The Sonos Arc Ultra is truly the worst-kept secret in tech right now, with the new soundbar leaking everything like water from a paper bucket. Only a few days ago, Best Buy seemed to reveal that it would have a price of $999, and now more retailers may have given us the release date.
Spotted by Redditors, Belgian retailers Fnac, Vandenborre, and MediaMarkt apparently had pre-order pages visible for the Sonos Arc Ultra and the Sonos Sub 4, promising a release date of 29 October 2024 for both.
The pre-orders offer a price of €999 for the soundbar, and €899 for the Sonos Sub 4 – all of which are in line with expectations.
October 29 is coming up fast, so we may get official information about the new soundbar imminently – early next week will be two weeks from that launch date, so I wouldn’t be surprised to see something arrive then.
On top of this release date revelation, a load more images that are claimed to be of the Arc Ultra have leaked on Reddit, too. There’s a combination of product shots and lifestyle images, and they appear to confirm that the soundbar will work with the Sonos Ace headphones (not that anyone had any doubt about that, especially since they were updated to work with the Beam and Ray soundbars).
The Sonos Arc Ultra is exciting because it’s claimed to be the first product with a new kind of speaker tech, which Sonos appears to be calling ‘Sound Motion’ based on previous leaks, but was previously known as Mayht Heart Motion before Sonos bought the company.
These drivers are much smaller than traditional speaker designs, but can apparently deliver the same power and depth. They’re said to be used here, though we don’t know in exactly what form yet – the likelihood is that they’ll provide much more bass and mid-range power from the bar.
The original Sonos Arc still rates among the best soundbars you can buy today, and I’ve written before why I think the Arc’s successor could be one of the best tech releases of the year. And if Sonos can keep its improved app on its positive track by adding features and fixing the reliability, we could be onto a real winner here. Looks like we’ll find out one way or the other soon.
