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While Sony might try to argue that if something ain’t broke there’s no need to fix it, in truth a refresh of its soundbar range feels long overdue. Its HT-A7000, HT-A5000 and HT-A3000, good though they are, have been around for the best part of three years now - over which time rivals old and new have come up with all manner of exciting new design and performance advances.
It’s not entirely surprising, then, that the long-awaited arrival under my TV of a new Sony soundbar has got my home cinema senses tingling more than they probably should in a middle-aged man.
The Sony soundbar in question is the HT-A9000. Or to give it its more prosaic title, the Bravia Theatre Bar 9 - a second name conjured up by Sony to make its new soundbars sound more like matches made in heaven for its new Bravia TVs. Here’s hoping this new joined-up naming convention doesn’t turn out to be the only reason Sony has finally decided to unleash a new soundbar into the world.
Sound quality
Just about every part of the Bar 9’s sound improves on that of its HT-A7000 predecessor, despite that predecessor picking up awards galore over its long run at the top of Sony’s soundbar pile. So wide-ranging are the Bar 9’s talents, in fact, that it’s initially difficult to start picking apart everything that makes it sound so good. You’re just so caught up in its sound that your critical faculties can’t be bothered to get in the way.
Suspecting that ‘I was having such a good time my brain wouldn’t work’ won’t wash as a viable excuse for not furnishing Sound Advice with a rather more in-depth review, though, I finally manage to drag enough cognitive function into play to start honing in on a few Bar 9 specifics. Starting with the phenomenal precision, subtlety and detailing of its Dolby Atmos and DTS:X playback.
Despite being significantly smaller than its A7000 predecessor, the Bar 9 introduces a couple more drivers and new two-way speaker designs with added tweeters - beautifully engineered refinements that have a profound impact on the soundbar’s sensitivity to even the faintest audio elements. Seriously, I pick up faint effects - both specific details and more general ambient, scene-setting, background stuff - on the Bar 9 that I’ve never heard before on a soundbar. Even with scenes I’ve watched countless times before.
This definitely does not mean, though, that the Bar 9 is overly sensitive or too busy sweating the small stuff for its own good. I never feel that any of the Bar 9’s subtle sounds are getting undue prominence. Every detail and effect just feels like it has the perfect weight, playing its own immaculately judged part in painting a fantastically rich and immersive movie world.
It’s not just the richness, relative weight and subtlety of the Bar 9’s detailing that draws you in, though. The 13 drivers propel sound way further left, right, forward and even upwards than you’d think possible in such a compact soundbar design. But the Bar 9 ensures that every detail within this large soundstage appears to be coming from exactly the right place, making a film’s world feel as involving and realistic as it is huge.
Transitions across the sound stage are immaculately tracked, too, confirming the epic size of the Bar 9’s soundstage doesn’t contain any areas of audio emptiness or ‘gapping’. Every scene also sounds exactly as big as it needs to be - no more, no less. All without the soundstage ever becoming incoherent or losing track of a mix’s intended focus.
The Bar 9’s almost physics-defying ability to deliver massively varied levels of power and impact, no matter where it’s needed, on a movie soundstage is spectacularly showcased by the Dolby Atmos airplane sequence near the start of Overlord on 4K Blu-ray. Every explosion of anti-aircraft fire around the plane erupts with astonishing venom, no matter how high or wide it may be placed relative to the soundbar’s physical position. So effective is the power and placement of these explosions that it’s almost impossible to believe you’re not listening to a full-on speaker system.
Dialogue benefits from the Bar 9’s stellar clarity and effects placement, too. Voices always sound like a natural part of the environment a film has put them in, no matter how much racket might be going on around them. It’s an achievement that’s bolstered by the Bar 9’s ability to place vocals slightly above the soundbar, so that they appear connected with the images on your TV.
One last strength of the Bar 9’s movie performance is the effortless way it’s able to shift through gear after gear to cope with the densest, most epic swells and explosive escalations many of omyur favourite movie test sequences contain.
I am briefly concerned that the Bar 9’s insight and precision with films might cause it to sound a bit forensic with music. Happily, though, the Sony confounds such expectations with a gorgeous stereo set-up that, despite being large, never feels strained or unnatural. Vocal tracks soar, scream, mumble or croon with just the right emphasis and level of clarity, no matter what type of music you’re into - and even the densest, most layered tracks are invariably rendered with a fantastic sense of balance and sensitivity.
I should say at this point that getting the absolute best out of the Bar 9 does require you to get involved with its settings from time to time. In particular, I’d strongly recommend that you stick with Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound processor for films, rather than the provided Dolby Speaker Virtualizer or DTS Neural:X alternatives. And I’d stick with ‘pure stereo’ mode for stereo music mixes rather than using the 360 Spatial Sound processing ‘upmixer’. Though of course, the 360 Spatial Sound system comes back into its own if you’re listening to one of Sony’s 360 Real Audio tracks, or a Dolby Atmos music mix. Be sure, too, to run the Bar 9’s Sound Field Optimisation feature during initial set-up.
The trickiest and, at times, most frustrating tweak I need to do, though, relates to the Bar 9’s bass performance. As with so many aspects of this remarkable soundbar’s performance, its bass delivery actually defies belief in many ways - it hits frequencies so low, at pressure levels so high, it’s hard to believe its chassis isn’t just one long bass port. Unlike every other element of the Bar 9’s music and movie presentation, though, this bass potency can sometimes sound a touch uncontrolled when using the soundbar’s default ‘Max’ bass setting. Sudden eruptions of bass in a movie or music mix sometimes hit so hard that it almost makes you jump, momentarily jolting you out of the immersive reverie you were previously enjoying.
There is, thankfully, a pretty straightforward and effective solution to this: switching the bass effect from ‘Max’ to ‘Mid’. Now bass lines, drops or impact effects feel much more in balance with everything else, letting you get back to uninterrupted enjoyment of really anything you care to listen to.
Having experienced just how deep the Bar 9’s bass can go in the ‘Max’ bass setting, though, I did occasionally feel its absence with bass-heavy music tracks and hefty movie moments. But unless you’re prepared to keep toggling the bass management between ‘Mid’ and ‘Max’, even from track to track or scene to scene, the consistency delivered by the ‘Mid’ setting is a sensible compromise.
Living with the Bravia Theatre Bar 9
The Bravia Theatre Bar 9 is very easy on the eye. It’s almost 40 percent smaller than the A7000, massively improving its key ‘heard but not seen’ appeal. It builds on this new subtlety, too, by covering its front, side and top edges in a dark grey felt finish, creating a refined and uniform look that’s a far cry from the A7000’s rather awkward mix of textures and finishes. The one unfortunate thing about the Bar 9’s design is that it doesn’t incorporate a proper LED display - though the potential frustrations this might cause are tempered by the effectiveness of Sony’s latest iOS/Android BraviaConnect app.
Surprisingly, the Bar 9 only carries a single HDMI input alongside its HDMI output where the A7000 had two. This single HDMI loop-through does add support for 4K/120 and variable refresh rate gaming features, though, as well as passing along the HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision HDR formats.
The only other wired connection on the Bar 9 is a unique-to-Sony ‘S-Centre Sync’ output, via which the speakers in a compatible Sony TV can take on centre channel duties. The Bar 9 supports both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth audio playback, with Airplay, Spotify Connect and Sony’s 360 Real Audio systems easily available via the Bravia Connect app.
You can also, finally, add optional rear and subwoofer speakers to the Bar 9 if you wish. While I can confirm that these optional extras are of a high quality, they aren’t cheap. So while the Bar 9 doesn’t really create a sense of sound coming from behind you, it’s good to find that it seems to lean more into getting the best from its default single-component status than the HT-A7000 did.
Conclusion
The Bar 9 really does feel like a soundbar with three years of development time behind it. The level of engineering required to get so much power, dynamic range and precision out of such a newly compact form, for instance, goes way beyond anything we’d expect to see happen within a typical annual product refresh window. Its sound is so refined, and adapts so well to radically different types of source material, that you have to think that Sony’s tuning team was given absolutely as long as it needed to get the soundbar’s awesome new driver designs gelling as well as possible with Sony’s latest audio processing refinements.
The result, even with a bit of oddly relatable default bass over-enthusiasm to deal with, is the finest addition to the single-unit soundbar scene we’ve heard all year.
Watching notes
Overlord 4K Blu-ray
If you’re in the mood for a bonkers war movie/zombie apocalypse crossover that also pushes your sound system to the edge of destruction (and why wouldn’t you be in the mood for such a treat?) Overlord ticks all the boxes. Especially the oft-demoed scene where flak explodes all around the plane about to drop the film’s unfortunate heroes into unexpected zombie hell.
It (Chapter One) 4K Blu-ray
There’s a scene in Andy Muschietti’s first It adaptation where Pennywise ultimately erupts out of a projector screen at the end of an epic Dolby Atmos build-up that introduces a series of escalating bass ‘bongs’ along the way. These bass eruptions handily reveal the amazing frequency depths the Bar 9 can hit - but also jar slightly in the default ‘Max’ bass setting.
Twisters 4K Blu-ray
The Bar 9’s remarkable ability to deliver extreme, but also completely convincing, height and width effects results in a terrifyingly epic sense of scale - in all directions - when the new Twisters 4K Blu-ray’s Dolby Atmos track takes you right into the heart of an F5 tornado.
The Bravia Theatre Bar 9 is a fantastic ‘traditional’, single-component soundbar that performs more than well enough to justify its initially high-looking price. It’s sensitive enough to bring out sound-mix subtleties that pass most, if not all, of its rivals by; it’s powerful enough to fill your room with sound and transport you fully into whatever movie world you’re watching; it’s musical enough to make your favourite tunes sound positively blissful.
As Sony is keen to stress by adding ‘Bravia’ to the name of its latest soundbars, it really really wants you to add them to a Sony TV. Especially as doing so unlocks Sony’s ‘Acoustic Centre Sync’ feature, where the TV’s speakers can take over centre-channel duties from the soundbar.
The ‘Bar 9’ part of the name suggests Sony sees a particular affinity with its new Bravia 9 Mini LED TVs - but I see no reason why it wouldn’t still be a great partner for any ‘Acoustic Center Sync’-capable Sony TV.
The impressive support of its HDMI loopthrough for 4K/120Hz and variable refresh rate feeds also make the soundbar an unusually good audio solution for Xbox Series X, PC or, especially, PlayStation 5 gamers.
