To help us provide you with free impartial advice, we may earn a commission if you buy through links on our site. Learn more
- Remarkably slim, wall-hugging speaker design
- Powerful, room-filling sound
- Can work in almost any room layout
- More expensive than some top soundbars
- Potential voice reproduction issues
- Doesn’t ship with a physical centre channel
Sony isn’t a brand in a hurry when it comes to refreshing its home audio range. In fact, it’s taken its engineers three years to come up with replacements for its 2021-launched A-series of soundbars and home cinema sound systems. On the evidence of the Bravia Theatre Quad system, though, it seems that Sony has put all that long product development time to seriously good use.
The Theatre Quad system is notionally the successor to Sony’s much-admired HT-A9 system: a surround sound home theatre speaker package comprising four separate but wirelessly connected speakers designed to be placed in the four corners of your living or home cinema room, with Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping technology then adding a bunch of virtual speakers to the mix to create a 360-degree dome of sound around your seating position.
In the flesh, though, the remarkably thin and wall-hugging speaker design of the Bravia Theatre Quad speakers is a world apart from the chunky cylinders of the old HT-A9 package – and inevitably raises questions over whether such a radical redesign can really still deliver the sort of performance home cinema fans would expect for £2,499?
Sony Bravia Theatre Quad Review: What Do You Get For the Money?
At £2,499, it’s fair to say Sony’s Quad system sits very much toward the upper end of the lifestyle home cinema speaker system world. The latest full surround sound soundbars from LG and Samsung, by comparison, cost around £1,700 – a thousand pound difference that could pay for a lot of 4K Blu-rays and Netflix subscriptions.
The Quad system does actually give you quite a lot for your money, though. Even if you’d be forgiven for thinking that it doesnt, judging by the slender, flat box it ships in.
As its name suggests, for starters, the package includes four separate speakers. These are all identically designed, and that design is really quite remarkable. Essentially, each speaker presents an almost square, 289 x 279mm (W x H), face that sits on just 73mm of depth when attached to your wall. For yes, as you might have guessed from their extreme form factor, the big idea behind Sony’s new Quad system is that all of its speakers can be hung on your wall far less obtrusively than other speakers.
Sony does, however, also provide table stands for each speaker in the box, if that suits your room layout better. These simply screw into the bottom of each speaker, and still only increase the overall speaker depth to 129mm, despite the results feeling perfectly stable.
Each speaker is adorned in a beige coloured felt that shouldn’t clash with really any living room paint job, in line with the neutral, unobtrusive approach Sony is clearly going for with this system.
Creating speakers as flat as the Quads that might actually sound good is, of course, no easy job. Especially considering the system is described as a 4.0.4 system, meaning that as well as each speaker having a main forward-facing driver, it also has to squeeze in an up-firing driver to add a height dimension to the soundstage.
Each of the four unit’s main sound is delivered via a three-way speaker design that includes one of Sony’s X-Balanced drivers (which use a race-track shape to get more distortion-free power out of shallow operating spaces), a separate tweeter for cleaner trebles and detailing, and a unique elongated bass reflex port to enhance low frequency response.
Boldly, for a system made up of such slender speakers, the Quad System doesn’t include a separate subwoofer. You can add either Sony’s SA-SW5 (£599) or SA-SW3 (£349) subs as an option, but hopefully this won’t be necessary given how much the Quad system costs as it is.
The only other hardware in the Theatre Quad box is a small, black box that functions as both a connections hub and the Wi-Fi distributor for the speakers. Its connections include an HDMI input, an HDMI input for feeding video on to a connected display, an Ethernet port, a 12V trigger output and an S-Centre output. This latter output can be used to feed centre channel information to a compatible Sony TV, so that the speakers on your TV can take over centre-channel sound duties.
All this talk of centre channels brings us neatly to the fact that the out-of-the-box Quad system doesn’t have a dedicated centre speaker. What happens instead is that Sony’s typically pretty remarkable 360 Spatial Sound Mapping technology will use test signals to assess the sound profile of your room and where you’ve placed the Quad speakers within it, and then create a series of extra ‘virtual’ speakers to fill in the real speaker gaps. Including a virtual centre channel.
What does it do well?
The Quad speakers’ design really does make it a remarkably unobtrusive system. Less so, even, than a typical full surround sound soundbar system. This is especially true if you can hang the speakers on your walls, where they protrude no more than a typical TV or painting. Though unlike a painting, they will have a power cable hanging out of them unless you channel this into the wall.
They also still look impressively minimalistic if you’ve preferred to use some or all of them attached to their tabletop stands, fitting easily on a bookshelf or tucking nicely against the wall. So you can consider the Quad’s target design box well and truly ticked.
Even more important to the Quad’s domestic design appeal is how well its speakers are able to adapt their sound to suit pretty much any room layout. Precious few room setups in the real world, after all, are going to be perfect square or rectangular boxes, with TVs hung or placed flat in the centre of the wall. Neither is it all that common for you to be able to hang or sit two of the Quad speakers either side of the TV with the other two in complementary positions behind you.
I tried all sorts of weird, wonderful and flat-out whacked configurations while putting the Quads through their paces, including having the front two either side of a corner-positioned TV while the rear two were at an angle behind me, and placing different speakers at radically different distances away from my seating position. And in every case, Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping almost miraculously managed to put you at the heart of a brilliantly seamless and balanced hemisphere of sound.
As well as somehow managing to balance the volume and profile of each speaker’s sound so well that no amount of placement awkwardness catches the sound staging out, Sony’s processing also does a fantastic job of creating extra virtual speakers to fill in the gaps between the four physical ones. It’s hard to believe there aren’t more actual speakers scattered around your room.
These virtual speakers include, crucially, a centre channel, meaning that dialogue typically sounds like it’s coming from the correct place in the soundstage.
The fact that all of this is achieved with you really having to do nothing more than run the 360 Spatial Sound Mapping auto calibration routine, is also fantastic. Though if you do feel the need to start playing around with the Quad’s set up and listening presets, the provided remote control and Bravia Connect iOS and Android app make it pretty easy. Backed up by a handy LED display on the connections/processing box.
Crafting a full and seamless three-dimensional soundstage around you is just the start of the Quad system’s audio charms. Its ability to accurately place details in the surround soundstage it creates is outstanding too – especially when playing the Dolby Atmos, DTS:X and Sony 360 Reality Audio mixes it supports. Sound effects move around the soundstage crisply and cleanly, too, with the virtual speakers ensuring there are no gaps in such transitions to break the sense of immersion.
The upfiring drivers manage to create a compelling sense of height in the soundstage too, despite how small they are, and because there are four speakers, this sense of verticality extends behind you as well as in front, completing the dome of sound effect that’s so important to a good Dolby Atmos experience.
The speakers offer more power than you’d think their slender, compact designs capable of producing. They had no difficulty in flooding even a large kitchen/dining room with a potent and accurate soundstage – as well as adapting effortlessly to our much smaller regular test room. Even better, the excellent staging and detail holds up without the drivers distorting or the sound starting to collapse in on itself.
Even low frequency sounds are delivered with reasonable conviction, reaching deeper than I’d have thought possible from such slender speakers without cramping the style of the main drivers.
One last treat the Quads serve up is music. The clarity, detail and power so apparent with film soundtracks translates into a pristine, gorgeously staged (mostly…) and engaging music presentation that’s especially lovable with true surround sound music mixes, but also warms the heart with standard stereo tracks too. The result feels like proper hi-fi rather than the sort of lifestyle-design affected compromise you might have expected.
What could be improved?
While the Quad speakers are mostly a marvel of design in both aesthetic and sound quality terms, their simple beige felt finish might not be to everyone’s tastes. I guess it’s probably about the most neutral approach Sony could have taken, but having four squares of beige on your wall can look a little strange. More colour options, at least, or even some true painting-style cover options/accessories would perhaps have been nice.
Having said a moment ago that the Quad system handles bass remarkably well for such slim speakers, it doesn’t plunge as deep into low-frequency areas as it manages to reach up into peak trebles, creating a marginal sense of imbalance at times with particularly meaty movie mixes. Personally, I didn’t feel that this slight bass limitation occurred often enough or severely enough to justify adding to the Quad’s already quite high price with one of Sony’s subwoofers. But it is a small limitation associated with the Quad’s design.
While stereo music playback is a joy to behold in most room layouts, I did experience a strange issue with a few of the many Quad positions I tried, where vocals could sound as if they were coming from the left or right side of the mix, rather than from the correct place in the centre. Even though the same layout tended to place dialogue correctly with film mixes.
If you find this happening in your set-up, the only effective solution is to turn the soundbar’s Sound Field mode on, which remixes stereo tracks to take advantage of the system’s four speakers and 360 Spatial Mapping tech. Though doing this can cause very dense, layered music tracks to sound slightly muddy in the mid-range.
Should you buy the Sony Bravia Theatre Quad System?
The Quad system isn’t for everyone. It’s quite specifically designed for home entertainment fans who care as much about the aesthetics of their living space as they do about sound quality – and don’t mind paying a fair bit extra for a product that meets this dual need.
If you’re a bit less obsessed with aesthetic concerns but still want a full and compelling surround sound experience, you could get a good full-surround soundbar such as the JBL Bar 1300 or the Samsung HW-Q990F (which we’re going to be reviewing soon) for hundreds of pounds less.
If the Quad’s design does tickle your fancy, though, and you can afford it, you will be rewarded with a level of performance with both music and movies that’s far, far better than you have any right to expect from such a design-led system.
