Sonos Beam Black Smart Compact Soundbar

This was an opportunistic purchase. I have four Sonos devices spread throughout the house, and started to run into problems with a slightly older sound bar for a TV in the house. This was an opportunity to upgrade the sound bar to one of the Sonos sound bars available. The problem was, which one? Those four Sonos devices are all Gen 1 devices, and I'm not going to upgrade them all to get compatibility, so I needed to find a device that was compatible with the Gen 1 environment. You'll notice that the current Arc, Beam (gen 2) and Ray all require Gen 2, so when I saw this Beam (gen 1) show up in the refurb section of the store, I bought it. The Beam (Gen 1) is compatible with both Gen 1 and Gen 2. Setting the Beam up was really easy. As a refurbed device, I was concerned about the condition it would arrive in, but I now know that Sonos does an incredible job of preparing a refurbed item for resale. My Beam could have been confused for a brand new product. Plugged it in, attached the included HDMI cable to the TV and launched the Sonos app on my iPad. It found the new Beam right away, and started the tuning process. No hiccups. It just worked. I've been using it for a little over a week now, and couldn't be happier. Part of the appeal was eARC, and having the TV's remote control the speaker without any setup is amazing. For years, I've had a sound bar that had it's own IR remote that I included on my universal remote...which didn't always work. HDMI eARC is amazing. It could be running at ARC only...don't care. The automation is awesome. Side note to Sonos: The Gen 1 and Gen 2 incompatibility problem you created is really poor for your customers. I've seen suggestions that "gen 1 hardware can't run gen 2 firmware" as an explanation, which is silly. You could have chosen to make Gen 2 firmware compatible with both revisions, but I'd guess schedules/costs said no, and customers now suffer. It's really a poor decision.