Sony BRAVIA Quad Home Theater System

**Pros:**
– These speakers sound great for movies and provide an amazing immersive experience. The ability to create phantom channels on the ceiling is impressive. Paired with an SW5 sub, the sound is perfect, embodying a movie theater experience.
– Although I haven’t mounted them on the walls or hidden the cords yet, they are stylish, modern, and fit nicely with the room’s decor.
– With minimal cords, the setup is theoretically stress-free in that regard.
– Music is probably the highlight; just casually listening to music with these speakers will blow you away.

**Cons:**
The software needs significant updates to be less buggy. Let me explain:

First, I have many wifi-connected devices in my basement: 15 Hue lights, a TV, computers, smart speakers, etc. None of them have problems connecting to the wifi (which is a 1 Gb mesh system). However, setting up the speakers via the app either failed to recognize the Bluetooth pairing or the HDMI, or both. It was very frustrating and took several attempts to get past that and onto the calibration section. By then, I was already not feeling great about the product.

Next, the connection to the app would randomly disconnect and then refuse to reconnect, saying the network couldn’t be found. This was again frustrating and caused more doubt about the purchase. I had to completely reset the Bluetooth and the hub and start all over again. After searching the internet for solutions, I decided to connect the hub via a LAN connection and hide the cords creatively. With that, the app connected every time without issue. I don’t know if this is a 2.4 GHz issue or if the congestion of devices constantly blocked the hub from connecting. So, if you have a lot of devices connected to wifi, beware.

After all that, there was more…

My TV, a Sony Bravia X90L, would randomly switch from the Theater Quad to the TV speakers—sometimes immediately, sometimes after 5 minutes, and sometimes not at all. Sometimes, it would refuse to stay on the Theater Quad and switch to the TV speakers every time. At this point, I was ready to return the whole thing. I tried every kind of TV configuration to see what was happening. Because this product is so new, there is almost no literature on troubleshooting it. But after extensive troubleshooting on my end, I realized the culprit was the Theater Quad’s HDMI CEC setting, which allows you to control everything from the TV remote. I don’t know what combination is supposed to be active for this to work properly, but turning off this setting on the Bravia app solved the issue, and it never happened again. Having to use two remotes is something I’ll have to live with until a software update fixes this.

After solving these issues, the product has run flawlessly, and I’ve decided to keep it. However, I was very close to returning it due to these problems, which I had to solve on my own.

**Conclusion:**
It took a lot of effort to get this system running properly, but once it did, it was worth it. It’s pricey, but the immersive experience keeps me satisfied. Based on the design alone, it’s not like you can easily swap it out for something similar, so I was hooked on that aspect as well.

If there is one advice I could give it’s to leave the drc off and if you are using your sony tv as the centre speaker, make sure the sound on your tv is not compressed.

I’ll start this off by saying that I’m not a true audiophile. I’ve had different speaker systems over the years but this is by far the most expensive set I’ve ever owned. Unsurprisingly, the sound quality on these is amazing. Unfortunately, I’m in the middle of a move so my ARC TV is in a box so I tested this with their demo tracks, via Bluetooth, and by hooking up my laptop directly to the hub using an HDMI cord. I figure with the relative lack of reviews, this is still of value for consumers looking to get this product.

I’ll get into my setup pains later, but once the system is setup, the sound is incredible. With their default track, I feel like I’m in a movie theater with speakers all around me. The sound is crisp with no distortion and I have thoroughly enjoyed it. Using both Bluetooth and my laptop, I only got sound out of one of the speakers. Now that was more than enough but was obviously not nearly as good as all four speakers. After a bunch of research, I figured out this was because my audio source wasn’t configured for 360 audio. This would seem obvious, but that brings me to my most negative part of this product, the setup and instructions absolutely suck.

It’s incredibly strange to me that Sony provided detailed instructions on how to attach a stand to the individual speakers, but did not give a setup guide or user manual for the app. This is especially annoying because you HAVE to use the app to setup and use this product. As another annoyance, you have to sign up for a Sony account and accept their terms and conditions. There are several steps for setup including connecting the hub to your Wifi network. This would seem like a trivial step that many IoT devices require but it took me nearly 45 minutes of hitting the same connect button over and over again for this to work. It was incredibly frustrating and because there was no user guide or anything, I had no idea if this was typical or my fault. A setup that could have been completed under 30 mins took me north of 2 hours in totality.

From a packaging perspective, you can see my picture, but each speaker was individually wrapped and all of the components were easily accessible. Usually packaging doesn’t affect my reviews, but I was genuinely happy with this. The speakers themselves are a pretty small form factor for the quality of sound that they produce. I have zero complaints here.

From a price perspective, I do feel like these speakers are expensive. I don’t think that they’re overwhelmingly expensive, but the lack of customizability and long setup time made me wish for a discount. This is especially true because you have to purchase the sub separately, which while not strictly necessary is another annoyance. For the record, I still haven’t done it and its around 600$.

TLDR: 4 stars, -1 for the setup. If you’re good with a self-contained system and don’t mind a painful setup process, the payoff is awesome. The sound quality is good and the app is easy to use (without setup). It might be a little overpriced, but you absolutely get what you pay for.