Sony’s Latest Sound Bar & Wireless Speakers

Sony just announced two new premium home theatre audio products, the HT-A7000 soundbar, and the HT-A9 wireless speakers. Both of these products are designed to significantly enhance your home theatre setup by providing an immersive sound experience.

The HT-A7000 is Sony’s flagship soundbar featuring 7.1.2 channels, two up-firing speakers for Dolby Atmos, two beam tweeters, five front speakers, and a built-in subwoofer for immersive room-filling sound. Additional subwoofers and surround speakers are also available from Sony to enhance the sound experience. The HT-A7000 uses Sound Field Optimization to calibrate and adjust itself to fit your living environment through its microphones and utilizes Virtual Surround Engine and S-Force Pro Front Surround to reproduce virtual surround sound that can take advantage of both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X. In terms of I/O, the HT-A7000 offers 8K/4K Dolby Vision passthrough, HDMI 2.1, eARC, optical, and analog. Lastly, the HT-A7000 can stream via Bluetooth 5.0, Wi-Fi, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, or AirPlay 2, and can be controlled with either Google Assistant or Amazon Alexa.

On the other hand, the HT-A9 is a home theatre system made up of four wireless speakers that can be placed anywhere. Each speaker is equipped with an up-firing speaker, tweeter, and woofer, and is controlled by the control box. Similar to the HT-A7000, the speakers utilize Sound Field Optimization to automatically detect your environment and optimize its settings. The HT-A9 also uses a technology called 360 Spatial Sound to apparently create “up to twelve phantom speakers” and produce a sound that expands “beyond the walls”. The control box itself features HDMI, eARC, and Ethernet ports. The system connects over Wi-Fi and can also stream via Chromecast, Spotify Connect, or AirPlay 2, and has support for Google Assistant and Amazon Alexa.

The Sony HT-A7000 and HT-A9 will cost $1,299 and $1,799 respectively and are expected to be available sometime between September and October.