With Sony and JBL hot on its tail, Sonos needs to up its small soundbar game sooner rather than later

It takes something special for a piece of AV kit to win a What Hi-Fi? Award, let alone keep its title for five years running. But the Sonos Beam Gen 2 has managed such a feat, holding strong in its position as a soundbar to be reckoned with.

And to be fair, there's a good reason for its longevity. It features a quintet of front-facing drivers configured into five separate arrays, with two dedicated to reproducing overhead and surround sounds with Atmos content.

And these let the five-star Sonos model blow us away when we first had it in our test room, dazzling with its precise, detailed and musical performance. Launching at £449 / $449 / AU$699, the soundbar was also a stellar value.

Hence why, in our review, we say: “The Sonos Beam Gen 2 is simply the best Dolby Atmos soundbar at this price point, and it elevates itself yet further with its streaming smarts, compact design and expert handling of motion, depth and space.”

With such high praise, it doesn’t come as a big surprise that the Beam Gen 2 has been left mostly untroubled by the other models that we have tested.

But in the last nine months, we have seen some incredible competitors come to challenge the soundbar’s reign, showing its time in the sun may be coming to an end.

Rising competition

The JBL Bar 300MK2, for instance, received a five-star rating from us and came dangerously close to knocking it off its pedestal. The all-in-one bar offers DTS Virtual:X as well as Dolby Atmos support, immediately showing up the Sonos Beam.

It is also a little cheaper than the Sonos model, launching at the respectable £350 / $450 / AU$549, which could be a draw for those on a budget.

We put the two models head-to-head in our test room to see how they compare. The JBL delivers an immersive, room-filling sound that gives your movie viewing experience a great sense of excitement and scale.

In our review, we add when watching Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning: “It packs a punch in terms of bass [...] which gives these action-heavy moments an extra level of excitement.”

Sonos’ model, on the other hand, delivers a more controlled overall performance with an excellent sense of precision that the JBL can’t quite match. Still, the newcomer's bass-heavy, engaging audio makes it a strong contender that ever so nearly dethroned the Beam (Gen 2).

But that's not the end of Sonos' competition. The most recent model to trouble the Award-winner is the Sony Bravia Theatre System 6.

It's a different proposition to the Beam Gen 2, offering a complete system consisting of a main soundbar, two surround speakers and a subwoofer.

While the soundbar is directly wired to the subwoofer, the surround speakers are not. Instead, the sub wirelessly transmits the surround sound information to a receiver box at the back of the room that is itself wired to the two surround speakers.

The Sony system's oddball design certainly makes it stand out from the crowd, and its audio performance did not disappoint either. It earned a five-star review for its punchy bass, and its cohesive surround sound.

We find that the Sonos delivers a crisper, cleaner and more musical overall, but the subwoofer-boosted System 6 is bigger, deeper and weightier. Plus, you get a lot more kit for your money with the Sonos, which comes in at £499 / $798 / AU$1199.

All that competition in the Dolby Atmos soundbar department is becoming more and more of a threat to the Sonos Beam Gen 2, especially as the model is getting a little long in the tooth.

We have been awaiting the Sonos Beam Gen 3 for years now, and its lack of HDMI ports and Bluetooth connectivity is becoming more of an issue with other models delivering on this front. Let's see if the brand can step up its game before another model takes the top spot.

MORE:

Here is our review of the Sonos Beam Gen 2

These are the best Dolby Atmos soundbars right now

JBL Bar 300MK2 vs Sonos Beam (Gen 2): Which is better?