the soundbar world, and so there are plenty of options that deliver great sound, including the massive $4K original Ambeo, as well as others from Bose, LG, and Samsung.

However, the most interesting competition Sonos has for the Arc Ultra comes from within: the regular Arc, which is still available and only a few hundred dollars less, except when on sale.

In fact, during the 2024 Black Friday sales in Australia, the classic Arc was nearly half the cost of the Arc Ultra, making it a stellar deal for what is still arguably one of the best spatial soundbars around.

This catch could be short-lived, however. A glance at the Sonos website shows the standard Arc might not be long for this world, featuring a “Last Chance” label. That could be a seasonal thing, but it’s also entirely possible the Arc Ultra will eventually remove the Arc from the range.

Given how good the Arc still is, it would make sense. Killing off the standard Arc would allow the Arc Ultra to stand on its own, even if there’s no regular Arc to match it against.

Final thoughts (TLDR)

The most interesting aspect of the Arc Ultra is working out who this soundbar is for, and right now, owners of new TVs looking for some of the best spatial is it.

If you have an Arc, the Arc Ultra is not an upgrade path. You won’t find much of a difference to matter.

But if you’re moving from a Beam 2nd-gen, a Ray soundbar, or even something much older — Playbase, anyone? — and you have a recently upgraded TV to make the best use of that soundbar, the Arc Ultra is a winner.

This is a stunning upgrade for anyone with a new TV and a need for a truly modern home cinema experience. It’s even great for music. Upgrade it over time with rear speakers and a better sub, and it will clearly get so much better. Highly recommended, unless you already have an Arc.