The beam is actually not that small once you see it in front of you - but like all Sonos home theater products - without the sub, they have little bass.
I'm a bit of a bass whorer I must admit - so when I turn off the sonos sub and just have the playbar and ones playing - they sound flat like a pancake, the bass levels without the sub don't sound much different to just using my TV's inbuilt speaker
Last party I had someone did this in a room I call the 'bass room', it's a medium-size room with a Play 3 and a Sub. They whacked up the volume and put on Pendulum. You could feel it across the house. Epic.Anyone who is prepared to max out the volume and sub levels on their Sonos system has some seriously balls
AFAIK they will need to be transcoded somehow, using something like Plex. That's why I've never pursued Sonos as an AV solution outside of the bedroom.
What TV is it? I found a problem with my Samsung that it will send DD to the Beam - but only if the audio originates from the TV itself. Any signal from another device it refuses to pass through. I ended up having to get a HDMI switch and connect all devices to the Beam directly to get the best sound.
I had this problem with Alexa so I turned it off on my fire tabGoogle Assistant for Sonos is now available in the UK
https://www.sonos.com/en-ie/google-assistant
Set up on my Sonos One was straightforward and seems to work well. Only annoying aspect now is that both my phone and speaker pick up the command requests, anyway to stop this?