Sonos Arc Ultra review: better Atmos, same software trade-offs

Item: Sonos Arc Ultra (2024 launch, tested with firmware 16.4)
Rating: 8

The Arc Ultra is a meaningful step up acoustically — particularly in the lower midrange — but Sonos's app remains the price of admission, and the price has gone up.

By Tobias Asher · Senior Reviewer, Audio & Smart Home

Last updated April 11, 2026 · Tested over: 3 months in two living rooms

Product tested: Sonos Arc Ultra (2024 launch, tested with firmware 16.4)

At a glance

Pricing$1,099 USD MSRP

Best forLiving rooms 16-22 m², films and TV with mixed dialogue

Our rating8.0 / 10

What works

Substantially clearer dialogue than the original Arc
Real Atmos height effects you can localise, not just sense
Good in-room stereo imaging without rear satellites
Trueplay tuning makes a measurable difference (iOS only)
eARC handshake reliable across two TV brands tested

What doesn't

Sonos app's 2024 rewrite is still rough at edges
Bass below 50 Hz is meaningful only with a Sub Mini or Sub
No HDMI passthrough; single eARC port limits home-theater rigs
$1,099 puts it past the JBL Bar 1300X and Samsung HW-Q990D's discount price

Overview

Sonos has been making the Arc since 2020, and for that whole period it has been the most “complete” Atmos soundbar at its price tier — not the loudest, not the most enveloping, not the cheapest, but the one that does the most things acceptably. The Arc Ultra, which began shipping in late 2024 and is the current product as of April 2026, is Sonos’s response to a market that caught up. The Samsung HW-Q990 line, the JBL Bar 1300X, and the Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar Plus all have credible cases against the original Arc on different dimensions.

We’ve been testing the Arc Ultra for three months across two living rooms — a 17 m² space with a Sony A95L TV and a 21 m² open-plan room with an LG C3.

Disclosure: Product purchased at retail by our team.

Key features tested

The Arc Ultra has fourteen drivers — up from eleven on the original Arc — including two new “Sound Motion” woofers that Sonos describes as motorised dual-piston units. In practice the change manifests as more displacement at low frequencies in roughly the same enclosure volume. There are seven tweeters, two of which fire upward for Atmos height channels, and two of which fire sideways for left/right separation.

Connections are eARC (HDMI), Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, optical (with included adapter), and Ethernet. There is no HDMI passthrough, no USB, and no analog input.

The Arc Ultra runs Sonos’s S2 platform with Trueplay room tuning available on iOS. Voice assistant support includes Sonos Voice Control and Amazon Alexa. Google Assistant is no longer supported on Sonos hardware as of late 2024 — a Sonos decision we’ve covered separately.

Performance over three months

For acoustic measurements we used a UMIK-1 USB measurement microphone and Room EQ Wizard, taking ten averaged measurements at the listening position. We tested with and without Trueplay. Reference content included three Atmos films (the Dune Part Two UHD, John Wick Chapter 4, and the Avatar: The Way of Water UHD), a non-Atmos television test set, and a music playlist of Apple Music Spatial Audio tracks.

Compared to the original Arc, the Arc Ultra measures 6 dB stronger in the 50-80 Hz octave at our reference listening position — exactly the range that “feels weightless” on the older bar. Dialogue intelligibility, measured against the BBC reference dialogue test, improved by approximately 12% (this is a coarse subjective panel measurement; we ran four reviewers on the same scenes blind).

Atmos height effects are now meaningfully localisable. On a Dune sandstorm sequence we could trace overhead helicopter passes; on the original Arc the same sequence smeared into a general “above” sensation. This is the upgrade most worth paying for.

Trueplay made a real difference in both rooms. In the smaller room, our 100-300 Hz peak (a known room mode at our listening position) flattened by 4 dB. In the larger room, with more diffuse boundaries, the change was smaller but still audible.

Music performance is better than the original Arc but is not the bar’s strongest mode. Stereo imaging is good for a single-bar product; bass below 50 Hz is anaemic without a Sub or Sub Mini. We do not consider the Arc Ultra a substitute for a stereo setup at any price.

Strengths

Dialogue clarity is the daily-use win. We watched dozens of hours of mixed-quality television over the testing window, and the Arc Ultra simply requires less center-channel boosting than its predecessor. Movies that we’d previously found mixed too quietly (Tenet, the Nolan-era Batmans) became listenable without compression.

Atmos height effects work. The dual upward-firing tweeters produce localisable overhead positioning that the original Arc smeared. This depends on having a flat-ish ceiling to bounce off; in our tests with a 2.4m ceiling and matte paint, performance was solid.

Trueplay tuning, where you can run it, is a genuine differentiator. The room-correction algorithm has been refined since 2020 and we measured improvements in two unrelated rooms.

Weaknesses

The Sonos app, which Sonos rewrote in mid-2024, has been the subject of a long public reckoning — and although the most acute issues are now fixed, the app continues to be the worst part of owning a Sonos system. During the testing window we encountered two unprompted disconnections that required a hub reboot, three Trueplay tuning failures (on iOS, no less), and a number of UI edge cases where the app would lose track of which speakers were grouped. The 2024 rewrite has improved week over week through firmware updates, but it is still the single biggest reason a thoughtful buyer might pick a competitor instead.

Bass below 50 Hz is the second weakness. Without a Sub or Sub Mini, the Arc Ultra cannot reproduce the lowest octave of a film mix. This is acceptable for a single-box product, and the bar performs better at 60-100 Hz than its predecessor, but film fans should budget for the Sub Mini at minimum.

There is one eARC port. If you have multiple high-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 sources, you will be running them through your TV’s inputs. This is fine for most home setups but is a real limitation for anyone with separate AV switching.

Trueplay on Android: still not shipping. We have written about this for years; nothing has changed.

Verdict

The Sonos Arc Ultra is the best single-box Atmos soundbar we’ve tested under $1,200. It is also a product that ships with a software experience meaningfully below the hardware. If you live inside the Sonos ecosystem already, this is an obvious upgrade. If you don’t, the Samsung HW-Q990D’s rear-satellite-and-sub package gives you more envelopment for similar money, at the cost of a less coherent music experience and a less polished room-correction story.

We’re still scoring it 8.0. The hardware is genuinely strong, the Atmos performance is genuinely improved, and three months in we’re still using it daily. We’ll re-test at twelve months for software stability.

FAQ

See frontmatter.

Tobias Asher reviews audio gear and smart-home products for The Review Bench. The Sonos Arc Ultra was purchased at retail by our team in November 2025. Tobias has no prior relationship with Sonos Inc.

The verdict

After three months of daily use, the Sonos Arc Ultra is the best soundbar we've tested under $1,200, with materially better dialogue clarity and bass extension than the original Arc. The Sonos app's 2024 redesign continues to cause us setup grief. Earns 8.0 with the explicit caveat that the software experience is below the bar of competitors.

Frequently asked

Is it worth upgrading from the original Arc?

If you primarily watch films, yes — the dialogue improvement and the upper-bass weight are noticeable on a daily basis. If you primarily use it for music streaming or podcasts, the gains are smaller and the upgrade is harder to justify.

Do I need the Sonos Sub or Sub Mini with it?

For a typical 18 m² living room, the Arc Ultra alone gets you respectable bass down to about 50 Hz. Below that — explosions, low synths, organ pedals — you're feeling the absence. A Sub Mini ($429) is the budget pairing and adds maybe 10 dB of usable headroom below 60 Hz; the full Sub ($799) is overkill for most rooms but transformative if you have one.

How does it compare to the Samsung HW-Q990D?

The Samsung has rear satellites and a separate sub in the box, and at its discount price (often $1,400) it gives you a more enveloping Atmos experience for not much more money. The Arc Ultra wins on dialogue clarity, build quality, and (if you stay in the Sonos ecosystem) multi-room music streaming.

Does Trueplay tuning matter?

On iOS, yes — meaningfully so. On Android, Sonos still doesn't ship Trueplay, which is a long-standing platform inequity we have written about repeatedly. With Trueplay, our test room measured 4 dB flatter across the 100-300 Hz range.

How is the eARC connection situation?

Reliable on both LG (C3 OLED) and Sony (Bravia A95L) TVs in our testing. Sonos's TV setup wizard handles HDMI-CEC well. We did not test with Samsung TVs.

Can I use it with a 4K Blu-ray player and TV passthrough?

There's only one eARC port. If you have multiple HDMI 2.1 sources (4K player, console, streaming box), you'll be using your TV's HDMI inputs and eARC-ing audio out to the soundbar. This works fine for Atmos as long as your TV passes Dolby Atmos through eARC, which most 2022-or-later TVs do.