Creative Stage Pro review

Soundbars can be complex beasts. We’ve reviewed our fair share with separate wireless subwoofers and surround speakers, complex companion applications, and that sweet, sweet Dolby Atmos immersive sound format that we know and love.

But what if you don’t need all that? What if you just need a soundbar that bypasses the middling built-in speakers of your TV for a simple sonic improvement?

We’ve seen plenty of soundbars promise to fulfil this brief, and the Creative Sound Pro is the latest to do so. It offers a dinky soundbar and slender subwoofer in one convenient package and at a surprisingly low price.

It's easy to take one look at this system based on those factors and assume it's nothing special. However, as we’ve found out from our extensive testing, that’s certainly not the case.

Price

At just £130 / $150 / AU$230, the Stage Pro already seems like a hugely affordable option when compared with the pricey Dolby Atmos models that often find themselves at home in our AV testing room.

Better yet, at the time of writing, the Stage Pro can currently be picked up for just £110 in the UK, and we expect discounts like this to be fairly frequent.

Competition for the Creative comes in the form of the three-star Amazon Fire TV Soundbar (£120 / $120), and the now long-in-the-tooth Sony HT-SF150 (tested at £90 / $100 / AU$199), which scored four stars when we reviewed it way back in 2019.

For those with a slightly more generous budget, the Sonos Ray (£279 / $279 / AU$399) and Sharp HT-SB700 (£199) are our two top picks, the latter of which supports Dolby Atmos, unlike any of the other soundbars we’ve mentioned.

Build

Despite the diminutive price, the Stage Pro feels like quite a well-built soundbar, and it looks the part too. It’s constructed almost entirely of a smooth-to-the-touch plastic, with a two-tone black and gold finish and a pair of rubber feet that angle the soundbar slightly upwards.

This is important as the Stage Pro can be used in two distinct ways. The first is with a TV, ideally up to 43 inches in size, as the soundbar only measures 8 x 55 x 11cm (hwd).

We’ve paired the Creative with a 55-inch TV for our testing, and it must be said that the pairing doesn’t look quite right, so bear that in mind if you do have a larger TV.

It’s arguably more at home on a desktop beneath a large gaming monitor. The rubber feet are useful for angling the sound upwards when you’re sitting directly in front of it.

And it’s not just the soundbar in the box, as the Stage Pro comes bundled with a slender subwoofer that measures 42 x 12 x 27cm and weighs just 3.4kg. Much like the soundbar, it’s suited for use in a compact TV set-up, or it can be tucked neatly under a desk if you plan on pairing the system with a PC.

We should also mention that the subwoofer plugs directly into the soundbar via an attached cable, from which it draws power and sound, meaning you don’t need to plug it into a wall socket separately or deal with any sort of pairing process.

Features

The Stage Pro sports an understandably light feature set, given its price. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as it is positioned as a no-frills soundbar that doesn’t try to overexert itself with half-baked features.

This is a straightforward 2.1-channel system with two 8.5 x 5.5cm race track drivers handling the left and right channels, while the subwoofer houses a 5.25-inch driver.

Creative claims that the soundbar outputs 20W rms of power, and the subwoofer is rated at 60W rms, though the total peak system power is quoted at 160W. These figures relate to power output over an extended period without distortion, whereas the peak power output refers to the very maximum capability of the system.

Dolby Audio is also supported on the Stage Pro in the Dolby Digital and Dolby Digital Plus formats, though Dolby Atmos is not (which is understandable at this price).

In terms of connectivity, the soundbar features HDMI ARC, optical, USB Type-C and 3.5mm auxiliary inputs. Bluetooth 5.3 is on board, too, with support for the A2DP and AVRCP profiles.

Wi-fi streaming is not featured, which keeps things simple in many regards, but it also means that you won’t be streaming in lossless from the likes of Tidal, Spotify or Apple Music – unless you do so via a compatible TV, of course.

While the driver configurations and connectivity options may be straightforward, there are a few noteworthy sound features on board. Creative has included two “Super Wide” sound processing modes; these are Near Field and Far Field (as well as off), and they’re designed to be used for desktop and TV use, respectively.

There are also five sound modes on top of this: movie, music, vocal, sport and game. They’re all fairly self-explanatory and easy to cycle through via the sound mode button on the functional, straightforward remote.

Sound

We’ll lay our cards on the table here; our expectations going into the Stage Pro were fairly low. A soundbar as affordable and basic as this on paper doesn’t inspire oodles of confidence, and yet we’re quickly corrected when we actually get to hear how this bar performs.

Starting with the 4K Blu-ray of Blade Runner 2049 via our Oppo UDP-203 disc player, we find that the Stage Pro delivers a surprisingly cinematic sound despite its small footprint. The challenging bass section towards the start of chapter two is handled with surprising oomph, and while it isn’t the most defined bass that we’ve ever experienced, it remains controlled, tonally balanced and, most importantly, doesn’t distort even at higher volumes.

Bass can be turned up for those who require a bit more punch, but doing so can upset the balance between the bar and sub somewhat. That all being said, the bass far exceeds our expectations, especially when we’re reminded that it's coming from a sub with such a slender footprint.

The soundbar is an equally pleasant sonic surprise. Voices, such as those of Officer K and the interviewer in the baseline test scene, are presented with impressive detail and emotion thanks to the bar’s solid handling of low-level dynamics.

Switching to Thunderbolts (also on 4K Blu-ray), we find that the scene in which the team of anti-heroes escapes a secret base under siege is conveyed with plenty of drama thanks to the system’s agile, dynamic sound.

An explosion towards the beginning of the scene sounds crisp and is presented with a swift punch of dynamics, which sets the tone nicely.

However, here is where we come across the Stage Pro’s biggest drawback: scale. The sound it produces is very localised and narrow, and it struggles to fill our testing room with sound. We try the Far Field sound setting and find that it definitely projects the sound outwards, but in doing so, it softens details and lessens focus.

The most effective way to add a necessary pinch of scale to the Stage Pro’s sound is to opt for the Movie sound setting and use the Near Field setting. Despite this being designed for desktop use, it actually strikes a nicer balance between scale and focus overall. That’s not to say it's perfect, as it also makes the bar sound slightly softer and less accurate, but it does make it sound bigger for much less of a trade-off.

We’ve also taken the Sony HT-SF150 out of retirement to see how it performs against the Creative, and it’s a surprisingly close match; though these soundbars seem to almost cancel each other out.

The Sony sounds more spacious and dynamic than the Creative, with a richer and more encompassing sound overall, but voices feel recessed, and details seem to be less crisp and defined, too. The Creative is the crisper and more talented of the two when it comes to dialogue, and bass is greatly improved too – but the Creative's sound feels even more localised when we listen back-to-back with the Sony.

From this, we deduce that the Creative is likely suited to smaller rooms, and we should remember that the localised sound won’t be anywhere near as much of an issue if you plan to use this soundbar in a desktop set-up below a monitor.

We move on to music, and this is where the Creative surprisingly shines the brightest. We stream Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place, Bon Iver’s From and Bad Bunny’s NUEVAYoL wirelessly from Apple Music via Bluetooth and also the wired USB-C connection.

Put simply, the Stage Pro shatters expectations here with a truly engaging and enjoyable music experience that’s underpinned by a pin-sharp sense of timing and impressively clean vocals.

The rhythmic drive keeps up with the pacey Latin dance-infused Bad Bunny track as well as it does the abstract and rhythmically challenging Radiohead track. Justin Vernon’s falsetto vocals in Bon Iver’s From are clearly detailed and tonally balanced, too.

Moving to a wired connection over USB-C, we find that all of the positive aspects we’ve mentioned are slightly improved. More detail is revealed, timing is improved, and each component of the tracks we test seems to be incorporated even more naturally.

We also can’t forget to mention how well the subwoofer is integrated when it comes to music playback, too.

While it could easily sound overbearing, Creative has cleverly ensured that it doesn’t overextend its role and instead plays a more subtle role in supporting the excellent timing mentioned above.

When there are lots of competing instruments and vocal layers, the Creative can sound slightly cluttered in the midrange, but this doesn’t detract from the overall impressive musical performance that the Stage Pro delivers.

Verdict

The Creative Stage Pro is cheap, cheerful, and better than it has any right to be. Its unassuming form and simple feature set could well have been warning signals for an underwhelming sound experience, but it’s instead a prime example of not judging a book by its cover.

The Creative Stage Pro is by no means perfect; sound is unfortunately too localised to the bar itself, and we wish the bass were a bit deeper and better defined, but these are relatively minor complaints in the grand scheme of things.

If you want a cheap, effective and enjoyable soundbar that will serve as an improvement over the built-in speakers of your TV, then this unassuming soundbar and subwoofer combo is certainly worth a look.

SCORES

• Sound 4
• Build 4
• Features 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Sony HT-SF150

Also consider the Sharp HT-SB700

Read our Sonos Ray review

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