it's been a number of years since Sony has released a new flagship Soundbar but
that's exactly what we've got today in this video sponsored by Sony taking a
look at the a7000 now one thing you guys might
notice immediately is that unlike the
st5000 which was their previous top-of the line there's no subwoofer included
well apparently this was based on customer feedback where people were
telling Sony like look I want your top-of-the-line Soundbar but I live in
an apartment oops realistically I'm never going to be able to turn the thing
on anyway so what they've done is they've essentially unbundled the two
things so it comes in at a whopping $700
lower price so it's $1,300 instead of $2,000 us and
then you can just add your own subwoofer
to it if you want based on your needs so we've actually got the higher end one
that's $700 which would put this combo right up at the same price as the old
one or you can go for the more basic one which is 400 so this is the S SW S5 and
even though they don't come together they're supposed to just instantly pair
now one of the biggest reasons that Sony is replacing their old Flagship cuz
already if you guys remember I've talked about it a fair bit in the past both in
sponsored videos and outside of them it already sounded great it had support for
dtsx Dolby Atmos it was a
7.1.2 setup so it already had upward firing speakers so you have those
virtual ual like top channels but
technology has moved on and HDMI 2.0 has
been replaced ah here we go man this
thing is a beast with HDMI 2.1 so the
new a7000 has support for 8K 30 HZ or 4K
120 HZ and all the latest
devices oh there's a little label here for which one is the HDMI input oh these
are both HDMI input ah okay I can see why they did it this way because
everyone's going to need to plug this into their TV via the HDMI outport right
here and then you can use it to not only replace that input from your TV but
actually switch so it's got two HDMI inputs in terms of the rest of the I/O
we've got an optical input just in case your TV doesn't support Arc or EC this
does support EC though it's part of the HDMI 2.1 specification it's got an
analog in if you have an analog Source you want to hook up to it it's got a USB
port and this s Center out if you've never heard of that before I don't blame
you but Sony has a feature on their Bravia TVs that allows you to use the
builtin speaker of the TV and they've actually got ones that have that speaker
built right into the display it vibrates the display so you can actually use your
TV as a center Channel with this soundbar not that you would necessarily
need to cuz this thing is absolutely bristling with Sony's X balanced
speakers oh that's interesting I had expected the grill to be removable like
on their old one but it looks like either it doesn't come off or it's
something that you have to unscrew how many of these are there uhoh yeah it
might not be intended to come off interesting that's quite unexpected well
that's fine we can still get a look at this so one of the things Sony's done
really well with their previous Soundbars is creating a really wide
Sound Stage so you can see we've got our Center drivers right here and then we've
got our right and left and then this
right here this is what Sony apparently calls their uh beam tweeters that's
really interesting they've got these small to large perforations here and
apparently what this is about is creating a more accurate and wider Sound
Stage so that's that's pretty cool and then ah yes this is another thing so we
can't ah yes no we can see them built into this are also two subwoofers so the
idea is that if they're shipping it without a dedicated subwoofer it should
have pretty good base performance out of the box confirmed though they've got these
little uh these little kind of spacers here to make sure this doesn't get
punched in this is intended to be run
with the grill not naked but I'm still glad we pride it up so we could have a
better look at that ran into a small problem when we
went to set up the Soundbar our Bravia TV has a stand that kind of H we would
need a deeper Media Console so we're we're inde deepening our media console
like this there we go try this at home don't
try yeah don't try this at home
nice now seems like as good a time as any to have a look at our accessory
package we've got a remote so you can
use this to control the built-in OLED screen in the front or if you have a
Sony TV there will be an onscreen display that'll come up so we should see
that on this one power cable HDMI cable
the 3 1/2 mm cable for hooking up your TV as a center Channel batteries and a
wall mount that's right my friends it's wall mount ready ah yes so the downside
of using optical well the upside of using optical is compatibility if you
have a device that doesn't support Arc or EC then you're going to want to use
Optical but the downside is that it doesn't support the same high defition
formats that e does so you're not going to be running Dolby Atmos over Optical
it just doesn't work that way um yeah it's it's funny cuz you think of like
Optical you know as like a high-s speeed connection
but that particular Optical standard hasn't been touched in like 15 20 years
yeah so it's really really slow this Soundbar has support for every surround
format that you could want today Dolby Atmos dtsx um I mean those are really
the main ones when you're plugging in your Soundbar Sony helpfully stickered
over the ports not to use on the sound bar itself but you need to make sure
you're plugging into the correct port on your TV so I'm going to hit the one
right here that is labeled Arc then for
my PlayStation 5 I'm going to plug that into whatever HDMI one okay there now
any content running on the smart TV itself and any content playing off of
the PlayStation 5 will all be red through the Soundbar that's kind of the
whole point of audio return channel is that the audio can go out to the
Soundbar either through the TV or directly through the soundbar to the TV
it just doesn't matter hey check this out this is the sw5 and it's got this
kind of like I can't tell exactly what this is
made of it has kind of like a leather wrapped look to what I think is just a
plastic mold but I don't know looks kind of cool they call it textured surface
they call it textured surface apparently thanks
jonno I mean it is a real creative name
look I can tell it's a textured surface okay let's see just how painless the
setup process is I'm going to power up the Soundbar is there like a pairing
button somewhere that's what I get for pulling the stickers off I misread the
label and I plugged into the wrong thing that's why there's no Setup Wizard okay
where'd that notification go uh yeah Bravia
notifications setup there we go reconnect the device to HDMI 4 oh all
right and we've got sound now that's an
improvement before we do anything else I want to run their sound field optimization setup thing so it uses
microphones built into the soundbar to optimize based on the shape and size of
your room I don't really want to add this around speakers yet so I want to do
that after because I want to experience it without them but I do want to optimize the round okay a loud sound may
come from the speakers do not stand in front of the speakers during
optimization all right I'm going
Brandon okay I am really impressed
though did that sound like it was coming from above us or what it totally sound
like okay so normally I would be like
okay well the product is working as it's supposed to that shouldn't blow my mind
but Brandon look up that is a
26 I believe 26t ceiling with acoustic
treatment on it I didn't think it was really going to be able to meaningfully bounce anything off of it
um but here we are in the next part of setup it's prompting me to set up Alexa
so it has support for Google Assistant Alexa and this is new it supports
AirPlay 2 so we're going to try that before we're done here as well uh I
don't know if I'm going to bother with Alexa for the time being though uh yes
Spotify and chomecast um but that that's
not new AirPlay 2 is new with this model
oh that's this is good to know both of the inputs on it are full HDMI 2.1
standard so you can do 4K 120 or 8K that's not a given oh that's another
thing it has D this isn't a new Sony feature they do have other products but
I believe it's their first Soundbar with d so what it does is it takes low bit
rate music so from services like YouTube music for example and it will on the-fly
AI upscale it or upsample it I've tried it before and it's not you know the same
as just having lossless files in the first place but it is a noticeable
effect for sure now I want to hear the demo there are two demos it has a Dolby
Atmos demo and then a 3D reality audio
demo that's definitely better than when we tried it before we optimized
it I think part of it is just that a subwoofer does add more hutzpah to it
like to be clear it already had decent base for a soundbar like considering
that it was a soundbar it was good but I would probably recommend if your living
space accommodates it add the subwoofer
let's try their 3D reality audio demo this is really showing off how wide The
Sound Stage is one of the tests for that is if you're listening to music you
should be able to make out exactly where each instrument was on the on a virtual
stage and yeah it's pretty
clear of course the best way to get surround is to add surround speakers so
we're going to do that next these are Sony's rs3s surround speakers and if you
find you don't get enough of a surround effect from the Soundbar on its own you
can add a couple of these on speaker stands they do need to be powered but
other than that they connect wirelessly to the Soundbar and they should enhance
the surround experience the rear speakers are M5 threaded in case you
were wondering so we're going to go ahead and mount them to our
STS something I should have mentioned by the way if you want to experience Sony's
360° immersive music you do have to subscribe to a supported music service
like title the light's green on that one I think these might have just picked up
either way I want to recalibrate it for the room with these accounted for though
okay let's do it again it I think it oh yeah okay time to enjoy Linus's
terrible driving the challenge here is I want to hear what it's like to have a
car coming up behind me and I have to pass one for that to happen you can
definitely feel like the the gravel kind of being kicked all around coming from
all around you though that is a pretty fantastic surround experience I think
it's fair to say at this point that if you have another person living in your
house that doesn't want to deal with the whole fussing about with inputs on a
receiver or whatever good quality
Soundbar it is really hard to go wrong
this is a pretty freaking sweet setup oh and we didn't even try airpl 2 yet let's
go ahead and do that step one is have an iPhone step two try to cast step three
AirPlay and Bluetooth devices step four
enter this code that's pretty big sound
I'm at like
70% I mean that's louder than you would reasonably want to listen to in your
living room I would think and I think that's about the end of the video here
today thank you Sony for sponsoring this video and sending over your a7000 looks
like a worthy successor to the st5000 and make sure you subscribe to
ShortCircuit for more videos like this one