Nine hundred dollars for a new soundbar might sound a bit extreme, but Bose’s new high-end Soundbar 900 looks to add a lot to your home entertainment system. Packed with features like support for Dolby Atmos, as well as Bose’s QuietPort tech, Bose says the new soundbar delivers better quality than its previous high-end soundbar, while also bringing your space to life with the sounds of your movies and shows. While the new soundbar doesn’t come cheap, the features that Bose has managed to push into this sleek package bring a lot to the table, making it a worthy upgrade to my home entertainment system.
Spatial Audio Upgraded
One of the biggest perks of the Soundbar 900 is support for Dolby Atmos. Spatial audio has slowly become more of a feature in soundbars over the past few years. However, Bose appears to be trying to up the ante a little by making the Soundbar 900 even more appealing to users looking for spatial audio support. Bose says the new soundbar goes beyond regular spatial audio, though, and uses the company’s PhaseGuide tech to create a horizontal audio effect, as well. The company claims that its tech can allow the soundbar to create spatial audio-like effects, even on shows and movies that don’t support spatial audio. It claims the soundbar uses various custom arrays and other hardware pieces to help create the effect without the need for it to be enabled in the media, itself. Being able to enjoy some form of spatial audio on any media you watch would be interesting and should offer a more immersive audio experience, overall. The company says this is done by remixing signals from the media to create a spatial audio-like effect. However, it doesn’t detail exactly how it works, and without any real testing experience, it’s hard to say how effective the tech will be. However, the idea is nice, and if Bose pulls it off when the Soundbar 900 starts shipping later in September, it could be a feature that makes the price of the Soundbar worth it.
Spread the Love
Another great feature Bose is advertising with the Soundbar 900 is the ability to connect to other Bose smart speakers and soundbars in other rooms. This allows you to create a multi-room effect and send audio from whatever you’re watching—or listening to—to those speakers. It’s a nice touch, especially for those who like to have that multi-room effect, though I can’t imagine the everyday person would really have much use for it besides listening to music when cleaning their home. Alternatively, you could connect it to other speakers in the same room, creating more of an auditorium or movie theater experience.
Dealer’s Choice
One of the best things about soundbars in the past few years has been the number of connections they allow. While you usually have different ways to connect the audio from your TV to the speaker, itself, a lot of them offer Bluetooth and other wireless connectivity now, too. The Soundbar 900 is no different. It supports connections like HDMI eARC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and even voice assistants like Google Assistant and Alexa. You also can utilize AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect. That gives you plenty of ways to connect your device, which is something I welcome in my home entertainment setup. One of my favorite things about my current Bose soundbar is the ability to connect it to my phone so that I can quickly change the songs and media that I’m listening to. It helps make tidying up the house more entertaining. Having even more capabilities to do that with the Soundbar 900 just makes it an even more enticing purchase for my home. Overall, dropping $900 on a new soundbar sounds like a lot of money to spend when nothing is wrong with the one I already have. But, with all the new features packed into the Soundbar 900, and the claims that Bose is making about it, it seems like an upgrade worth having.
