Orbitsound M9 review

After proving that you could build a tiny soundbar with room-filling stereo sound last year with the Orbitsound T9, the company’s back again this year with an even more advanced budget soundbar, the M9.

This takes the same case and speakers as the T9, but has several tweaks for higher-quality sound and convenience. Most obviously, this is the first product we’ve seen from Orbitsound not to use an iPhone dock, relying on Bluetooth instead.

This makes a lot of sense, as Apple’s decision to ditch the old 30-pin connector and move to Lightning with iPhone 5, makes it harder to make a physical dock. Besides, switching to Bluetooth means compatibility with practically any smartphone, such as the Samsung Galaxy S3, or tablets that won’t even fit in the dock, such as the iPad 4. Of course, there’s also an optical digital input, as well as stereo phono and 3.5mm minijack inputs, so you can physically connect your mobile device or TV.

As well as Bluetooth, you can physically connect devices via the optical S/PDIF and analogue line-in and phono inputs

Bluetooth isn’t the only wireless technology on display, as the subwoofer now has a digital wire-free connection. This may not sound like a complicated device to add, but behind the scenes a lot of work has gone into it, primarily because of the issues of delay. Delay, also called latency, is the time between the sender (the soundbar in this case) transmitting audio and the receiver (the subwoofer here) getting it. If that delay is above 30ms, as it frequently is in digital systems, then the soundbar and subwoofer would noticeably be out of sync.

A wireless subwoofer might not sound complicated to add, but getting it working this well is harder than you think

There are ways around this problem, with the easiest solution to simply introduce a delay to the soundbar, so it syncs with the subwoofer. However, this has a major problem when you hook up a TV, though: all of your sound is then out and you lose lip-sync.

Orbitsound’s method was to replace the wireless antennas in the soundbar and subwoofer with hi-gain models. This improves reception and means that a smaller buffer is needed, reducing delay. In fact, the company states that the subwoofer has less than 10ms of delay. Subwoofers come pre-paired with their soundbars, although they each have connection buttons on them, should you need to re-pair them. Technically, the soundbar is one-to-many, so you could even connect up multiple subwoofers, if you think that the bass is too directional.

In addition, Orbitsound has replace the amplifiers inside the soundbar with all-new digital ones. The side-facing speakers, which give you the spatial audio, have also been tweaked using hi- and low-pass filters, so that they only output the frequencies that give you positional audio.

All-new digital amplifiers and filters make the spatial stereo better than ever

That’s the theory behind the product, but it’s the final sound that we were most interested in. We’re pleased to say that the M9 sounds even more fantastic than its predecessor. Audio tweaks mean that the M9 is slightly less harsh than the T9, generally sounding smoother.

It’s exceptionally well balanced, too, with the subwoofer perfectly matched to the soundbar, so that your bass doesn’t drown out the quieter parts of your music. Detail is excellent in all of the tracks we listened to, no matter the genre, with fine detail picked out in everything we listened to. You can hear every instrument and subtle sound in each track, but there’s also room-filling thumping tones that will make the most out of any upbeat track.

Spatial stereo again shows its worth, ditching that sweet spot and letting you place the soundbar anywhere, filling up a room with sound. It’s impressive what it does. Just listen to the Foo Fighter’s Enough Space, and you get the feeling of being surrounded by swirling guitars. Pink Floyd’s Wish You Were Here, which starts with radio and rhythm guitar in the right channel before the lead guitar kicks in on the left, sound sublime.

Our one concern was that as the M9 only uses A2DP, rather than with an advanced codec, such as Apt-X, Bluetooth quality was going to let the system down. However, after testing it by switching the inputs on our phone between Bluetooth and the headphone output, we were hard-pushed to tell the difference. Besides, there are comparatively-few devices that support Apt-X, anyway and the iPhone is one model that doesn’t. Given the convenience of still being able to still use your phone to choose tracks and even use it to browse the web and read email, we’d take Bluetooth over a dock any day.

Bluetooth pairing is pretty clever and works by ‘grabbing’ your phone when it’s needed. That is, when you walk in the door your phone doesn’t automatically pair, so that every sound is sent to the M9; instead, you hit play on the remote control or hit the Bluetooth button on the soundbar and only then is your phone connected.

We also connected a TV to the optical input, so that we could test the M9’s audio prowess out on films. Spatial audio isn’t virtual surround-sound, but more a technology for taking stereo and making it fill a room. In that respect, you lose some of the detail in a 5.1 sound track, such as positional rear audio, but the M9 makes the most of the stereo making it feel like it’s coming from all round you. Testing with the opening scene in Star Trek, where a young Kirk is driving in a convertible, while being chased by a cop, we thought it sounded fantastic.

That extra oomph from the subwoofer and the clean detailed audio from the soundbar, really brought the scene to life. Switching to a scene with more talking, the audio track was much clearer and cleaner than using TV speakers alone.

We still think that a 5.1 system will give you the best movie experience, particularly as you’ll get the full lossless Blu-ray audio that you can only get over HDMI, but if you don’t want to go down this route and want something more compact to give you high

Control over the sound comes down to bass and treble controls, which are all you really need. However, as the subwoofer is active, you’ve actually got a bit more control over bass with this model. To start with you’ve got an analogue-style control on the back of the subwoofer, which lets you set its master volume; you can then tweak the bass using the controls on the remote, which really equate to a gain control.

There’s all the control over audio that you need, via the buttons on top of the soundbar

In general, the controls have been improved over previous Orbitsound products. Solid-state memory now means that your settings are saved, so you don’t lose your finely-tweaked sound in the event that you unplug the M9 or have a power-cut.

The entire system has also been fine-tuned and everything just feels that bit more polished. So, switching inputs, for example, fades your current input out and fades the new one in. It also has intelligent volume control with an anti-party mode. So, if you’ve been listening to your music really loud the night before, in the morning the volume resets itself to a quieter volume, saving your ears, which is particularly useful if you’re nursing a hangover.

The remote is the same used on previous Orbitsound products, but that’s no bad thing

Orbitsound has kept the same remote it has been using for a while. It’s got all the controls you could need, including playback, track skip, volume, bass and treble, and input select. However, if you’re primarily using Bluetooth, you’ll find that you don’t need the remote very often and its primary purpose is for switching inputs and, when you’re using it with TV, changing volume.

The Orbitsound M9 is an improvement in terms of sound quality and flexibility over its predecessor, the T9. Our fears over Bluetooth were proved largely to be irrelevant and the flexibility it gives you is a worth any minor loss in audio quality. With room-filling sound, high-quality sound and its amazing spatial stereo technology, this remains the best mini soundbar you can buy.