Orbitsound T9 review

Orbitsound’s spatial stereo is simply brilliant. No matter where you stand in a room, you feel as though the audio is surrounding you and you don’t have to try and find that sweet spot. Standing in front of the soundbar still gives the best stereo separation to our minds, but moving out of this area doesn’t cause a dramatic loss of sound quality, as with a traditional stereo system, and the audio still seems to envelop you.

Sound quality is certainly helped by Orbitsound’s decision to go with a lacquered wooden case for the T9. Orbitsound claims that wood, as well as making the T9 look like a high-end product, also produces the best sound and is far ahead of plastics and other man-made materials.

The neat, responsive remote control gives you everything you need to adjust the sound to your preference and control an iPod or iPhone

You have minimum control over the audio and the simple, responsive remote control simply has controls for bass, treble and volume, in addition to full navigation controls for an iPod or iPhone. In truth, you don’t need any more than these three controls and we say use the bass and treble with care: push either one two far and you throw out the balance of the system, making it either a little too tinny or too bass heavy. A click or two on either control’s plus or minus button is all you’ll likely need.

While the iPod dock on the top of the soundbar may suggest that the T9 is just designed for use with Apple products, there are plenty of other inputs. The rear of the soundbar contains 3.5mm and stereo phono inputs, and there’s an optical S/PDIF input, too. There’s even an optical cable in the box.

A decent range on inputs means you can hook up pretty much any bit of AV kit.

What these inputs mean is that you can hook the T9 up to pretty much any other audio device. Where it really appeals is to boost your TV’s audio quality, by hooking up your television’s digital output to the T9.

For general watching it’s a vast improvement over any TV’s built-in speakers, providing clearer audio and a much wider range. If you want to watch movies, it’s even better.

Although there’s no HDMI input, so Blu-ray audio has to be downsampled to DVD quality, audio quality is still fantastic. The stereo effect helps fill the room and put you in the middle of the action. Explosions sound thunderous, while the ping of bullets in action films reverberates around the room. For quieter films and scenes, the T9’s crystal clear dialogue reproduction makes sure that you never miss an important bit of speech. Where you don’t have room for or don’t want the hassle of 5.1 or 7.1 speakers, the T9 can make all the difference.

Nominally Orbitsound has positioned the T9 for use in smaller rooms placed near smaller, secondary TVs, with the slightly-louder T12 for larger rooms and that more cinematic experience. However, the T9 is more than capable of filling the largest of living rooms with high-quality audio that you simply wouldn’t expect from something so small. With the ability to produce high-quality audio from every input source, it’s a clear Best Buy winner.