The Verge:

Walk into any of Sonos’ downtown Santa Barbara, California, offices, and you could almost convince yourself you’ve been transported back north to Silicon Valley. There are the requisite kitchenettes, bikes, and happy dogs padding about as endless video conferences take place in meeting rooms. (Sonos also has offices in Boston and London.)

You’ll also find evidence of Sonos’ technical roots. These are deep speaker nerds doing deep speaker nerd things. They design everything in-house, no off-the-shelf parts. The labs have dogbone-shaped tables so everybody can stand close to each other and to their prototypes (Some of those tables are hooked up to a 24-hour-a-day video conference system to identical tables in other offices.) There’s a room where a hundred speakers have been entombed to play at maximum volume for months on end.

But thinking of Sonos as just a transported Silicon Valley company misses the point entirely. It’s something different, something much more interesting. Sonos participates in the fast-paced world of tech, but it’s trying to translate that quarterly cycle of innovation onto a more humane timescale.

The latest product to come out after spending two years in those labs is the Sonos Beam, a new $399 soundbar that will be available on July 17th. It’s a carefully designed, premium speaker that needs to work at two radically different speeds: the lightning-quick, fast-paced feature cycle of the overall tech industry and the slower pace of the living room. It encapsulates everything Sonos is and everything Sonos needs to get right.

I know this sentence strikes fear in my wife’s wonderful heart, but…

…this sounds really promising, and as someone who has been looking into the connected audio world (whether Alexa or Siri or what have you), this seems like a great, well-priced entry point.

I will be watching reviews closely.