Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 review: A spectacular standalone soundbar

While Sony, like most AV brands, religiously refreshes its TV range every year, it takes a more circumspect approach to its soundbars. The new Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 arrives more than three years after Sony’s previous soundbar range first rolled into town, raising hopes that Sony has put all that time to good use in conjuring up another impressive addition to the home cinema audio scene.

Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 review: What you need to know

On one level, Sony takes a fairly traditional approach to soundbars. This trend continues with the Bravia Theatre Bar 9 (henceforth known as the Bar 9), which ships as just a single bar, with no external wireless subwoofer or rear speakers included.

You can add optional rear and subwoofer speakers to the Bar 9 if you want to take things to the next, full surround sound level. But Sony has focused hard on making the Bar 9 a ‘true’ self-contained soundbar.

The Bar 9 manages to squeeze no less than 13 separate drivers into its compact form, delivering an unusual 7.0.2 channel count. The soundbar can decode both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks that currently represent the state of the AV audio art. This support is backed up by Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping system, which creates virtual speakers around your room to make up for the lack of real ones.

Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 review: Price and competition

The Bar 9’s £1,399 price is on the premium side by soundbar standards – especially for a single-bar solution. The Samsung HW-Q990D (£959) and JBL Bar 1300 (£1,212) both cost less and offer 16 channels of sound across a soundbar, subwoofer and rear speakers.

There are some strong single-bar rivals out there too, such as the Sonos Arc Ultra (£999) and the Harman Kardon Citation Multibeam 1100, which is end-of-life but an absolute steal at £399. The Bar 9 is by no means the most expensive standalone soundbar around, though. The mighty and meaty Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar Max, for instance, costs £2,199, while the Devialet Dione, with its rotating centre channel speaker and ability to both hang vertically on a wall or sit flat on a tabletop costs £1,800.

Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 review: Design and features

Sony’s pursuit of the soundbar’s traditional clutter-busting ethos sees it managing to make the Bar 9 nearly 40% smaller than its HT-A7000 predecessor. The resulting 1,300 x 113 x 64mm (WDH) dimensions still look like a serious bit of AV kit, but the bar won’t stand out like a sore thumb against your svelte television and is less likely to obscure low-lying TV panels.

The Bar 9 shifts to a much more uniform design than the A7000 had. Now the front, sides and top of the bar all sport a fetching uniform grey felt finish, only broken by a thin strip of glossy black plastic running along the back of the top and sides. This helps the Bar 9 feel less conspicuous and more elegant and refined than its predecessor.

Sony provides wall mounting brackets, but you can’t use the soundbar in a vertical profile, meaning it will jut out from your wall more than you may be comfortable with. Likely more useful for most household setups will be the two little screw-on feet Sony provides so that you can lift the soundbar a little if you want to lie it across a TV’s desktop feet or stand.

The Bar 9 uses 13 drivers to deliver a 7.0.2 channel count. This works out as front left, centre and right, front side left, front side right, side left, side right and two up-firing channels. The latter are there to deliver the height/overhead effects associated with Dolby Atmos.

The main drivers are new two-way designs, with added tweeters used for front and centre channels. The race-track shape of the core X-Balanced Speaker units isn’t new, but still worth mentioning for the way it boosts the low-frequency sound and core volume the drivers can produce by increasing the surface area of their diaphragms.

The ‘.0’ bit of the official channel count indicates there’s no dedicated bass channel, but Sony has squeezed in a new Quad Woofer with passive radiator system to try and underpin audio with convincing amounts of low-frequency sound.

While the Bar 9 boasts nine actual channels, Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping System is on hand to analyse your room and use the results to create more ‘virtual’ speakers around your seating position. There’s also support for Sony’s 360 Reality Audio, which enables you to enjoy a fast-growing catalogue of songs mixed in the brand’s spatial sound format.

Spotify Connect is also built-in, and there’s support for Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and IMAX Enhanced audio. Dolby Atmos and DTS:X can either be fed through the 360 Spatial Sound Mapping system, or else delivered using Dolby’s Speaker Virtualizer technology or DTS’s Neural:X virtual surround technologies. To access IMAX Enhanced, however, you need to have added Sony’s optional surround sound and subwoofer speakers.

These optional speakers are available in four different flavours: ‘entry-level’ and step-up rear options, and entry-level and step-up subwoofer options. The cheapest SA-RS3S rears cost £449 a pair, while the most expensive SA-RS5 models (which are in truth the ones you’d probably want to add to the Bar 9) cost £699. The cheaper SA-SW3 subwoofer costs £449, while the SA-SW5 costs £699. So you’ll be looking at a total spend of at least £2,300 for an IMAX Enhanced-ready full surround system, rising to £2,800 if you go for the most appropriate optional extra speakers for the Bar 9.

Getting back to things helpfully included in the Bar 9’s price, hi-fi purists will be pleased to hear that despite all the clever virtual speaker technologies the Bar 9 carries, Sony also provides a simple two-channel playback mode for stereo music. There’s support for AirPlay streaming, too, alongside Sony’s renowned DSEE upscaling processing.

Other handy little features include the ability to add delay to the audio track if it isn’t syncing with the pictures on your TV; an AI-based system that separates dialogue from the mix to give you greater control over how it sounds; and an unusual feature for adjusting how high – literally – the Bar 9’s core soundstage appears. This very welcome idea lets you adjust the vertical level of the sound to compensate for the height of your viewing position or the size of your TV screen.

Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 review: Connections and control

The Bar 9’s connections are more interesting than comprehensive. A single HDMI input means you can’t use it as a switching box, but the single HDMI input/output does support 4K/120Hz gaming feeds. The HDMI passthrough can also cope with the HDR10, HLG and Dolby Vision HDR formats, but every HDR10+ source I tried to play through it defaulted down to basic HDR10.

The only other connection of note is an S-Center out. This lets you couple the soundbar to a Sony TV so that the TV can take on centre channel duties, placing centre channel effects more effectively on the screen and allowing the soundbar to devote more energy and power to other mix elements.

With the Bar 9 only carrying a single on/off button, making any adjustments falls back on either the provided remote control or Sony’s BraviaConnect app for your mobile phone or tablet. You’ll need the app to activate some of the soundbar’s more advanced features, including a worthwhile Sound Field Optimisation tool that adjusts the sound’s balance and virtual speaker placement to suit your specific room layout. The app is also pretty much essential to your first install of the Bar 9, and since there’s no LED readout on the bar, the app is also your best bet for knowing exactly what the soundbar is doing.

Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 review: Sound quality

The Bar 9’s compact form had me worried about whether Sony had sacrificed sound quality to achieve a more demure look. Thankfully it took mere moments to discover the Bar 9 actually sounds bigger than its predecessor.

Despite not having any other speakers to lean on, the Bar 9 casts its sound so far to the left, right, forward and even up that you completely forget that everything you’re hearing is coming from a single speaker enclosure under your TV.

There’s nothing forced or random about the way the Bar 9 generates its prodigious soundstage, either. Every sound effect, from the daintiest patter of a raindrop or rustle of a leaf to the loudest gunshots, punches, explosions and crashes is delivered with absolute precision in terms of its placement in space and its relative balance in the mix. There’s no hint here of ambient sounds becoming overstated, or bigger sounds falling away when the going gets tough.

Even sounds right at the outer edges of the Bar 9’s substantial sound field are rich and controlled, rather than becoming brittle or vague. Just as importantly, the Bar 9 doesn’t leave any empty spaces in its sound staging in either its horizontal or vertical projections.

The clear sense of height effects such as rain appearing to come from somewhere near your ceiling is particularly welcome and unusual for a single-unit soundbar, contributing brilliantly to the creation of an epic but also intimate three-dimensional wall of sound.

The Bar 9’s outstanding understanding of how movie soundtracks work is also evident in the way it deals with ambient effects and music. It manages to present these atmospheric additions with a beautiful sense of positioning so that they sound just beyond the world of the main action while never becoming overwhelming or feeling too detached from the onscreen action.

Dense scores are delivered with a gorgeous sense of escalation, revealing just how much controlled power the Bar 9 has at its disposal, as well as, where appropriate, achieving a lovely sense of ‘layering’ of different score elements. The precision and balance that marks out the Bar 9’s impeccable soundstage building extends to its handling of dialogue. Voices always sound clear and immaculately positioned, but never too bright or decontextualised.

My biggest pre-listening concern about the Bar 9 given its reduced size and lack of a dedicated low-frequency channel was its bass handling. Sony again (mostly) allays such concerns instantly, as the Bar 9 pumps out deeper, richer, more distortion-free low frequency sounds than I’d honestly thought possible from such a compact, speaker-packed device. Action scenes have a real sense of scale and heft, and the Bar 9’s ability to rumble ensures there’s a genuinely cinematic feel to action-fuelled films.

In fact, the Bar 9’s bass can occasionally erupt a little too heavily, momentarily disturbing the impeccable sense of balance that’s otherwise its trademark. Using the Bravia Connect App to change the low-frequency impact from its default Max level to Mid substantially reduced these brief moments of bass excess.

The only other limitation of the Bar 9 for movies is that, despite the best efforts of Sony’s 360 Spatial Mapping system, I seldom felt as if its sound was truly wrapping right around me. Everything was happening, admittedly in a pronounced 3D space, in front of, or occasionally, to the side of me. For a full surround experience, you’re going to have to cough up for those optional rear speakers.

The Bar 9 handles music beautifully, for the most part. Its stunning mix of refinement and staging practically screams ‘Hi-Fi’ – albeit in an elegant, refined, classy and never clinical kind of way. A soundbar capable of as much raw movie grunt has no right being able to adapt so well to the different demands of two-channel music, but here we are. So deep does the Bar 9’s understanding of music run that even applying the soundbar’s 360 Spatial Mapping system to stereo tracks typically sounds compelling and involving.

The bass situation is a little more complicated with music than movies. While the Mid bass setting is the best option for some songs, it feels a touch light for others. With some electronic albums, this discrepancy can occur between different songs.

I think most users will probably settle on the Mid bass option rather than keep adjusting settings. But it might have been nice if Sony’s clever audio processing had included an ‘on the fly’ bass management option that could automatically trim and unleash the bass during music playback, without requiring manual intervention.

Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 review: Verdict

Sony hasn’t wasted the three years between the HT-A7000 and its new soundbar flagship. The engineering involved in growing and refining the Bar 9’s sound while simultaneously reducing its physical presence feels almost miraculous. It just shouldn’t be possible for a single bar this unassuming to deliver such dazzling precision and warmth with music one minute and such room-shaking cinematic massiveness the next.

The Bar 9 is not quite perfect. Slightly more consistency at the bass end would have been appreciated, and it would be lovely if the optional rear and subwoofer speakers weren’t quite so expensive. The bass issues can be managed with a little manual input, though, while the cost of the extras doesn’t directly reflect on the Bar 9’s stellar solo efforts. So I have no hesitation in putting the Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 right up there among the standalone soundbar gods.