The main upside of switching to HDMI ARC and CEC, according to Sonos, is that it facilitates support for more standards and codecs and that it makes things simpler overall. For example, the Beam can now automatically recognize whatever remote you're using. Not all TV sets support HDMI ARC, so Sonos will throw an HDMI-to-optical adapter into the box so you can still send digital sound to the Beam. Like many new standards these days, simplicity comes with dongles attached.

Heavy Presence

To get a sense of how the soundbar performs, Laine cycled through a few music tracks from Jordan Rakei, Radiohead, and Beck before eventually landing on a short clip from the film Arrival. It's hard to make an in-depth judgment after just a few minutes of listening, but to the average ear, I think the Sonos Beam will sound fantastic. Audiophiles may pick up on the diminutive speaker's subtle lack of bass, despite it having four full-range woofers and three passive radiators. But it sounds great despite the small size. The clip from Arrival, which included loud, ominous tones and whispery dialog, benefited the most from the soundbar—specifically from its center tweeter, which was designed to amplify dialog.

Later that same day, I briefly visited Sonos' anechoic chamber, a giant concrete box of a room with a mesh suspension floor and foamy soundproofing wedges lining the walls. The Beam speaker sat in the center of the room, on a surface carved to be the exact same size as the bottom of the speaker. A thin metal arm covered in microphones arced above the Beam. It looked like the speaker was about to be interrogated. In fact, this chamber is where all of Sonos' products are interrogated. Because of the lack of any audible reverberation or resonance, every word spoken inside an anechoic chamber sounds serious, almost profound. Someone made a joke about turning the lights off, and I'm glad they didn't. One form of sensory deprivation was enough.

Sound, of course, is a critical part of any speaker's success. But Sonos' business strategy isn't just rooted in sound. The company has established itself as a hardware maker that's agnostic when it comes to the services it supports. Right now, you can stream audio from more than 80 music, radio, and podcast services accessible from within the Sonos app. And since Sonos was one of the original pioneers in Wi-Fi-based, multiroom audio, you can stream all that stuff across multiple Sonos speakers at the same time. This is clearly a different approach from that of Amazon and Apple, which steer speaker buyers to their in-house, subscription-based streaming services by default and try to incentivize those customers to continue to use those services above all else.

The Sonos Beam will offer an exchange between competing voice assistants in a way that no other smart speaker on the market does.

Sonos believes it can take its agnostic approach to audio and do the same thing with voice assistants: create a platform in which Alexa, Siri, and Google Assistant all get equal treatment, and not only that, but also play nice with one another. Sonos has built a new API that exists as a layer on top of the Beam software, and, thanks to a lot of negotiation and work with the big three tech companies, the three voice assistants can technically hook into this API and control the Sonos Beam.

"There's definitely a lot of coordination happening across content providers and control providers in order to make that happen," says Lidiane Jones, Sonos' VP of software product management, who's based in the company's Boston office. Sonos effectively grabs the metadata from each audio service you're listening to and sends it to and from the voice assistants. "It depends also on the type of content," says Jones. "So, for example, if it's a newscast, the forward and backward [commands] don't work the same as an album. But we try to get to the bottom of what the content is to try to reduce the complexity for the user themselves."

Frankly Speaking

Almost all of the designers and engineers I spoke to—as well as Spence, the new Sonos CEO—used the phrase "continuity of control" to describe what they're trying to build. It's a mantra someone clearly came up with in a brainstorm session at some point. In an ideal world, this continuity-of-control idea means you can walk from room to room in your home and use some type of input mechanism to easily change songs or services. That main input used to be touch on a phone's screen. Now voice is a fast-growing option.