When my wife and I, along with our then four-year-old son, moved house around three years ago, I promised that the new living room would be a family room first and a home cinema second.
The 12-speaker, dual-amp-powered beast I’d assembled (and loved) wasn’t going to fit that brief, so it went into storage with a promise that one day I’ll convert the garage into a dedicated cinema room.
One extra benefit of simplifying the system was that I could retire the painstakingly programmed Logitech Harmony remote that had made the old setup usable by ‘normal’ people.
When simple becomes complex
Over time, the sources crept back in. Alongside the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X came a Nintendo Switch.
I brought the Apple TV 4K back in for better picture and sound than the A95L’s integrated Google TV smart platform, too. This sat alongside the mainstay Sky Stream Puck.
And eventually, I could bear leaving my beloved Oppo UDP-203 Blu-ray player in cold, damp storage no longer.
Six sources into four HDMI inputs just won’t go, so an HDMI switch had to be added, and HDMI-CEC, which had been unreliable from the start, became almost entirely useless.
Sure, sometimes one press of the power button would wake everything and switch to the correct input. More often, though, something wouldn’t cooperate, leaving us staring at a blank screen while rummaging for one of the many remotes scattered around the room.
The search for Harmony
After putting myself and my family through this for far too long, I admitted defeat. It was time for a universal remote again.
My old Harmony was still in storage and technically still supported, but I didn’t want to invest effort setting up a discontinued product that could lose support at any point – or fail with no replacement available.
So I went looking for a modern equivalent. The internet pointed me to the Sofabaton X1S.
After a week of use, I can say that the Sofabaton X1S has genuinely simplified our setup. But it isn’t the magic bullet that Harmony was.
The biggest issue – and one widely reported by Sofabaton users – is the absence of a ‘Help’ button.
It’s inevitable that, occasionally, something won’t power on or switch inputs correctly. Harmony’s solution was simple: press Help and the remote would resend commands, then walk you through correcting power or input status.
Sofabaton offers no such safety net. If something goes wrong, you either have to exit Activities, dig into the Devices menu, locate the misbehaving component and manually correct it (hardly intuitive for the experienced user, let alone a first-timer), or dig up the original remote for the tricksy component in question.
Even Sofabaton’s newer, pricier X2 seemingly doesn’t include an equivalent ‘Help’ function, which suggests this isn’t an oversight but a deliberate design decision. That’s baffling to me.
To be fair, the X1S gets things right first time, most of the time. But when it doesn’t, the recovery process feels clumsy. It’s the main reason I’m tempted to resurrect my old Harmony.
Setup was also more involved than I remember with Harmony. Configuration is handled entirely through a phone app – fine for many, I’m sure, but I’m a middle-aged man who very much conforms to the stereotype of wanting to use a computer rather than a phone for anything ‘serious’.
Finding the correct device profiles proved hit-and-miss, too, particularly with UK-specific kit. My Sky Stream Puck required several attempts before I found a fully working profile – ironically, a user-supplied one. And, even after specifying my exact TV model, most of the commands were wrong, leaving me to manually correct them.
Ultimately, Sofabaton feels as though it ‘knows’ your devices less well than Harmony did. Where Harmony generally anticipated, the X1S frequently needs educating.
My only other gripe is the lack of a charging dock. Plugging it in isn’t a hardship, but a simple stand would feel more elegant. Third-party options exist, but not readily in the UK.
The good outweighs the bad
That may sound like a lot of criticism, but I do like the Sofabaton X1S. The design is sleek and comfortable, the scroll wheel is preferable to a touchscreen (though I’m aware that not all owners agree), and the included transmitter reliably reaches components nestled in the deepest nooks.
Most importantly, we’ve reduced our six remotes to one, and my wife and son can operate the system far more confidently than before.
It has brought order back to our home cinema – even if it hasn’t quite restored Harmony.
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