What is Sonos Sound Motion? Explaining the speaker tech in the Arc Ultra

The Arc Ultra is Sonos’ new premium soundbar in its speaker line-up, and the company will be hoping it marks a reset after the disastrous revamp of its control app earlier in 2024.

The Arc Ultra will come bearing new technology with what its calling Sound Motion transducers, which help to create the most powerful soundbar Sonos has created to date. What can this technology do? You’ll have to read on to find out more.

What is Sonos Sound Motion?

Firstly, Sound Motion wasn’t developed by Sonos per se, but the technology behind it was created by a Dutch start-up company called Mayht. It was started by two brothers (Mattias and Timothy) who conceived of what they called Heartmotion technology. A speaker they calimed completely reinvented the inside of a speaker to create a new type that are 10 times more compact, flatter, and lightweight without compromising sound, range or output.

Mayht was bought by Sonos in 2022 for $100m, and the Heartmotion technology eventually become what’s now known as Sound Motion; transducers designed to offer clearer dialogue, deeper bass, and a more detailed sound from a speaker that’s smaller in size.

Unfortunately, Sonos doesn’t go into much (if any detail) on how the speakers inside the Arc Ultra work, so we’re having to rely on older information before Mayht was acquired. From what we can source, the way in which the speaker is configured is different from more traditional approaches, creating more space behind the membrane of the speaker.

Creating more space offers more room for the membrane to move, and as the membrane is the part of the speaker that creates the sound you hear, what that meant was that the speaker could output the same sound without taking up as much space in the cabinet. You can see how it works in this article.

In theory, smaller transducers could result in smaller speakers, but that’s not what the Arc Ultra has gone for. Its dimensions are effectively the same as the original Arc soundbar. Working with smaller transducers has led Sonos to fit more speakers into the cabinet.

The Arc had three tweeters from the high frequencies and eight midwoofers to cover the midrange and bass, for a total of eleven speakers. The Arc Ultra has more than double the number of tweeters (seven), six mid-woofers, and the most interesting part is the four-motor, dual-membrane woofer that carries the Sound Motion branding. Ideally, this could solve the problem single-bar soundbars have with bass. In order to create big bass, you need a big enclosure, which means a bigger soundbar. But if you can produce deeper bass in a smaller enclosure, then you can keep the soundbar around the same size.

Does that mean the Arc Ultra will sound better than the original Arc? We’ll have to wait and find out.