Forget soundbars for your giant TV: Sony’s new Dolby Atmos wireless “LCR” system eats Sonos’ lunch by pumping out powerful home theater sound from separate speakers, and I’ve heard it in action

Sony has just announced the Bravia Theater Trio, a new Dolby Atmos wireless system that cuts the difference between a proper surround system and a soundbar, and is particularly designed for huge TVs, to ensure the soundscape is wider than the TV itself – but which will be tempting for anyone who wants more physically separated sound than the best soundbars alone can offer.

It can also be expanded to a more complete wireless surround setup, and I was able to hear this complete system in action. But first, let’s go over the basics.

The Sony Bravia Theater Trio is, as the name suggests, three wireless speakers in one set. This is what home theater enthusiasts call an “LCR” system, meaning left, center and right channels.

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The Sony Bravia Theater Trio with a black television screen. Two speakers hang on the wall, either side of a TV with a small speaker below — (Image credit: Future)

There’s a center speaker that looks like a mini soundbar, which connects to your TV via HDMI eARC. And there are left and right speakers that look like little pillars with a flat section added to the back, so they can be wall-mounted.

The center speaker has two woofers and a tweeter, while each of the side speakers has a front-facing woofer and tweeter each, then an 8cm upfiring driver for the Dolby Atmos height channels.

Simply put, it’s a 3.0.2 channel system, although Sony says the system is built heavily around virtualizing deeper speaker setups. This initial three-speaker system can apparently emulate 24 phantom channels.

Sony says it’s done some smart things with its virtualization technology in the Bravia Theater Trio, including rethinking how these phantom channels work: They’re now designed not only to mimic the location of a more elaborate speaker setup, but also to mimic the “indirect sound sources” of a movie theater’s acoustic signature, including reflections.

So yes, for those who follow how psychoacoustic virtualization works, it may be that this system uses the reflections of your room to create the impression of an entirely different set of thoughts…

To help the system do this best, it comes with a USB-C microphone that you can use for room calibration. Just plug it into your phone or tablet, launch the Sony app, and follow the instructions so it can do its best.

As I mentioned above, this main three-speaker setup can also be expanded with additional rear speakers or a subwoofer.

The Sony Bravia Sub 8 and Sub 9, showing that the Sub 9 is approximately twice the size of the Sub 8

The Sony Bravia Sub 8 (left) and Sub 9 (right) (Image credit: Future)

You have two subwoofer choices: the new Sub 8 is a mid-range option, while the Sub 9 is a huge beast of a sub by lifestyle technology standards. It looks like two Sub 8 units stuck together with a vent in the middle, and while Sony hasn’t confirmed the specs, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s not far from the truth.

You also have two choices of rear speakers: there’s the existing Bravia Rear 8 or the new Bravia Rear 9, which are more or less the same speakers as the front left and right (woofer, tweeter and combo upfirer — in the same design).

The Sony Bravia Theater Rear 9 speakers, showing their round design

Sony Bravia Rear 9 speakers (Image credit: Future)

Of course, these add-ons will cost you – and the base Bravia Theater Trio package isn’t cheap either. Here’s the breakdown of all of these options (Sony was only able to provide pre-launch pricing in the UK, but we’ll update other pricing as we get it):

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Product	Price
Bravia Theater Trio	£2,000 (around $2,700 / AU$3,800)
Bravia Rear 9 (pair)	£700 (around $950 / AU$1,300)
Bravia Rear 8 (pair)	£449 / $499 / AU$699
Bravia Sub 9	£900 (around $1,200 / AU$1,700)
Bravia Sub 8	£650 (around $875/$1,200)

Sony eats Sonos’ lunch

Before we get to my experience with the performance of these speakers, something that immediately struck me is that this type of setup is what Sonos users have been begging the company to do for years.

Since Sonos only focuses on wireless satellite speakers, its users have asked many people: a lot times (directly and on the r/sonos subreddit) for the possibility of using separate front left and right speakers in an LCR configuration with its soundbars.

There’s even a third-party app that does this, called SonoSequencr, which is very popular among Sonos home theater enthusiasts.

It seems crazy that Sony offered this before Sonos, and with a better spec list than Sonos can offer, because the Bravia Theater Trio offers both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X support (Sonos doesn’t have DTS) and has an HDMI pass-through port (supporting 4K 120Hz) so you won’t lose an HDMI port when using it.

Of course, if Sonos ends up offering a configuration to rival this one, it could present a major price advantage. You can get a Sonos Beam Gen 2 (as center channel) and two Sonos Era 300 speakers (as spatial audio side speakers) for £1,077 at the time of writing, compared to £2,000 for the Sony system.

And there is also the small problem that in my demo of the Sony system, I found it quite random…

Mix

I didn’t have the opportunity to hear just the basic configuration of the Bravia Theater Trio alone at the Sony event; instead, I heard the most complete setup, with the original trio, two Rear 9 speakers, and two Sub 9 subwoofers (although, curiously, these were placed next to each other rather than spaced apart for even bass distribution).

In terms of pure physical channels, this is a 7.2.4 setup, but Sony hasn’t been able to confirm exactly what virtualized channel setup it creates using the phantom channels – although Sony has confirmed that you get 24 phantom channels regardless of how many physical speakers are involved.

The Sony Bravia Theater Trio with a Sony Bravia 9 Mk II TV and Sub 9

(Image credit: Future)

First of all, we watched the big musical show of Sinners at the juke joint. What stood out right away was that the system delivers a really powerful and warm sound, which matches the pounding of the drums really well and makes the tone of the guitars sound solid and electric.

However, I wasn’t very impressed with the separation of different elements in the mix, despite all the power of Dolby Atmos – and in particular, I felt that vocals were more muted than I expected, especially for a system with a true separate center speaker.

Let’s move on to the drive-by shooting in No time to diesurround and positioning effects were given a special chance to shine. The rear effects were solid, but the after effects were especially impressive considering there are no real speakers.

Building on this, I found the way the sound moved from front to side and back was particularly impressive: it was as if the sound moved smoothly all the way, and didn’t jump from front to back, as can happen in some simple five-channel systems.

But this demo also showed the same apparent weakness with the vocals, with dialogue being soft and a bit muddy even in the quietest moments – and even some mid-frequency effects didn’t seem to come through as loudly as they should (I saw this scene a lot in the demos).

The final demo was the first racing scene in Ready Player Oneand the system was producing a lot of sound and fury all around me here… but I thought there was a slight softness to the fine details that held it back – the very sudden sounds didn’t seem as dramatically sudden as they should, which robbed them of some impact, scale and spectacle.

This last point wasn’t helped by the fact that in all three demos I noticed that the sound and visuals weren’t quite in sync. This isn’t uncommon at all in HDMI ARC based systems, but I don’t normally notice it as strongly as I do here – and I think it made a difference during crashes of Ready Player One if you see the impacts before you hear them.

Of course, this is far from a criticism – and I’m definitely interested to see how the core ensemble of the Bravia Theater Trio performs on its own. But at this early stage, I’m a little torn: I like the overall concept and design, but I’m concerned about the high price, based on the performances I’ve heard so far.