THE BIG REVIEW
There are two ways we could review this radical four-speaker surround system from Sony. We could tell you what Sony says it does, then describe how it sounds. But we only half believe what Sony says it does; we’re left taking that pretty much on faith.
So it might be easier if we tell you what we’re sure this system does, and how it sounds. Well discuss the conjectural stuff in a panel overleaf.
Because the HT-A9, what do we think? It’s just brilliant — it’s clever, it’s neat, it sounds great, it’s well-priced. Let’s get into it.
Really very Sony
Sony has been through such transformations over the last decade or so — separating and restructuring its divisions, outsourcing TV production and far more — you’d be forgiven for wondering if the innovative Sony of old, the company which would release products unlike anything else — has been lost somewhere on the margins, the more radical revisions of today’s technologies left to the likes of Google and Apple.
But then here’s the HT-A9 system: definitely different, and most certainly successful in its goals, which are to provide a simpler but still fully immersive surround sound system for the home.
So what’s wrong with the current offerings for surround in the home? Well, there are soundbars which offer immersion, but they often fake the surround element, and may throw height information up at the front but not the rears. Plus you have to fit a soundbar right in front of the TV, or have it looking a bit daft sticking out from a wall-mount.
At the other end of the equation is the traditional home cinema system, which requires a big AV receiver to decode the signal and create all the multiple outputs, with cables running everywhere. Full surround systems have or hang speakers all over the room, and those centre speakers are particularly hard to accommodate in anything other than a dedicated theatre room.
So here’s Sony, with a proper all-round surround system of identical speakers, each with a dedicated height channel built in and firing up. There are no signal cables: everything is wireless. There’s no big receiver required: Sony’s small control unit does it all. And there’s no centre-channel speaker to accommodate: there are four speakers, one to go in each corner, plus an optional subwoofer (though we’d suggest it’s not really optional; see below). Four speakers means real surround, no psychoacoustic virtual trickery required. And identical speakers mean a perfectly balanced soundfield all round.
As soon as we saw the HT-A9’s release, we thought — how clever! And how ‘Sony’.
The control box
The first thing out of Sony’s all-in-one packaging is the control box. Pictures make this look rather like an AppleTV, a black box with a curved square footprint — but when we set it down next to an AppleTV 4K, it is far larger, having a 20cm diagonal compared to 13cm, and 5cm height compared to 3cm.
It is nevertheless a remarkable achievement, given that it has to manage input switching, signal decoding, all the wireless communication and at least two sets of antennas, because
