Sony has just unveiled a couple of new budget soundbars for 2025, and I got the chance to hear them both in action at a Sony event. They’re both very impressive for the price, bringing big and powerful sound from fairly compact speakers.
But Sony showed off one particular new feature I wanted to highlight, because it instantly made me wish that my Sonos setup at home had it.
It’s called Multi Stereo, and it’s an incredibly simple option: turn it on when listening to stereo music and it’ll replicate the front left and right sound channels on the rear left and right speakers, with a sound balance that keeps all the speakers feeling in line with each other.
But it means that when you have your soundbar at the front of your room and the rear speakers at the back, the space in between is filled with a nice, even stereo sound – not some kind of upmixing from stereo to surround that leaves parts of the space feeling less well-filled.
So it’s perfect for parties, because it means all speakers are being used for a nicely forward stereo sound that’s filling the room, with pumping bass from the subwoofer in the case of the model I heard.
If detects that song is Dolby Atmos, this mode will turn off and it’ll switch into a regular surround listening mode.
Why do I want Sonos in particular to steal this? Obviously, it would be nice on any soundbar system, but a) Sonos is what I have at home, and b) Sonos’ rear speakers are already music speakers that are repurposed for home theater, so they’ll be especially well-suited to a mode like this.
And obviously, building the Sonos multi-room system into this makes tons of sense, so you can play music across the whole house during a party, but have the living room especially well catered-for if you have a surround setup.
As I said before, this mode is such a simple thing (though I expect that doing it well required some extra polish), but it makes such a dramatic difference to the spread and expansion of the music based on the demo so far.
I heard it demoed on the Bravia Theater System 6, which is a 5.1-channel surround system in a single box – there’s no Dolby Atmos support, it’s just a powerful sound system for a promised low price (the exact price hasn’t been confirmed, but it sits low in Sony’s range).
This mode adds a lot of value to it in my opinion, because it now becomes a party system as well as a TV sound system. I’d love to see this in more of the best soundbars overall – but obviously, it coming to Sonos would suit me.
We’ll have a review of the Bravia Theater 6 as soon as we can get our hands on one, along with Sony’s new 2025 TV range.
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source: https://www.techradar.com/televisions/soundbars/sonys-new-soundbars-have-a-genuinely-great-party-music-mode-that-i-wish-sonos-would-steal
