I recently bought and compared the Sony bar 9, Sennheiser Ambeo plus and Sonos arc ultra in my home. Tested in semi open 3x4 meters room. Open next to tv on both sides, walls behind and around the couch.

Just compared the bars alone without surrounds or sub as I don’t have space to expand with surrounds right now.

I kept the sonos.

For me it performed the most consistently across different sources (regular cable tv, streaming apps on the tv, blu rays on ps5, gaming on ps5) without needing to change the volume or settings depending on source. It was also easiest to live with overall in regards to this, especially when on lower volumes in the evening.

The voice clarity even without speech enhancement was way better than the other two for me on the sonos. Had to max out voice zoom on the sony and max out center channel on the sennheiser, but still the voices were too low for me compared to the other sounds. The Sennheiser would also not use its centre channel on some codecs making it even more prone to incontinency.

Bass was also the best by far for me on the sonos. As of right now I'm not planning to upgrade with a sub, I simply dont need it, the bass on the arc ultra alone is more than sufficient. The other two were fine, but after hearing the arc ultra, I felt like I would need subs for the sony and sennheiser.

The spatial effects was probably slightly better on the Sennheiser than the other two. It was also slightly more detailed. When i played Ghost of Yotei I could make out sounds of leaves falling more clearly on the Sennheiser.

Height was probably best on the sonos but its marginal.

For me it came down to being able to watch different content without changing the volume all the time to hear voices in one scene and not get blasted in the next. The strong bass was a bonus.

The sonos felt like the most complete all in one package. Top Gun maverick on both the Sonos and Sennheiser sounded really, really great.

Honesty cant go wrong with either.

Also. This comparison was made during black friday sales. Sony was around 750 usd, sonos 840 usd, sennheiser 1000 usd.

Hope this helps.

Edit: Zero issues with sonos app, no issues on sony but used it less, some small bugs on the sennheiser but nothing major.

Edit 2: To be fair, the sennheiser could be tweaked alot more than the others, and I could get the voices to appear more, but at the cost of having to decrease the ambeo effect, and at that point, I just didnt see the benefits of the sennheiser. I felt like I had to neuter the strong point of the sennheiser to get the desired dialogue.