hi i'm tom you're watching sony 365. now the last few videos have been filmed in my dingy hotel room
while i'm here sort of working out what i'm going to be doing with the channel but this video is
from my brand new luxury penthouse apartment in the heart of soho london none of that's true but
this is true look who i found how's it going guys i didn't realize until today that troy is actually
an ex-sony employee obviously we all love his sony stuff if you haven't already subscribed to his
channel please go ahead and do that links in the video description below and now we're both going
to be treated to these amazing new products i'll see you back in my dingy hotel room getting to
know the hta9 has been one of the most enjoyable experiences i've ever ever had at sony 365. you
know not everything sony makes is perfect they'll tell you that themselves there's a consistent
you know solid performance that you expect from sony products but every now and then there are
products that are just absolutely exceptional i'm talking about things like the xperia one mark
iii and my wf-1000xm4s i absolutely love those products they're as good as anything on the market
and i'm going to tell you right now why i think that hta 9 is absolutely at the top of this the
scale there in terms of just how great these are now look first and foremost let's look at
what we're dealing with here okay so four speakers wireless of course there's a hub here that's the
sort of the brains behind the operation and what we're basically getting here the promise is 7.1.4
surround sound but without any of the hassle no wires well don't forget of course you do
need to plug these speakers in and give them power but other than that yeah it's wireless
the technology is absolutely amazing if you're a control freak you're going to hate this because
you do just have to let the technology work it all out for you the setup is absolutely it's just the
easiest thing it's very enjoyable actually because the speakers work out where they all are make sure
by the way although you can put these speakers anywhere obviously make sure that you've got
the the two main front speakers either side of the television otherwise that will mess things
up um but yeah get them all plugged in put them in the most sensible place you can but remember this
is to make life easy for you there's no wires you can put them where you need to where you want to
and then there'll be zaps and pings the speakers will work out the distance to the ceiling the
distance to the walls and so on and then you'll get a little demo actually and that's the first
time you get your full wow moment and you realize that what you're dealing with here is impressive
so the speed at which you're up and running is really remarkable the initial impact there of
the sound in that little demo is like you know okay wow we're expecting something special now
what sony then did for us is they gave us a little tour of the sound if you like in a
way that i wasn't expecting normally when you do these things it's just explosions and airplanes
and it's all a little bit obvious but it works and you get the sort of the general feeling of
how good the technology is this is one of the things i absolutely love about the way eric
kingdon over at sony by the way he's been there for it's um nearly 40 years at sony and not only
has he done an incredible job consistently with everything that he's been involved with but he's
actually got the new generation now trained up and fully fully into this it's been such an amazing
project here and talking to everyone involved has just been so much fun but um yes what eric did
which i absolutely love is he had he had us watch a scene where someone is inside and there's almost
just complete silence and then that person walks outside still in silence but the the level of
detail retrieval and sophistication here is so high that you can actually sense and feel and hear
the different types of silence i mean that's the level of detail we're talking about yes all of the
stuff you'd expect you know planes flying around all the action scenes we did that as well and
it is absolutely true to say that you know when explosions take place you can almost if you close
your eyes you can actually point and you know you can really sense where this is all happening
now let's do a quick reality check will this ever be as good as a true actual 7.1.4 no of course not
but it is startling how close it actually gets you to that even though of course
everything is basically running um off trickery essentially firing off the ceiling and all the
rest of it it works incredibly well so let's take a look at the speakers here and how they are doing
this magic so at the top of the speakers each one of them here we've got an upwards firing x balance
speaker it's actually what fires up to the ceiling that and it does an amazing pinpoint accurate
job sort of tricking you where these sounds are really coming from um the microphones in here um
this beveled edge structure there's a huge amount of thought has gone into the design of this and
by the way the overall design it looks in real life a lot bigger than you'd be expecting because
it's designed i suppose to just blend in into your surroundings it doesn't make a massive
visual statement i really like that but it means that when you see the pictures of these speakers
online they look tiny they're not they've got real presence then they're big they're weighty
and they pack a punch of course you've also got in here the main x balanced speaker in the center
and the really clever sony amp tech as well which is is really really awesome um high-res tweeter
here just at the top in the center yeah very very cool stuff so when i had the demo with sony
um we weren't using the bravia tv there as a center channel you can do that um in a way i mean
i i mean obviously if you've got one of those sony tvs and xr1 ideally of course i would say give it
a try and see if you prefer it or not and the fact that we didn't do that there with sony and we were
all blown away well troy and i were um means to me that's optional you may or may not want
to do that the bottom line though is that this is a beautiful setup when it comes to listening
to music the musicality here i mean if you want to play two-channel music and give it the full
enhancement having all of that sound surround you beautifully this works a treat and you can do that
with just the press of a button obviously for tv and for movies it's next level but here's the
really important thing if you're looking at this and you're thinking do i go down this route or the
sound bar by the way we're going to be covering that in the next video in just a couple of days
there's something really important i have to say whichever one of these roots you choose and i will
explain in the next video why i prefer the a9 way of doing things you've got to get a sub because as
much as it's clever and the pinpoint accuracy is startling and it's very musical system it
you can do music properly here um okay the very very top level of audio files may insist that's
not a thing but for 99.9 of us this absolutely works for music beautifully but you've got to get
a sub in there if you really want the cinematic wow factor that full rumble which for me that's
that's something you just gotta have i understand the argument and i that why sony has said look
you can buy that separately and i get that because you can even choose which sub you want um but when
we heard it all with sony it wasn't with the sub now luckily thanks to my friend greg a massive
shout out to eusa i actually got way more exposure to this exact setup in a real living room with the
sw5 sub 300 watt that is that's the one you want that's the setup you want if you go down this
route because you want beautiful 7.14 surround sound with oomph to really enjoy music and movies
without any of the hassle in terms of setting up any of that stuff this is absolutely the way to
go get it with the um sw5 don't even think about running it without the sub i i would say if you
had a very small room and you didn't have space for all four of these sure a sandbar could be the
thing but even if you take the soundbar route get a sub in there if you can i'd really consider it
otherwise it's never quite going to be the full beams experience that i think you're probably
going to want i know that's what i want when i go ahead and get something like this now i haven't
gone through all of the specs and that's for two reasons partly because they're in the video
description below and if you want to check off you know all the most important things for you
are they contained in this or not you can do that the other thing is at the time of recording this
there's only one review i've managed to find that's been done outside of sony i always try
and find the best reviews from other channels and link them in the description below now that one
was from our friend linus over at linus tech tips or one of his uh channels and he's got quite a few
um now that one is sponsored by sony so i wanted to just put that out there they are paid by sony
but he's obviously extremely trustworthy and it's a great um proper first look at the tech and all
of the connections and all the rest of it but just so you know things like high res audio high res
audio wireless actually of course that's really important um are there er hdmi in and out all
that kind of stuff the google assistant also for alexa you know voice control and spotify connects
in there as well i mean apple airplay of course airplay too everything i think we all want to
see in here is here it ticks all the boxes there were no obvious admissions as far as i can tell
let me know what you think about this setup and here's another really important thing
the only kind of question mark i have about this is will there occasionally be dropouts losses in
the connection and so on um the only way we'll know that i've only had a few days with this so
look i beyond that i don't know for me it wasn't an issue but i want to know if you do own this
setup tell us if you've got this if you have any negative experiences with dropouts because
this is a proper community here as you know um and we all like to see who's got this and who
hasn't what they're feeling about the product you know long term let me know in the comments
thank you so much for watching uh i'm tom sonny365 i'll see you next time