Soundbars, particularly those designed to deliver immersive 3D audio formats such as Dolby Atmos, live and die by calibration.
Their effectiveness depends heavily on being able to bounce sound around your room in a way that properly matches your seating position, while also taking into account the shape of the space, the placement of furniture and the amount of soft furnishing that might absorb or diffuse sound.
Without effective calibration, even an excellent soundbar can sound surprisingly underwhelming.
In the early days of soundbars, most notably with Yamaha’s pioneering YSP range, calibration was handled using a dedicated wired microphone included in the box. You would plug the microphone into the soundbar, position it where you normally sit, activate the test tones and let the system do the rest.
Manufacturers eventually concluded that this process was too cumbersome for mainstream buyers, though, so more advanced and convenient systems were developed.
The best-known of those is probably Sonos Trueplay, which uses the microphones built into your iPhone. Generally, you first take a measurement while sitting in your listening position, before walking around the room slowly wafting your phone through the air in a manner vaguely akin to vacuuming your walls.
It feels faintly ridiculous going through the process, but Trueplay is genuinely effective.
The problem is that its accuracy depends heavily on the quality and consistency of your phone’s microphones. That’s why Trueplay is still limited to iOS devices. Android owners either have to borrow an iPhone from a friend to calibrate their system properly or simply live with an uncalibrated soundbar.
Sony’s own Sound Field Optimisation system has historically been far more open, supporting both iOS and Android devices, but has it always produced entirely consistent results? The company’s latest solution rather suggests otherwise.
Said solution is simple: a bespoke USB-C microphone designed specifically for calibrating its new Bravia Theatre Trio home theatre system.
The microphone plugs directly into your smartphone during setup, allowing the Bravia Connect app to handle all of the clever room-analysis processing while ensuring that the recordings themselves are captured using consistent, purpose-built hardware rather than the wildly variable microphones built into phones.
In other words, Sony has effectively separated the software processing from the recording hardware.
That strikes me as a genuinely smart solution to a longstanding problem.
Yes, it means keeping track of an extra accessory, but that feels like a very small price to pay for more reliable and consistent calibration results – particularly for a premium Dolby Atmos system that is designed to create convincing spatial audio effects.
Accurate calibration alone doesn’t guarantee great sound, of course, but it does provide the foundation on which great spatial audio depends.
And, based on my brief hands-on experience with the Bravia Theatre Trio, Sony’s approach appears to work remarkably well. It’s one of the smartest soundbar innovations I have seen in quite some time – and one that rivals such as Sonos should probably be paying close attention to.
MORE:
Here are my initial thoughts on the Sony Bravia Theatre Trio
These are all of the best Dolby Atmos soundbars you can buy right now
