SOUNDBARS
Sonos Beam £399 / stuff.tv/SonosBeam
Sonos’s home cinema gear has always been a little expensive, but with the Beam it’s created a great-value soundbar. It sounds ace, comes with loads of features and is compact enough to fit into the average living-room AV setup without taking over. If you want the best-sounding system then the Playbar or Playbase are still the products to go for, but they’re a lot more money, they don’t have Alexa, and they don’t control your TV in the same slick way the Beam does.
Stuff says ★★★★★
Smaller and cheaper than the already excellent Playbar, and packed full of smarts
Sonos One £199 / stuff.tv/SonosOne
Making an amazing speaker was an easy job for the multiroom champs, but getting Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant to dance along in time with it… well, that wasn’t such a simple task. But the One is now an altogether more well-rounded device than it was at launch, supporting Spotify with voice control as well as Amazon Music and TuneIn Radio, while the early Alexa hiccups seem to have been fixed by a series of software updates. The only issue? It’s a little hard of hearing compared to Amazon’s Echo.
Stuff says ★★★★★
Sonos’s Alexa-powered speaker remains a class apart from the competition