I’m of the mind that there are more than enough actual products out in the world that I tend to not spend too much time worrying about the ones that don’t actually exist yet. But a couple of things stand out about two rumored Sonos endeavors that are too obvious to ignore.
I’ll preface this with the caveat that it’s all conjecture on my part. But it also makes plenty of sense, especially given that Sonos itself has said it has a couple of products ready to announce — and ship — anytime now. They’re currently stuck in limbo while it waits for the 2024 app debacle to rectify itself.
Let’s start with the Sonos Arc Ultra soundbar, which has had a few leaks of late. There’s the post on X (formerly Twitter) in September that came with marketing materials. There’s also a latent Best Buy listing that appears in a Google search, though you run into a dead end when you click through to the product page. This is exactly the sort of thing that happens when you have a product ready to go that then gets shelved for a while.
Most recently, what are purported to be Arc Ultra specs have appeared on Reddit. For the most part, there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary. Seven tweeters. Six woofers. Trueplay. All the Dolby standards you’d expect. Even the presence of a microphone shouldn’t be surprising — Sonos has baked them into speakers for years now. There’s also the TV Audio Swap feature that lets you hop back and forth between the soundbar and the Sonos Ace headphones. Not even the supposed addition of a quad-core A55 processor stands out — the original Sonos Arc also has a quad-core CPU.
What set off alarm bells for me, then? The inclusion of 16GB of RAM and 8GB of NV. That stands for non-volatile memory. That’s a ROM, boys and girls, with enough RAM to run whatever sort of apps it has on board. The first-generation Arc only has 1GB of RAM and half as much NV memory. Combine that with the marketing image from September that clearly shows some sort of Sonos play screen, and we have a very real possibility (I’d even go so far as to say probability) that when the Sonos Arc Ultra finally sees the light of day, it’ll do so at the same time as Sonos TV. Not listed in the supposed specs? A remote control, which could well be problematic.
As for Sonos TV itself? That’s a completely different question. You probably don’t have to go too far out on a limb to figure that it’s something akin to what Roku has done with its soundbars — a fully embedded operating system. Chances are it’s an Android fork, though maybe we’ll be surprised by something new.
What’s all this mean? For one thing, we all need to stop referring to Sonos TV as some sort of “set-top box.” Never mind the fact that that’s a legacy device design that doesn’t really exist anymore, seeing as how TVs aren’t thick enough to put anything on top of them. That goes for myself, too. When I asked Sonos executive Eddie Lazarus in a recent interview if he wanted to talk “about this supposed set-top box,” he replied: “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about.”
I should have asked about the Sonos Arc Ultra instead.
