You can get premium Sonos audio for over $100 off for Black Friday

Buying a sound bar is one of the best things you can do to improve your enjoyment of your living room TV. It will make you forget about the muted audio of your built-in TV speakers, and if you play your cards right, it can be the start of a whole-home audio solution. For Black Friday, I can think of no better deal than the one you can get on the Sonos Ray, an entry-level sound bar that normally costs $279, but you can get it from Sonos, Amazon, and other online stores for $169.

The Sonos Ray isn’t as fully featured as other Sonos speakers like the Arc or Beam, but it still lets you group the sound bar with other Sonos speakers, and seamlessly pass audio from the Sonos Ray to the Sonos Ace headphones when you want a more immersive listening experience. Here’s where you can get the Sonos Ray on sale.

The Sonos Ray packs a punch for its small size

Deep, loud sound and Sonos software perks

For its compact size — around 21.93-inches long and 2.76-inches tall — you’ll get a surprising amount of audio oomph out of the Sonos Ray. The speaker gets very loud and loses very little detail at max volume, which makes it great for enjoying a blockbuster movie at home. It’s size and number of midwoofers and tweeters (two of each) naturally means it has a narrower sound stage than some of Sonos’ other sound bars, but you likely won’t notice unless you’re a more discerning audiophile.

Where Sonos speakers generally shine, and the Ray is no exception, are the extra software features. Sonos’ app makes it easy to add the Ray to a group of speakers in your house, and control what those speakers are playing at a moment’s notice. Using the Sonos app, you can also tune the Ray’s sound to your room with the company’s Trueplay feature. Since the release of the Sonos Ace headphones, you’ve also been able to transfer whatever sound is playing from your Sonos Ray directly to the headphones just by pushing a button. What other sound bar lets you do that?

A great price makes up for some missing smart features

You will miss out on a few things, of course. The Sonos Ray doesn’t have any built-in microphones and naturally won’t let you access voice assistants like Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Sonos Voice Control. If the rest of your smart home ecosystem is built around using your voice to control things, you won’t have that option with the Sonos Ray. Because the sound bar connects to your TV over an optical audio cable rather than HDMI, the Ray can’t leverage any kind of eARC features to control your TV, either.

Even with those missing features, what the Ray can do is worth the price. Sonos’ ecosystem just works better and more seamlessly together than other products do, and if you can get in on that for less than $200, you absolutely should.

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