View offers Soundbar | £279 | whf.cm/SonosRay
Sonos has always had an aspirational cachet. Its elegantly crafted but expensive speakers are developed to be used en masse, integrating to provide you with an expansive, seamless audio accompaniment in every part of your home as well as immersive cinema sound in your living room. So, the question is, can this – the company’s first budget soundbar – still deliver something approaching this experience?
It’s unusual to find wi-fi connectivity in an entry-level soundbar, and while many soundbars costing similar money to the Ray have HDMI ports and even Dolby Atmos support, streaming is typically strictly limited to Bluetooth, which, incidentally, the Ray lacks.
There’s no Dolby Atmos decoding here either, but the Ray can handle Stereo PCM as well as Dolby Digital 5.1 and DTS Digital Surround, and there’s still the flexibility to create a standard multichannel surround system that can be added