Sony turns living rooms into imax caves with 360-audio bars and 100-inch bravia beasts
The projector crowd just lost their last excuse. Sony’s new Bravia Theatre Bar 7 slides under a 55-inch set yet fires nine drivers—up-firing included—to map sound in mid-air, no ceiling speakers, no receiver maze. Pre-orders opened Monday; cinemas felt the draught Tuesday.
Cinema is coming home, and it is wireless
Sony’s engineers stuffed the Bar 7 with 360 Spatial Sound Mapping, a algorithmic parlor trick that triangulates phantom speakers behind your sofa. Pair it with the Theatre Rear 9 wireless satellites and the dual-driver Sub 9 and the room becomes a black box of moving audio; voices hover, explosions crawl underfoot. The rig decodes IMAX Enhanced, DTS:X and every Dolby Atmos stream Netflix can throw at 96 kHz/24-bit. Cables? One HDMI 2.1 eARC and a power cord. That is the entire install.
Step-down buyers get the Bar 5: 3.1 channels, a single 160 mm wireless sub, and the same Vertical Surround Engine that fooled my ears into hearing raindrops above a flat ceiling during a Mad Max: Fury Road test loop. Both bars share Voice Zoom 3, a DSP slider that lifts whispered dialogue without nuking the score, and the Bravia Connect app that auto-matches EQ to the exact millimetres of wall-to-sofa distance measured by the remote’s mic. No pink-noise torture, no calibration discs.
Tvs grow to 100 inches and still feel small
Screens are the other half of the assault. The Bravia 3 II scales from 43 to an almost obscene 100 inches, yet carries the same XR Processor once reserved for the flagship 9-series. Translation: full-array dimming, XR Triluminos Pro colour volume, 4k/120 Hz across four HDMI 2.1 ports and Dolby Vision gaming at 6 ms input lag. The Bravia 2 II caps at 75 inches but keeps Google TV, VRR and the same studio-calibrated presets Sony licences to post-production houses. Both sets ship 13 May; the 100-incher needs two people just to lift the cardboard.
Price tags land like punches. Bar 7: €1,499. Bar 5: €899. Sub 9: €799. The 100-inch 3 II: €4,999. Early listings on Sony’s own store already show two-week back-orders; hi-fi forums compare the frenzy to 2006’s first Blu-ray rush. Sony won’t disclose allocation numbers, but a Spanish distributor told me under embargo that initial European stock is 60 % lower than internal forecasts. Translation: scalpers will feast.
The uncomfortable truth for cinephiles? A 55-inch OLED plus Bar 7 now beats the local multiplex on contrast and raw channel count. The projector faithful can cling to lens memories and 150-inch diagonals, but the bulb dimming curve and fan noise suddenly feel antique. Sony isn’t selling better sound; it is selling the moment you cancel your annual cinema subscription because the hallway popcorn smells better at home. The premiere date is whatever day FedEx knocks.