Review: Sony Bravia Theater Quad

Sony Home Theater has taken some big swings in 2024, from doubling down on LED to push the brightness barrier with the bold and beautiful Bravia 9 TV (9/10, WIRED Recommends), to its fabulously expensive new digital surround sound system, the Quad.

A follow-up to the HT-A9, the Quad is a multispeaker setup comprising four fuzzy rectangles and a central control box designed to fit with any decor in virtually any room. It delivers stunningly immersive sound, at a price. There are some good reasons you might invest in the Quad: You’re looking for a simple audio solution that goes beyond soundbars; you don’t care for the work or clutter of traditional home theater solutions; and you have the means and desire to drop a boatload of cash on a system sharply focused on submerging you in sound.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

You can get a pretty good estimation of what the Quad can do for much less with some of the best soundbars, like Samsung’s Q990 or LG's S95TR, which, unlike the Quad, include a subwoofer. Alternatively, those willing to shop around (and run speaker wires up the wall) can get a more capable and versatile system for the money from traditional speakers and a receiver. Still, the Quad does some fantastical things, utilizing Sony’s cutting-edge processing and acoustic engineering to put you in the center of your favorite shows, movies, and games.

Foolproof Setup

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

Packed inside the Quad's slim box is everything needed for setup, including cables, wall mounts, stand pieces, and the small black control box for inputs. The speakers look like a cross between a bookshelf speaker and one of those fabric pushpin boards from grade school (remember those?). The aesthetic aims at camouflage over distinction; it's designed to blend in.

Sony clearly expects most buyers to wall-mount the speakers. They’ll fit on large consoles, but they’re too big for compact speaker stands, stretching over 10 inches wide on their table stands and over 12 inches tall. Even Sony didn’t have a console to fit them at its March TV event, mounting them on bracket stands instead. I had to get a little creative with my setup, including running the power cables for each speaker.

Creative setup is actually part of the Quad’s appeal. Like the HT-A9, it's designed to work in odd positioning. I had to place the rears to the sides instead of directly behind me as directed, and they still created a remarkable “phantom” center image.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

That’s thanks mainly to the software, led by the Bravia Connect app which walks you carefully through setup, including calibration and connection. The speakers shoot the room to align the soundstage, and the app quickly notified me that I’d clumsily swapped the left and right rears. As with Sonos, you use your phone to optimize for the main listening position. It’s an involved but mostly painless process and I ran into zero hiccups connecting to my network and TV.

If you’ve got a newer Sony TV, an included cable connects it to the control box to be used as a center channel. That worked reasonably well with the well-appointed Bravia 9, offering a bit of extra warmth in dialog and effects, but the sound was as good or better with the speakers alone.

4x4

The Quad is a 4.0.4-channel system with 16 amplified channels at a claimed 504 watts total. Each of the four blocks harbors a woofer, midrange driver, and tweeter, along with a small upfiring driver to bounce sound off your ceiling for 3D sound formats like Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, and Sony’s 360 Reality Audio.

Home theater buffs will immediately note the lack of a dedicated center channel. Instead of a center speaker, the Quad virtualizes it, similar to how a pair of good bookshelf speakers creates a convincing virtual center image.

Also notably missing is a bass channel. That’s part of the Quad’s unspoken cost: Unlike most surround soundbars, there’s no wireless subwoofer included, so you’ll need to add either Sony’s SA-SW3 or the SW5 (included with my review unit). That’s tough to stomach at $2,500, but it’s an “in for a penny, in for a pound” scenario. The Quad carves out solid mid-bass on its own, but you won’t get true cinematic sound without a sub.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

Out With the Old

The Quad aims for simplicity, with convenient control via your TV’s remote for power and volume and the Bravia Connect app as your central hub. The app was stable throughout testing, providing upfront access for control of the rear surrounds and bass, volume, and other playback functions. Though it self-calibrates, picky listeners may find adjusting the rear channels and bass necessary; it took me some time to lock things in.

You may also need to keep the app (or the very basic remote) on hand to control the Sound Field and Voice Mode features. Sound Field virtualizer does a fantastic job expanding the sound with “phantom speakers.” It’s refreshingly natural sounding and additive, even with multichannel formats like Dolby Atmos, creating a more immersive soundstage that swings fluidly around the room. That said, you may want to swap it off for some stereo content.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

The Voice Mode feature is similarly effective, using Sony’s Voice Zoom 3 to elevate dialog. Like the Sound Field, it’s not always useful and can create some balancing issues between the central channel and side-channel effects (more on that below), so you may want to keep it off until necessary.

Diving deeper into the settings lets you adjust things like compression for volume balancing, add or remove your Sony TV as the center channel, and even adjust the overall soundstage height, useful if you need to raise or lower the speakers due to setup limitations. I also appreciate the top window that reveals your current sound format (e.g., Dolby Atmos, 5.1 surround).

There are some missing features, both in the app and the hardware itself. On the app side, I was surprised to find no controls for EQ or individual channel levels. I think that’s by design, and with so much virtualization, I was happy to let Sony software take the wheel for channel balancing. Still, I’d love the ability to tweak the treble or raise the midrange to warm up the sound signature.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

There are lots of available sound sources, but once again, there are some missing pieces. You can stream music over Bluetooth or Wi-Fi with Spotify Connect and AirPlay, but there’s no Chromecast support–odd for a company that makes Android phones. Sony also drops the optical port, opting for HDMI ARC/eARC only, and there’s not a single analog input. There’s reasoning behind each decision; optical is an older digital connection that doesn’t support 3D audio. On the analog side, Sony likely wanted to keep the system all digital, opting not to add an analog-to-digital converter in the small plastic control box. The takeaway is you can never add components like a CD player or turntable.

The single HDMI input also seems skimpy. Most top soundbars have at least two or three, while a traditional receiver might have five. On the plus side, the lone input supports HDMI 2.1 for gaming features like VRR (variable refresh rate) in 4K at 120 Hz, HDR and Dolby Vision pass-through, and more for connecting modern gaming systems. These features are becoming more common, but the Quad is among the first all-in-one setups to support them.

Hello From the Dome

The Quad is the best system of its kind I’ve ever heard when it comes to reproducing the spherical “dome of sound” for which 3D audio formats like Dolby Atmos are prized. It’s particularly good at height sounds, which are often the most difficult for smaller speakers to reproduce. The pouring rain in the “Amaze” scene from my Atmos demo disc was stunningly realistic, seeming to cover the entire room in pounding droplets.

Just as impressive is the system’s expansiveness and precision with 3D effects. Strafing starships and helicopters can be almost perfectly traced in space. Effects centralized behind me felt like I could reach back and grab them. Sound editors are given free rein with 3D formats, meaning they can move “sound objects” virtually anywhere in space, and the Quad takes full advantage of stellar test films like Ant-Man and Mad Max: Fury Road. It’s not on the same level as traditional systems with mounted speakers, but it scratches that itch well.

Photograph: Ryan Waniata

Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping tech (engaged by the Sound Field button) seems to be the magic behind the immersion. It enhances and expands even traditional 5.1 and 7.1 surround, but it really makes a meal out of Dolby Atmos. Interestingly, when I switched the Sound Field setting to the available Dolby version, it didn’t seem as effective or balanced as the 360 Spatial Sound Mapping, but your experience may vary.

The system is equally fun for gaming, swirling effects around you to drop you deeper into fantasy worlds and precisely mapping characters and effects. My wife often thought I was behind her, only to discover it was an NPC chatting in the background.

The Quad isn’t perfect, even if you might expect it to be for the money. As touched on above, I noticed some occasional balance issues while using the Voice Mode. Though the feature ramps up dialog more naturally than any such system I’ve tried, it sometimes stifles other effects or instruments. On the flip side, turning it off sometimes made me strain to hear dialog, even though I was mostly impressed with the phantom center channel. I sometimes found myself either riding the volume or swapping between the modes.

Stereo content can be a little lackluster, especially music, which can occasionally sound a little flat and/or synthetic. It’s not bad, especially once I added the subwoofer, which not only adds gravitas but also clears some space up above. With the sub in place, I found myself generally enjoying music across genres even when using the Sound Field mode to virtualize it, but it’s not as good as cheaper stereo options.

A sub is integral for whatever you play, and Sony should offer one with purchase at a sizable discount. The lack of inputs is tougher to square, limiting versatility and making the Quad less attractive as a holistic audio solution.

The Quad isn't for everyone, even those with the budget for it. It’s aimed at very specific well-heeled buyers that are after crazy awesome immersion from a system they barely notice. If that sounds like you, this system delivers it better than anything I’ve tried.