Interview: How Sonos squeezed big sound into its tiny Ray soundbar

So if you know speaker technology, this is a ported box, but it uses an anti-distortion technology we’ve developed in Ray that really cuts down on the turbulence that you get out of a ported system, and delivers the bass notes without a lot of the turbulence sounds that you can get out of a ported box," Holley explains.The turbulence Holley is referring to comes from the fact that the Sonos Ray's design required a strong curve to its bass port, and curves are the enemy of clean air movement."In an ideal situation, you’d have a nice, straight port, with no curves," says Holley. It can’t be tucked into furniture."While Holley enthused about the potential bass performance of the Ray, in TechRadar's experience they key upgrade that most people who don't currently have a soundbar would like from their TV sound is clearer speech.Hollay explained to us that Sonos' effectively considers the Ray to be a 3.0 system, with left, right and center channels… but those channels aren't divided cleanly between speakers. The idea of a split waveguide is to take sound that's been fired in one direction and to split it into two slightly different directions – in this case, that's partly towards the front, and partly towards the side, to create width.On the face of it, this doesn't sound like an ideal setup for dialogue clarity, but Holley explains how Sonos is deploying it with speech in mind."We’re using full-range drivers, but then we add that ported system onto them. Surround sound is the best version of this, but a lot of soundbars, including the Sonos Beam and Sonos Arc, are designed around providing that feeling too – a car screeching from left to right across the screen should have sound that moves convincing with it, even though the audio is coming from a single box.But the way to get really convincing positional audio is to have a lot of speaker drivers, and plenty of space to arrange them. That’s one of the, I think, great innovations over the last several years, just in the DSP [digital signal processing] realm – being able to create a sophisticated experience with fewer drivers is very possible."With no HDMI port, the Ray also isn't capable of receiving a Dolby Atmos signal, which again means there's an element of the latest and greatest positional sound that it can't do anything with.