Sony Bravia Theater Quad

Most consumer home theater systems are built around a soundbar that serves as an anchor for the primary left, right, and center channels. From there, satellites and subwoofers can be added for rear surround and bass support. Sony ignores this convention with the Bravia Theater Quad, which uses four identical wireless speakers to cover all the audio around you. It’s an incredibly effective solution, generating an immersive spatial audio experience from its soundbar-less configuration. The Theater Quad sounds excellent, but you have to pay extra for a subwoofer to provide any significant low-end rumble, and that’s on top of the system’s already hefty $2,499.99 price. For more powerful sound for around the same price, you can build your own home theater system around the Sonos Arc soundbar, a pair of Era 300 speakers, and a much-needed Sub subwoofer, which Sonos offers in a bundle ($2,596) that offers more bang for your buck than the Theater Quad.

Design: Four Friendly Slabs

The Theater Quad consists of four speakers and a control box that wirelessly connects to them. The speakers are identical rectangular slabs each measuring 10.8 by 11.5 by 2.3 inches (HWD), with table stands that expand their footprint to 5.2 inches deep and increase their height by 0.7 inches. Wall-mounting brackets are also included. Each speaker is wrapped in gray grille cloth and features a flat black metal top panel with another grille for the upward-firing drivers. The speakers are wireless, so the only connection on them is for a power cable on the bottom. You can run the power cable around the table stand or straight down if the speaker is mounted on a wall.

Each speaker must be positioned with the large, flat front surface facing the listener. Since they’re all the size of coffee table books, they aren’t that easy to stash under your TV like a soundbar or even on the same surface the TV is placed on. My entertainment center is 15 inches wider than my TV and putting the speakers on the far corners of it would block part of the screen. You’ll probably want to mount the front speakers on the wall or put them on their own stands.

The control box is a 2.3-by-6.4-by-6.4-inch black plastic transmitter that’s small enough to fit under all but the lowest-seated TVs. This box connects to your TV over HDMI eARC, and wirelessly streams audio to all four speakers. It features an alphanumeric LED display on the front and ports for HDMI out, HDMI in for pass-through from another device, a 3.5mm center channel output for connecting to compatible Sony TVs with a center channel input like the Bravia 8, an Ethernet port, and a power button on the back.

On its own, the Theater Quad is a 4.0.4-channel system with left, right, left surround, and rear surround channels, along with equivalent height channels for each. It's expandable with a wireless subwoofer like the Sony SA-SW3 ($399.99) or the SA-SW5 ($699.99), and as mentioned, you can add a dedicated center channel with a compatible Bravia TV.

The remote is a simple black candy bar with basic controls. Its biggest button is a circular rocker for the system’s main volume, but there’s a smaller rocker for switching between three bass settings (Min, Med, and Max) below it. The remote also has power, input, and mute buttons, along with three other buttons that toggle the system’s dynamic range-dampening Night Mode, surround sound-processing Sound Field Mode, and dialogue-enhancing Voice Mode. As an eARC device, you can also increase and decrease the volume and mute the system through your TV’s remote.

App: Mapping Your Acoustics

You can control the Theater Quad with Sony’s Bravia Connect app for Android and iOS, but it’s mostly just useful for setting up the speakers. You have to create a free account, but it lets you update the Theater Quad’s firmware. More importantly for the listening experience, it can tweak the speakers’ output based on your room’s acoustics and where you usually sit. The app will direct you to hold your phone while sitting, and it will then play a series of tones through each speaker channel. The microphone on your phone will measure those tones and make adjustments based on those measurements.

Besides those two functions, the app offers all of the same buttons as the remote, plus an additional rocker to change the output of the rear channels. If you aren’t in your usual spot, there’s a Viewing Position button that lets you take a quick acoustic reading to temporarily adjust the spatial audio based on your current seat. After using this feature, the Theater Quad will automatically return to your usual settings the next time you turn it on.

Sound Quality: Accurate Spatial Audio With Little Deep Bass

The Sony Bravia Theater Quad is a 4.0.4-channel sound system that supports spatial audio in Dolby Atmos, DTS:X, IMAX Enhanced, and Sony 360 Reality Audio formats. An HDMI connection over eARC is required for spatial audio, though the system can also play audio over Bluetooth and Apple AirPlay 2.

We tested the Theater Quad without a subwoofer, and while it sounds very clear with excellent surround imaging, it can definitely benefit from augmented low-end. The sub-bass reach of the synth and drums in our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” feels very tamped down when played through the Theater Quad. In fact, the speakers’ output on this track seems to barely increase after pushing the volume past 60%, which indicates digital signal processing (DSP) to ensure the drivers don’t distort from vibrations they can’t handle. Which, to be fair, they don’t.

When we aren’t pushing its sub-bass response as far as it can go, the Theater Quad sounds excellent for music. The opening of Yes’ “Roundabout” gets plenty of crisp, delicate string texture in each guitar pluck, along with strong low-mid resonance to back it up. When the track properly kicks in, every element is present and detailed, and no single aspect, from the vocals to the guitar to the drums, outshines or falls behind any other. The bassline reaches low enough to anchor the track with a bit of punch and prevent it from sounding too poppy.

The Theater Quad supports spatial music through Sony’s 360 Reality Audio platform as well as Dolby Atmos. To test that audio, besides the standard demo clip of nature sounds and sweeping tones the Bravia Connect app plays after setting up the Theater Quad, I installed Tidal. Unfortunately, as of a week before the time of this writing, Tidal no longer supports 360 Reality Audio. It should be noted that Sony’s 360 Reality Audio site still lists Tidal as one of the services to stream that content, which isn’t the best sign of the platform’s health as a whole. When you get down to the core technology and concepts, though, 360 Reality Audio is simply another spatial audio format like Dolby Atmos, and while Tidal doesn’t have 360 Reality Audio tracks anymore, it does have Atmos tracks. And they generally sound fantastic on the Theater Quad.

The Atmos mix of Fleetwood Mac’s “Tusk” is immersive and detailed, with the drum beats seeming to come from two separate locations as if they were separate drums in a large drum kit. The other instruments and vocals have their own firmly anchored positions in front, and USC’s Trojan Marching Band takes up a wide but slightly distant stance as if they’re playing behind Fleetwood Mac. The drum flourishes around the end of the song are especially effective, with one cymbal swell seeming to revolve around the listener.

Of course, the Theater Quad is also meant for theatrical content, and it handles that very well. In the opening scene of Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness, the sounds of rubble flying and energy fields humming come through clearly, with plenty of positional imaging. The height channels of the speakers aren’t used to extremes compared with the primary channels, but they add enough to really anchor sounds like an eldritch monster held in place by sorcery in the space behind and next to the listener. The dialogue is easy to understand against the sound effects, and the soundtrack has enough dynamic range to be exciting, even without significant bass response.

Avatar also sounds excellent on the Theater Quad. In the scene where Jake tames a banshee, the whipping of air and swooping of the dragon-like creatures get plenty of detail and strong directional imaging around, behind, and in height. A shot where the tribe navigates through a waterfall is especially immersive and compelling. Through this, both the Na’vi dialog and Jake’s louder and deeper narration are both strong and clear.

While the Theater Quad could certainly benefit from a subwoofer, it doesn’t need a center channel. The primary and height channels of the two front speakers very effectively synthesize center-channel sound and give the impression that audio is coming directly from the TV rather than either speaker located at the TV’s sides. I didn’t test the system with a Bravia TV that can accept center channel input, but I didn’t miss it at all. It’s a full, detailed sound field.

Verdict: An Expensive, Expandable Speaker System

The Sony Bravia Theater Quad home theater system sounds great and shows excellent spatial audio imaging through its atypical four-speaker design. Its audio quality is balanced and detailed, offering better performance when playing music than many soundbars, which generally focus on big, dynamic sound for movies. Its big stumbling block is bass power. The speakers have strong, accurate audio from the top edges of bass up to high frequencies, but they just can’t offer any real rumble on their own. For $2,500, some form of subwoofer should really have been included with the system, because it’s definitely missed. As an alternative, you can get similarly fantastic sound quality and spatial imaging, along with much-needed low-end with the Sonos Ultimate Immersive Set, a bundle that combines the Arc soundbar, two Era 300 speakers as satellites, and a Sub subwoofer in one package that offers greater oomph than the Theater Quad.