While the Beam may not have the full surround experience of Dolby Atmos, the speaker cleverly scans the room during setup — including determining where you'll be sitting in relation to the screen — to optimise the audio for your space. This is no mere gimmick; having tested its room-scanning ability in the big open space during the Beam launch, and also in our pokey little living room, it really does work. The Beam sounds best when we're sitting on our couch, as it should.

Loading

But the features that really won me over were simple ones: Speech Enhancement and Night Mode. Speech enhancement boosts the dialogue track in movies, while Night Mode limits the sounds of explosions and car chases so the speaker never wakes the family during late night watching. The idea of messing with the audio of a movie may make some cinephiles cringe but this a life saver for families, and I'm always asking for night mode in competing home theatre systems now.

Sonos created a cult-like following for its speakers, and pioneered the idea of multi-room music systems, where adding a new speaker immediately pairs and allows for the same audio to be pumped throughout the house. It is a clever business model that ensures when people buy one Sonos, they're more likely to buy a second, and then a third.

I've not yet joined the cult, but I do enjoy our much less fancy multi-room speaker solution; we have a series of Google-powered units, from tinny Home Minis to a wonderful sounding Panasonic. The Beam immediately joins its own Sonos multi-room platform, but it's smart enough to accommodate both Google Home and Amazon Alexa multi-room set ups as well, and can be controlled by your voice assistant of choice.