The Sonos Arc full setup has a great overall stereo frequency response. Its sound profile is well-balanced and suitable for most audio content right out-of-the-box. It has a room correction feature on iOS devices that adjusts its audio reproduction based on the room it’s in. It also has some customization options that let you control the bass and treble ranges, on top of the subwoofer level, for you to find the best sound for your needs.
Unfortunately, our current test bench doesn’t accurately reflect this and seems to penalize this specific setup too harshly. While we know our measurements are accurate for this soundbar, the way our website analyses the data might not be optimal. For example, our test bench gives substantial weight to the Low-Frequency Extension (LFE) measurements but doesn’t take into consideration the low-bass energy that it has. This results in a poor score, as it’s only looking at one data point rather than acknowledging the soundbar’s ability to reproduce lower frequencies, even if it’s under our target curve by over 3dB. Note that we’re aware of this issue and will try to fix it in an upcoming methodology update.
There’s also the fact that our scoring system is based on a set target curve. To investigate this issue, we optimized the subwoofer level – not the Bass EQ – to +9 to make it better suit our target, which results in a much better score. Comparably, we decreased the subwoofer level of the often-compared Samsung HW-Q90R to -3 to see the impact on its score, which turned out to be a lot less significant. To learn more about our testing procedure for this soundbar and our thought process for this review, check out this discussion thread.
Overall, according to our own subjective opinion, the Sonos Arc sounds well-balanced and has many tools for you to make it sound the way you want, even if our scoring doesn’t reflect it. It’s one of the most neutral soundbars we’ve heard in our testing room.