Sony Bravia Theater Bar 9 Review

The Bravia Theater Bar 9 is Sony’s flagship soundbar, a spatial audio machine with 11 drivers for front, side, and height channels that can produce an accurate, immersive sound field in front of you. At $1,399.99, it’s also one of the most expensive one-piece soundbars we’ve tested, and despite its premium price, it lacks much bass power to provide any real sense of rumble, effectively demanding you spend another few hundred dollars on a separate subwoofer to boost its missing low-end. The Sonos Arc Ultra ($999) delivers far better bass response and costs much less, remaining our Editors’ Choice for soundbars.

Design: A Basic, Blocky Bar

Sony favors functionality over flash for most of its non-PlayStation device designs, so the Theater Bar 9 looks very simple. It’s a blocky black bar measuring 2.7 by 51.3 by 4.5 inches (HWD) with a completely flat top and hard right angles everywhere except the front panel, which curves into the sides. The front, top, and sides are all covered in black grille cloth, completely unadorned. A narrow black band runs along the back edges of the top and sides, with the far right side featuring the soundbar’s only physical control, a power button.

The back of the soundbar features two recesses situated a quarter of the speaker’s length from either side. The left recess has a connector for the power cable, facing down. The right recess has an HDMI input, an HDMI output, and a center channel 3.5mm output, facing right. The 3.5mm output lets you use your TV’s speakers in tandem with the soundbar to improve spatial audio imaging. Many Sony Bravia TVs have inputs for this, though most non-Sony TVs don’t.

(Credit: Sony)

The remote is a similarly simple black candy bar. A large circular volume rocker sits near the top with input, power, sound field, and voice buttons above it. A separate bass rocker, a mute button, and a night mode button sit below the volume rocker.

Connectivity and Features: Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, and AirPlay

The Bravia Theater Bar 9 is a spatial audio soundbar with 11 drivers, including four front-firing woofers, three front-firing tweeters, two front-firing beam tweeters, two side-firing full-range drivers, and two up-firing drivers, plus two passive radiators. It’s primarily intended to be used wired over HDMI eARC with support for Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, and IMAX Enhanced. It can also play audio wirelessly over Bluetooth with AAC, LDAC, and SBC codecs, and over Wi-Fi through Apple AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect.

The Bravia Connect app for Android and iOS lets you connect the Theater Bar 9 to your Wi-Fi network for AirPlay and Spotify Connect, update its firmware, and pair additional speakers like the $400 SA-SW3 or $700 SA-SW5 subwoofers or the $350 SA-RS3S or $600 SA-RS5 rear satellites. The app also features a calibration wizard that uses your phone’s microphone to measure your room’s acoustics and the soundbar’s placement, and adjust the spatial audio processing accordingly. 

Sony Bravia Connect (Credit: Sony)

Movie and Game Performance: Wide, Accurate Spatial Audio

Movies sound excellent thanks to the soundbar’s multiple drivers for spatial audio. In the opening scenes of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the sound of rocks flying around and magic spells humming gets strong positional imaging, giving each element a precisely anchored position horizontally along with a good sense of height. The crash of rubble doesn’t have much low-frequency force behind it, but with the bass set to maximum, it sounds well-rounded. 

The deep rumbling at the start of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts comes through at higher volumes, still not quite shaking the furniture but certainly conveying more depth and power than most TV speakers and smaller subwoofer-less soundbars. The spatial audio is very precise here, with the high-pitched laser blasts really seeming to come from specific points in space around the soundbar. There’s no rear imaging without separate satellites, but the Theater Bar 9 still puts up a very wide and accurate sound field on its own.

(Credit: Sony)

I was especially impressed by the Theater Bar 9 when I played Alan Wake II. The soundbar’s frequency range reaches just low enough to make creepy, atmospheric rumble sound ominous, while the focus on high-mids keeps dialogue and sound effects in the forefront. The spatial audio imaging really stands out here: Thanks to the wide, accurate sound field and height imaging, hatchets flying by my head actually sound like they’re coming from the higher elevations the Taken are throwing them from. Of course, there’s no sense of anything creeping up from behind without separate satellites, but I didn’t find myself missing them at all with the great aural soundscape in front of me.

Music Performance: Big Bass Means Buying a Subwoofer

The Theater Bar 9 can put out some big sound on its own from the low-mids to highs, but it doesn’t reach deep enough to put out palpable bass. You should consider adding a subwoofer if you want a really thunderous listening experience. The bass synth notes and the kick drum hits of our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” don’t rattle the walls and seem to get tamped down by digital signal processing (DSP) to protect the drivers. Even then, at maximum volume, the soundbar comes close to distorting.

The $400 SA-SW3 subwoofer (not included) (Credit: Sony)

Less sub-bass-focused music, like Yes’ “Roundabout,” sounds much bigger since DSP doesn’t seem to muffle the soundbar’s output nearly as much. The opening acoustic guitar plucks get reasonable low-mid resonance and sound reasonably full while conveying string texture in the higher frequencies. When the track properly kicks in, all of the elements of the busy mix can be clearly heard. It’s a very sculpted sound, though: High-mids and highs are most prominent against the underpowered low-mids, resulting in hollow, almost crunchy strings and an overly poppy bassline. The soundbar has clearly been tuned to highlight voices even without the voice mode enabled (making the sculpting even more extreme), which is fine for watching TV but doesn’t result in very accurate or well-balanced music. Unfortunately, besides three bass levels and toggling the spatial audio Sound Field, dialogue-enhancing Voice, and bass-dampening Night modes, there aren’t any real EQ options or presets.

Verdict: Immersive Audio, But You Need a Sub for Low-End

The Sony Bravia Theater Bar 9 is a big, powerful soundbar with excellent spatial audio imaging that’s priced too high for what it offers and what it lacks. Its wide, precise sound field makes for immersive movie watching, even if you don’t add rear surrounds. However, its unambitious deep bass performance practically begs for a subwoofer. This could become a fantastic surround system if you’re willing to spend even more for a subwoofer and perhaps a pair of rear surrounds, but the Sonos Arc Ultra remains our Editors’ Choice because it features better bass on its own and Amazon Alexa voice control for $400 less than the Theater Bar 9.

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About Will Greenwald

Lead Analyst, Consumer Electronics

I’ve been PCMag’s home entertainment expert for over 10 years, covering both TVs and everything you might want to connect to them. I’ve reviewed more than a thousand different consumer electronics products including headphones, speakers, TVs, and every major game system and VR headset of the last decade. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and a THX-certified home theater professional, and I’m here to help you understand 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and even 8K (and to reassure you that you don’t need to worry about 8K at all for at least a few more years).

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