Sony's HT-A3000 is its most affordable premium Dolby Atmos soundbar with tons of great features. But its lack of up-firing drivers may give you pause.
Sony’s HT-A3000 does virtual Dolby Atmos right, if you can handle the price MSRP $700.00 Score Details DT Recommended Product “A Swiss-army knife of a soundbar that really does it all.” Pros Cons Sony’s A-Series of Dolby Atmos home theater soundbars and speakers are impressive, but they also cost a lot, with prices that begin at $1,000. That’s what makes its latest model so interesting.
What’s in the box? Along with the HT-A3000 , you get an HDMI cable, a power cable, a remote with two AAA batteries, a 3.5mm analog cable for sending center channel sound to a compatible Sony TV, a quick start guide, wall-mounting template, and a full user manual, which is nice to see — many companies are making folks head online for that documentation. It’s all packaged with big Styrofoam blocks, so you may not be able to fully recycle the material depending on where you live.
Behind that metal grille is a small OLED text display that shows you all of the status info you need from the current input, to volume level, to audio formats, if you need them. I kinda wish Sony had made it a few characters wider — many of the messages require text scrolling, which I find a hassle. But as these displays go, it’s fairly easy to read and you can dim it or turn it off entirely if it bothers you.
Apple’s AirPlay 2, on the other hand, gets enabled as soon as you’re connected to Wi-Fi, making it a cinch to stream audio to the soundbar from any Apple device. Finally, there’s a USB port for accessing music from storage devices. Again, I didn’t try it because I suspect most of you will use the A3000’s streaming options, but Sony does provide excellent file format support. If you can play it on a computer, you can probably play it on the A3000.
When a soundbar doesn’t have discrete drivers for each channel, it has to virtualize them — a clever bit of digital signal processing that simulates the presence of those missing channels. How well that works depends on a number of complex factors, but let’s just say it’s a difficult trick to pull off convincingly, and many soundbars that try just can’t make it work.
That underrepresented middle leads to a slightly colder sound, but that’s something your brain adjusts to pretty quickly. On the flip side, the clarity of the higher frequencies is excellent, if a bit sharp at louder volumes, so fans of vocal-heavy genres will find a lot to like. I sampled my favorite lossless tracks from Amazon Music, Tidal, and Apple Music and enjoyed every minute of it.
No EQ settings There’s one drawback to sound on the A3000 and that’s its almost total lack of EQ settings. It’s an especially strange omission on a soundbar from Sony, and yet, it seems to be the approach the company has taken with its whole A-Series line. The HT-A5000 and A7000 are bereft of EQ adjustments, too, save for a few changes you can make to the Sound Field mode.
But, it’s not perfect. The problem is that when you use height drivers that reflect sound off your ceiling , geometry is key. Most people will be able to find a good distance for getting the right angles from a set of front, soundbar-mounted height drivers, but the rears are much trickier.
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