Sonos Sub (Gen 3) Wireless Subwoofer (Black)

I have been using sonos beam for about 3 years now and I loved the product. However I felt only the bass was missing and was confused between sony hts2000 or to add on sub mini. Finally decided to go ahead with sub mini, I didn’t the bass punchy enough. My room dimensions are 10*25. May be I should have gone with the big sub.

This sub is sooo good, I was confused between the newly released sub mini or 3gen, but I must tell you, it’s an investment of lifetime, I heard both in the nearby showroom and I must say the sub gen 3 is leaps ahead of sub min in terms of performance low frequency bass and it gets better when you pair this with a Sonos arc and two SL.
No brainier if you are in market to purchase wireless system that can help you with music and also a home theatre system then this is a blind buy… Go for it you will never regret on your decision.

If you want to hear high quality music and sound from TV with rich bass, especially from HD movies with Dolby encoding, subwoofer is absolutely essential. SONOS Arc soundbar by itself will not reproduce the bass that is desirable The unit is supplied with power cord, and four felt pads. They are needed only if the unit is placed flat, the position that is not recommended. Positioning upright on its sturdy four feet is recommended. Surface of the sub is glossy and must be held very carefully. Quickly catches finger prints.
SETUP: It is 110/220 V compatible and does not require a stepdown transformer. The sub is third generation. Ensure you provide regulated power supply using servo stabilizer and preferably protected with spike protectors. Place it in a corner next to the TV. Do not enclose it in any enclosure and should be placed on the floor without a stand. Raising it above the floor can reduce the bass response. You can cover it with a cover made from speaker cloth. Use the power cord that comes with the unit. Connection is located at the bottom of the unit. Download the SONOS app2 and ensure is activated. Once the sub is connected a flashing green light will appear and the app recognizes the sub. Follow the instructions and ensure it is placed in the same room as the soundbar. Press the flashing light when prompted and a steady white light is the indication that sub is ready for use. A musical chime is an indication that the set up is complete. You need to select the settings in the app. Under phase use “0” and rarely 180 degree option is needed. Under the volume use +4 or +5 for optimum bass.
USEFUL INFORMATION: SONOS sub is unique in its design. It has TWO force cancelling transducers facing each, with a gap in the middle. As a result it cancels vibration and rattling often experienced with the majority of other subwoofers. It can handle high volumes without distortion up to a frequency of 25Hz, the maximum human ear can handle. If you own all the units needed for 5.1 system, that include arc, sub and Sonos one ( SL is recommended) It is highly recommended to optimize the sound using TRUE PLAY software from Apple devices. True Play enables adjustment to sound waves that are reflected from walls, furniture and other surfaces in the room and will give the BEST SOUND possible from the SONOS system. Android devices have no True Play provision. I am not sure if SONOS will ever upgrade the software to accommodate android devices to accomplish the same as that by True Play. Once tuned true play is no longer necessary. Hence borrow an apple device finish the tuning and you are done till you move the components again.
AMAZON is offering one year warranty. I do not know the basis for this. SONOS does not have service facilities in India. However one of the importers of SONOS equipment is offering to provide the service. If this is true AMAZON should give this information on the website. Arc, SUB and a pair of ONEs together cost more than TWO LAKHS rupees, making it one of the most expensive sound system. Before you buy my recommendation is to ensure that SONOS equipment can be serviced in India.

Excellent Product

Best subwoofer i have ever used. It has zero vibration at max sub level. Its great pair if you pair it with sonos beam gen 2.

Don’t skip reading this, especially some extremely important reasons that maybe you should reconsider. You’re here for a reason and reading these user comments because you’re not so 100% sure that you haven’t clicked on the cart button yet. This is a pricey brand and a little knowledge is always a good thing.
Being an audiophile since I was at university I have owned enough components and speakers to open a store. I actually did that at one time and it was very successful. I got introduced to the idea of soundbars when I moved to a temporary smaller home during the pandemic and learned that they were pretty impressive, but like all speaker systems adding a subwoofer just make them better. Then one day on a whim I decided to sell my Heos system and try their main rival, the Sonos system and I was (and still am) amazed by how musically accurate and pure they it sounds. One of my first add-ons was the sub 3, which was a game changer, my living room actually sounds like being in a movie theater. In the past with discreet components I’ve owned dual subwoofers and I know of their benefits. I’ve read several articles about adding a second sub to my Sonos system. They’re not cheap and it isn’t a casual decision to buy something that isn’t necessary so the deciding factor was being able to get one on one of their rare sales. This review is not as much about the speaker itself (which I will include in passing) but about the value in considering having a matched pair of them.

WHY A SUB

Whether you like bass or not you need a subwoofer to make music and movies sound natural. End of story. If you like bass, and they use a lot of it in today’s movies and songs, then you shouldn’t even be asking the question. A subwoofer takes over the task of reproducing the low and ultra low sounds that normal speakers can’t and actually tells them not to even try.

THE SONOS SUB 3

Besides being very expensive what makes this one different is, of course it is mated to the rest of their audio ecosystem so you pretty much don’t have a choice. It does a good job at that, fully wirelessly, other than plugging it in to a wall power outlet of course. So you can place it anywhere, and experts all agree that the best place is where it sounds good, there is no right or wrong, just move it around until it sounds the best. And the good thing about that is that wherever you end up putting it, it will look great, it has one of the best modern minimalist designs going right now. It somehow produces bass that literally shakes my walls and floors but unlike so many speakers, this one sounds clean and distortion free no matter what I throw at it.

HOW AND WHY ADD A SECOND ONE

Here’s where I disagree with the experts, I don’t believe adding a second matched sub is that fantastic. It does add some additional character to the bass but doesn’t make it any deeper or louder, it just rounds it out a little. If I switched it on and off with most people listening they would not be able to call if it is on or off. If you do add one, don’t just follow what you read about where to put it (or either one for that matter if you have two). And don’t believe that the low bass registers are without direction, that’s not true, it’s true that the higher the frequency of sound the more directional it becomes. A sensitive ear can hear which way the low bass notes are coming from and the only right place to put your subs is where they sound good. A little hint, if you use your system primarily to listen to music you might find that it sounds more natural for the bass notes to come from the same direction as the rest of the music, but if you use your audio system primarily for movies there is nothing like the thrill of those thunderous bass notes coming from right behind you, it can add a lot to the entire surround sound experience.

SETUP FIASCO

The hassle setting up what should be a simple speaker add-on is bizarre and inexcusable, I can’t believe someone at the top wasn’t awake when they let this fiasco happen. Since I already had one of their subwoofers, which I installed as part of my initial setup, I expected to take it out of the box, plug it in and have it be instantly recognized by pushing the one button on the side, like my first one. So expecting that I moved my heavy couch and found a home to my new speaker in what I believed to be the sweet spot. Then I moved all of my furniture back in place, expecting then to run through the automated tuning procedure (see below). But no, after I had everything plugged in and in place the app went into one of the worst scenes of misplaced paranoia I’ve ever seen in an app. Of course I had to sign it to prove it was me and not my neighbor Wilson trying to set up my speaker without my permission. Then it demanded further proof that I had to hold my phone next to a certain spot that the app vaguely points out for NFC to confirm that the speaker was really mine. Of course that didn’t work, I assume because of the second bump in the road that they haven’t gotten around to making their app compatible with my phone yet. So I had to crawl on my belly behind my couch and try to read a long series of numbers, printed in dark gray on a black background, that was printed on the UNDERSIDE of the speaker, which I had to try to turn upside-down without getting it all scratched up. This process alone had me on the verge of wrapping it all up and sending it back.

WHY YOU SHOULDN’T BUY THIS SUB

I hinted at the start that I had some bad news for you and it’s not fully about their absurd paranoia that someone is going to try to break in and try to listen to my sub (and only my sub, nothing else) without my permission. There’s no excuse for that. No this one is actually worse. One of the most important things that Sonos drills into you about this series of products is what they call Trueplay. They urge you to depend on it and make you endure endless annoying popups reminding you that you haven’t used it yet. It’s a tuning system that works via an app on your phone in which you walk around your room and it automatically sets up each and all of your speakers to an ideal standard. I’ve used it in the past and It truly works. So I unpack this subwoofer, went through the juvenile but mandatory setup procedure, then sat back and got ready to use their magical Trueplay app. But no, a popup appeared (this company loves to use annoying popups) telling me that my iPhone 14 isn’t supported. What? That phone has been out for months and they have sold hundreds of millions of them, and it’s virtually identical inside and outside in almost every way to the previous model 13, which is supported, but the Sonos people haven’t made time to prioritize making their golden egg app work with one of them most popular phones in the world. But wait, there’s even more bad news, the new Apple phone isn’t alone, it seems the engineers having bothered to make their system compatible with a long list (12) of some of the biggest selling ios products in the world and NO android products at all, that’s right none! This does not bode well for instilling consumer confidence that this company plans to stick around much longer. I’ve already been through that with Heos, I don’t want to see my money go down the drain again. So far, nothing buy silence from Sonos. – pun may or not be intended.

PET WARNING

if you have a small puppy or kitten read this, so far I’ve never seen it mentioned anywhere. That cool I shaped slot isn’t very big but it is wide enough for your little fur baby to crawl in, right between hundreds of watts of immense loudspeaker pressure that can instantly make them deaf or even kill them. Use caution until your pet has grown big enough to not crawl into that opening and even then use some care, animals have ears that are many times more sensitive than ours. And one more thing, the designers left the speaker cones on these completely exposed, one swipe from a cat’s claws could completely destroy your speaker, and it’s not covered under warranty. Even if you don’t have pets be careful – it’s really easy to poke your fingers right through the speaker cones if you’re not careful lifting them the only way their design permits you to do that.

YES NO MAYBE

I’ve read some things that equate adding a second Sub to the second coming, saying it’s almost a requisite if you really want your system to sound good. My opinion differs, I think it’s nice but not earthshaking (or at least room shaking). One sub really was a must to make the Arc soundbar and two Play One’s as surrounds really sound theatrical. Adding a second one if it was a hundred bucks would make my system maybe 10% better – at eight-hundred bucks? Do it if you have money to burn, I think all things considered I would still give this five stars based on adding a first one of them to an existing system but only one or maybe two stars for adding a second one, bringing their score somewhere between three and four. Being an Apple user, their lack of a working app for one of the major reasons for buying this brand definitely loses them that star in play, ending up with a lukewarm average overall. Sonos get your act together.