Optus Mobile Review ALDI Mobile Review Amaysim Mobile Review Belong Mobile Review Circles.Life Review Vodafone Mobile Review Woolworths Mobile Review Felix Mobile Review Best iPhone Plans Best Family Mobile Plans Best Budget Smartphones Best Prepaid Plans Best SIM-Only Plans Best Plans For Kids And Teens Best Cheap Mobile Plans Telstra vs Optus Mobile Optus NBN Review Belong NBN Review Vodafone NBN Review Superloop NBN Review Aussie BB NBN Review iiNet NBN Review MyRepublic NBN Review TPG NBN Review Best NBN Satellite Plans Best NBN Alternatives Best NBN Providers Best Home Wireless Plans What is a Good NBN Speed? Test NBN Speed How to speed up your internet Optus vs Telstra Broadband ExpressVPN Review CyberGhost VPN Review NordVPN Review PureVPN Review Norton Secure VPN Review IPVanish VPN Review Windscribe VPN Review Hotspot Shield VPN Review Best cheap VPN services Best VPN for streaming Best VPNs for gaming What is a VPN? VPNs for ad-blocking By comparison, the Sub Mini adds clean, visceral bass. Bass you can feel. You can dial it up and down in the Sonos app depending on the amount of oomph you want. Maxing it at “15” can make your home or apartment feel like a club. Impressively, doing so still kept the bass distortion-free - even on tracks that heavily lean into lower sub-bass frequencies like Carly Rae Jepsen’s “I Didn’t Just Come Here to Dance” and Childish Gambino’s “3005”. The overall audio was still relatively balanced in these cases. I wouldn’t recommend sliding the bass all the way up in most cases, however. It suits certain kinds of music, but not all. The death metal double kick in Opeth’s “The Funeral Portrait” was a disaster with a turnt-up low-end. For most, I think upping the bass by one or two notches is a happy balance, especially at lower volumes. There’s just a little more drive without it being over-powering. But if you’re listening at higher volumes, this isn’t really necessary. As a Sonos product, setting up the Sub Mini is very simple. It’s a case of plugging it in, opening the app, and following the prompts. There’s a new NFC pairing process, but I couldn’t get that to work with my iPhone 13 Pro, so I had to type in a code round on the bottom of the speaker. Otherwise, it’s hard to the fault. One minor niggle is Sonos’ Trueplay tuning technology is still iOS exclusive. Trueplay adjusts your speakers’ sound to your room, which can be incredibly helpful if you’ve got a subwoofer in a small-to-medium room, like Sonos suggests the Sub Mini is ideal for. If you’re an Android user, I’d recommend borrowing a friend’s iPhone to take advantage of this. In a smaller room, there’s more potential for sound to bounce off walls and unbalance the overall mix, so Trueplay can help tame this. From an aesthetic perspective, the Sub Mini is an interesting subwoofer thanks to its cylindrical design. It’s a nice antithesis to the “black box” design we typically see on most subwoofers. Maybe a little more organic, if I had to pick a word. Size-wise, the Sub Mini lives up to the name, taking up roughly half the volume of the larger Sonos Sub. It’s shorter, narrower, but also a little wider. The extra width means it might not be as easy to shove in a crevice. While the Sub Mini is clearly designed to go with soundbars, it can also be paired with any non-portable Sonos speaker. It could go nicely with a Sonos One pair if you wanted a bit more bass, or even a Play:5. In terms of soundbars, Sonos suggests pairing it with a Beam or a Ray, but there’s nothing stopping you from using it with an Arc or a Playbar, for example. In a larger room, the Sub proper is probably a better companion for these soundbars, but in a smaller room, the Sub Mini would do just great. That being said, $699 for a Sonos Beam and $699 for a Sub Mini combined is still less than the $1,499 you’d pay for a Sonos Arc, and I’d say that’s a more than good enough combo for most, even if you miss out on the upward-firing speakers.
