Picked up a Sonos Beam Gen 2? Change these settings immediately

I've made the argument for years now that a soundbar is often the biggest single upgrade that people can make to change the quality of their home cinema experience. Loads of us now have great 4K TVs, even if they're not necessarily ranked in our list of the best TVs on the market, but very few of those affordable or midrange displays have remotely solid sound.

If you're looking to get a soundbar to transform how movies and streaming shows sound at home, there are few better choices than the Sonos Beam (2nd Gen), which is compact but extremely impressive – which is why it's a best-seller. Despite being a bit of a stunner, though, that doesn't mean its performance is always perfect without any tweaks from you, the user.

So, as the proud owner of a second-generation Beam myself, I've come up with this short list of settings that you should pay attention to if you have one – with only a few minutes of tinkering in the Sonos app, you could get a welcome boost to your sound.

Tune your soundbar immediately

One of the longstanding features that has made Sonos so beloved of audio reviewers is its Trueplay system, which lets you tune your speakers to the room they're in, based on reverb and spatial detection. The only asterisk is that you need an iOS device for it to work fully (on Android, you get a less detailed QuickTune option for some speakers).

If you have access to one, do this immediately by finding the option in the Sonos app, as it'll help you Beam (2nd Gen) tune its sound more specifically to your setup, and can really help the tone and accuracy of its audio both for music and even more so for movies and TV.

It can be easy to forget this step, or to assume that it's a very optional extra, so don't forget it. It's also worth remembering that you should do the process again if you rearrange your room!

Experiment with speech and night modes

When your Beam (2nd Gen) is connected to your TV and playing audio from it, you'll have live access to two audio mode toggles that are well worth exploring – night mode and dialogue enhancer.

These two toggles can be life-savers in certain scenarios. Night mode curtails the soundbar's dynamic range to massively reign in the bass, making it ideal for late-night movies where you're worried about disturbing neighbours or anyone in adjoining rooms.

That dialogue booster, meanwhile, uses some very clever systems to detect spoken dialogue in your audio, and boosts it a little to make it easier to hear and make out from background noise. It's great for those who sometimes have a little difficulty making out lines, and it is a real help for older movies and content that might not have quite the clean audio of modern productions.

Banish that LED

I love the design of the second-generation Beam, which ditched the dust-magnet that was the previous version's fabric grille cover, but there's one detail that persists from the first-generation Beam – a little status light. Some people will find this helpful, since it lets you know the connection status of the soundbar, but I have beef with it.

Primarily, if you're watching a movie in a dark room (as you should be), even that tiny soft-glowing LED can be a slight, minute distraction, and it's better off deactivated. Luckily, Sonos has thought of this – you can easily turn it off in the Sonos app, and I'd recommend you do so and never look back.

Choose your microphone settings carefully

The Beam can be a pretty smart speaker if you want it to be, but it's fair to say that plenty of us haven't embraced smart assistants such as Siri or Alexa nearly as tightly as their creators might have hoped.

If you're in the camp that doesn't really use voice controls in your home, then it's a good idea to head into that familiar Sonos app before too long to simply deactivate the Beam's microphone entirely. It's unlikely to wake accidentally, to be fair, but it's a little bit of peace of mind to know that it's just off and not a problem at all.