{"id":1201835,"date":"2022-09-10T12:11:21","date_gmt":"2022-09-10T12:11:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/09\/10\/sonos-ray-review-best-small-soundbar\/"},"modified":"2022-09-10T12:11:21","modified_gmt":"2022-09-10T12:11:21","slug":"sonos-ray-review-best-small-soundbar","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/09\/10\/sonos-ray-review-best-small-soundbar\/","title":{"rendered":"Sonos Ray Review: Best Small Soundbar"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><\/p>\n<div>\n<p><span class=\"lead-in-text-callout\">I have a<\/span> shitty TV in my bedroom. It\u2019s old, cheap, and likely the last of its kind. While the picture quality is bad, the sound quality is even worse. However, as my editor says, most TV experiences are made better by a soundbar, so I plugged in the new Sonos Ray. It did not disappoint, to say the least.<\/p>\n<p>The Ray was incredibly easy to set up, paired seamlessly with my regular remote, and the sound quality is great\u2014I could finally play Harry Styles from a speaker other than my phone. No matter what I played, be it dialog-heavy dramas or intergalactic action movies, the crisp sound filled the room perfectly.<\/p>\n<p>Sound Check<\/p>\n<p>I\u2019ve never owned a Sonos, so I didn\u2019t know about the \u201chypnotic effects\u201d that my colleague Lauren said it has on your audio life: You buy one, then you fill your house with the things. Still, I\u2019ve been in proximity to them enough to know that they typically sound good, look nice, and are well-reputed.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>It wasn\u2019t until I actually used my new soundbar that I knew what earned Sonos such gravitas in the sonic world. Simply put: The Sonos Ray was the easiest piece of electronics I\u2019ve ever set up. There weren\u2019t many cords to wrangle, and the app only took a few minutes to get the Ray up and running. I plugged the Ray into an outlet and connected it to my TV with the included optical cable, opened the Sonos app and followed the simple prompts\u2014the most involved prompt was to initiate Trueplay Tuning (I\u2019ll get to that in a moment). After maybe five minutes, everything was over and I had <em>Grey\u2019s Anatomy<\/em> playing through the tiny soundbar.<\/p>\n<figure class=\"AssetEmbedWrapper-iKAnWF bhyIoG asset-embed\">\n<p><span class=\"BaseWrap-sc-UABmB BaseText-fETRLB CaptionCredit-cSxGsC hkSZSE bmsBkF iOEyAO caption__credit\">Photograph: Sonos<\/span><\/p>\n<\/figure>\n<p>Trueplay tuning may sound like a technological white whale\u2014it essentially uses sound the way literal whales do to map the sound of your room\u2014but we\u2019ve seen this tech in Sonos speakers like the Roam and Beam since 2015. It employs the speaker on your iPhone and the surfaces in your room to analyze the acoustics by bouncing sound waves around to optimize your listening experience. You can enable this during your initial setup in the app, or you can go to your system settings and start the tuning process later. This feature may not matter much for bigger rooms, but in apartments, bedrooms, and other smaller spaces it can really make a difference. The only limitation is that it currently requires iOS.<\/p>\n<p>Trueplay isn\u2019t a gimmick. When I watched dramas like <em>Surface<\/em>, the dialog was clear as the speaker seamlessly adjusted between the show\u2019s score and when characters spoke. Action movies are a different beast with their many blasts and explosions, and the Ray handled them expertly, filling my small bedroom with lightsaber swooshes and the many pew-pews of Star Wars.\u00a0<\/p>\n<p>When it came to queuing up a playlist, I could keep it quiet enough to listen while I worked at my desk, or loud enough to hear from the kitchen while doing the dishes if I needed. All the while, the sound remained balanced and crisp.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I have a shitty TV in my bedroom. It\u2019s old, cheap, and likely the last of its kind. While the picture quality is bad, the sound quality is even worse. However, as my editor says, most TV experiences are made better by a soundbar, so I plugged in the new Sonos Ray. It did not [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1201836,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1201835","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-celebrity-gossip"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201835","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1201835"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1201835\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1201835"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1201835"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.ghanamma.com\/2022\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1201835"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}