Sony's newest flagship soundbar can produce impressive sound for movies and shows, but its lack of extra features makes us question its high price.
Sony Bravia Theater Bar 9 MSRP $1,400.00 Score Details “You still get that great Sony sound, but the Bravia Theater Bar 9 feels like a downgrade.” Pros Cons With its 2024 soundbar lineup, Sony hasn’t just changed its naming convention — it’s also changed its approach.
Sony has stripped away far too many features from the HT-A7000 for me to see the Bar 9 as an upgrade from that model. If anything, it’s a downgrade. And given that Sony is asking $1,400 for the Bar 9 , you’re paying more for less. A lot less. The remote control also has been drastically simplified, which you should read as foreshadowing the lack of settings and features I’m getting to.
Perhaps you’re reading this and thinking “dude, this all sounds amazing — I never liked all of that extra stuff to begin with!” Well, it gets better. Sony has ditched a lot of other features, too. Another annoyance: The app talks to the soundbar via Bluetooth LE. That’s a necessary step before a soundbar is connected to your network. But once you’ve got Wi-Fi enabled, using Bluetooth is sluggish. You notice it most when switching from another app back to Bravia Connect — it always needs a moment to establish that BT connection and collect any changes that have happened to the state of the speaker since it was last used.
This isn’t the first soundbar I’ve come across where streaming options aren’t as robust as I’d like. Klipsch’s excellent Flexus 200, for instance, doesn’t do Wi-Fi at all. In those circumstances, the easy fix is to connect a network music streamer like the $100 Wiim Mini, which not only has a great app for managing music, it also works with Google Cast, UPnP, Tidal Connect, AirPlay, and Bluetooth.
All I can say to this is just because everyone else is doing it doesn’t mean you should too. I’m disappointed that a company like Sony, which once created soundbars that stood apart, is now seemingly focused on making ones that offer so little differentiation. The cinema and music presets have vanished, and you can’t exert control over channel levels. The app offers the ability to adjust the “height” of its Sound Field effect but this isn’t the same as being able to independently increase the level of the height channels. Instead, it sounds like Sony is boosting several parameters simultaneously, including some of the higher frequencies.
The Bar 9 is different. You must have Sound Field mode on to get Dolby Atmos. This threw me for a loop until I figured it out. I started running through all of my usual Dolby Atmos test clips, and yet the Bravia Connect app kept reporting that it was receiving “Dolby Audio 7.1” and thus no height channels and no Atmos object-based sound effects. When I turned Sound Field on, suddenly, Dolby Atmos was being processed.
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