Sonos Beam Soundbar: Price, Details, Release Date

The Sonos Beam is a new $399 soundbar, but to Sonos, it's a heck of a lot more than just a speaker that sits under your television. It's a fabric-wrapped representation of how Sonos sees the future--one in which all the voice assistants from Apple and Google and Amazon can live next to one another. In this future, hip urban millennials parents will use Beam not just for Netflixing and HBOing, but queuing up the soundtracks to their hip, urban lives and for controlling their hip, urban smart home. And they'll do it all with spoken commands instead of an app or a remote. Development on the Beam has been going on for more than two years (during which time the speaker was referred to internally as "El Rey," Spanish for "The King"). And it's being released at a critical time for Sonos: It's been reported that the 16-year-old audio company will soon file to go public.