I tested the Sonos Beam Ultra for a week, and it's the ideal mid-sized Dolby Atmos soundbar — expansive, immersive audio meets a fantastic set of features

TechRadar Verdict

The Sonos Beam Ultra marries the compact nature of the standard Beam and the true Atmos credentials of the Arc to perfection to deliver expansive, immersive audio in a single slim package. Its elegant design and vast feature-suite only help to justify the asking price, although it would’ve been nice to see HDMI passthrough on board.

Pros

• +Up-firing drivers and amazing Atmos effects
• +Clear dialogue with effective Speech Enhancement
• +Compact and beautiful design

Cons

• -No HDMI passthrough
• -DTS:X left out

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Sonos Beam Ultra review

The Sonos Beam Ultra doesn’t merely feel like an evolution of the pre-existing Beam products. Instead, it feels like something of a middle child between the Sonos Beam Gen 2 and the Sonos Arc Ultra. After all, it sits bang in between its sibling models when it comes to channel configuration, boasting a 7.1.2 setup with nine drivers, and while it has up-firing drivers for true Dolby Atmos, it still maintains a fairly compact design.

But the Beam Ultra certainly isn’t an awkward middle-child; it’s a highly capable mid-range option that provides striking cinematic sound, while still being able to fit into a smaller setup. But is the Sonos Beam Ultra worth its $699 / £699 / AU$1,099 asking price?

Like most of the best soundbars, the Sonos Beam Ultra supports Dolby Atmos (though notably Sonos omits DTS:X), and it handles the format very effectively. When watching a 4K UHD Blu-ray of The Mask, the soundbar seamlessly tracked the titular character as he tornadoes across the screen, with audio sounding as if it far exceeded the limited confines of the soundbar. When The Mask jumped upwards, diagonally, his upward trajectory was captured with precision.

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And the Beam Ultra continued to impress me with its height effects across multiple movies. For instance, in Godzilla Minus One, the sense of a plane flying overhead was replicated more naturally than I expected from a mid-range bar. When Godzilla first appeared, the width of the kaiju’s movement was handled brilliantly — it sounded as if the creature’s stomping and destruction were emanating from different corners of the testing room, rather than a set of speakers, even without the help of surround speakers.

What’s more, the Sonos Beam Ultra nails the fundamentals. Watching Top Gun: Maverick, the roar of jet engines was palpable, and I found this to be the case across multiple films. For a mid-sized standalone bar, the Beam Ultra produces incredibly regimented, deep, and responsive low-end sound, which is excellent for movies with high-octane action sequences and dark, impactful scores. The Beam Ultra can also get seriously loud if you want to fill a more open space, but I never noticed any tinniness or harsh compression.

Still, this doesn’t come at the expense of sounds elsewhere in the frequency range. I found dialogue to be generally clear and detailed too, though I will note that turning on the Speech Enhancement mode and setting it to Medium gave me the best results. This means you can bring voices forward without hampering the fidelity of other elements in the mix.

The Beam Ultra even proved to be a hit for music, whether I was listening to an Atmos or stereo mix. With an Atmos mix of I’m Gonna Love You Just A Little More Baby by Barry White, there was tremendous width to the guitars, the vocals were perfectly clear in the center, and the bass had pleasant warmth to it. Moving over to First Summer by H.K., deep bass came through with attention-grabbing impact, sounding more full-sounding than I’d anticipated, yet keys and vocal chops in the mid-range still maintained excellent clarity, as did articulate drums in the treble.

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