I wasn’t impressed by Sony’s ambitious 5.0.2-channel Bravia Theater Bar 9 due to its high price and very weak bass, chalked up to its lack of a subwoofer. The 3.1.2-channel Bravia Theater Bar 6 soundbar ($649.99) addresses both of these issues, shipping with a wireless subwoofer for less than half the price. It’s certainly a better buy than the Theater Bar 9, but it still doesn’t manage to hit the ultra-low frequencies needed for palpable, wall-shaking sound. It sounds good and offers solid spatial audio imaging, but if you’re expecting to feel the explosions in movies and games, it might be a letdown. The LG S70TY ($349.99) has only one height channel, so its directional audio isn’t as precise as the Theater Bar 6's, but it puts out clear, well-balanced sound with more boom for hundreds less. It remains our Editors’ Choice award winner for midrange soundbars. 

Design: Minimalist and Sleek

The Bravia Theater Bar 6 measures 2.7 by 37.5 by 4.4 inches (HWD), with a metallic front grille that curves around to the sides. This grille covers the left, right, and center-channel drivers, along with two status LEDs near the right side that provide very little information besides showing that the speaker is on and receiving remote inputs. The top panel features two additional grilles for the upward-firing height channel drivers. A recess in the middle of the back holds its few connectors: an HDMI port, an optical audio input, and a connector for the power cable.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The Theater Bar 6’s subwoofer is a plain, simple black box measuring 15.3 by 8.3 by 15.3 inches. On the back, it has an open bass port, a power cable connector, and a pairing button.

There are no controls whatsoever on the bar, relegating everything to the included remote, the Bravia Connect mobile app (available for Android and iOS), or your TV’s remote with HDMI-CEC. The included remote is plain black and shaped like a candy bar, with a large circular volume rocker, a smaller bass rocker, and buttons for input, mute, power, night mode, sound field mode, and voice mode.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

It’s a no-frills infrared remote, and confirmation of any button press comes solely from the soundbar’s two LEDs. You have to listen carefully or check the Bravia Connect app to see whether different modes are enabled or disabled. (Voice prompts would have been preferable.) The remote also feels a bit laggy, taking an extra second or two compared with using my TV remote or the app to toggle power or adjust volume.

Software: An App With Few Frills

You won’t find many more controls in the Bravia Connect app than you get on the basic remote. The app lets you adjust the overall volume or bass level, mute the soundbar, and toggle the modes. From the app, you can also choose whether the soundbar plays the main, bass, or both audio channels of a dual mono signal, a control that the included remote lacks. It’s an oddly specific function, and it seems to have no effect whatsoever, even when simple stereo sound is coming through. Some more detailed settings are hidden deeper in the app’s menus, but you probably won’t need to touch them. These granular settings let you adjust the timing for A/V sync, manually enable or disable eARC and HDMI-CEC, and switch among Dolby, DTS, and Sony spatial audio upconversion processes.

Without any EQ options, it's a pretty barebones app. The soundbar's lack of any Wi-Fi connectivity, voice assistant, or multi-room streaming also means there isn't much to set up. You can't even update its firmware through the app; you need to download the update to a USB drive and manually install it through the soundbar itself.

Audio: Solid Spatial Sound, Weak Sub-Bass

As I mentioned up top, the Sony Bravia Theater Bar 6 is a 3.1.2-channel soundbar. Sony does not specify driver size, but the system has six drivers total (full-range left/right/center/up left/up right, and the wireless subwoofer) with 55 watts of total power consumption (35W soundbar, 20W subwoofer). It supports Dolby Atmos and DTS:X spatial audio over HDMI eARC and features Bluetooth 5.3 with SBC and AAC codecs for wireless audio streaming. Support for AAC, but not for AptX or LDAC, means that music played from an Apple iPhone will probably sound better than from an Android phone.

The Theater Bar 6 is capable of producing a wide sound field thanks to its five channels, which effectively enhance movies over what most TVs can offer. The opening chase scene in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness sounds big and detailed, with the upward-firing drivers giving solid directional imaging of rubble flying overhead. It isn’t nearly as precise in its spatial audio imaging as the Theater Bar 9, which has 13 drivers, but the Theater Bar 6 manages to sound fuller thanks to the wireless subwoofer. It's much more balanced than the more expensive model, with enough bass output to keep the overall audio from coming off as hollow or brittle.

That’s when comparing the Theater Bar 6 against a soundbar without a subwoofer, though. For speakers, power output doesn’t matter nearly as much as driver size, which Sony doesn’t specify, but at 20W, the included subwoofer is at the extremely low end of the spectrum. That lack of power shows because the sub simply doesn’t produce palpable vibrations in the sub-bass frequencies, even when it gets very loud in the bass range. LG doesn’t specify the output or driver size for its S70TY soundbar, but its subwoofer is noticeably more powerful, able to get my walls shaking when the Theater Bar 6’s sub can’t. While I haven’t tested it yet, the subwoofer you can get bundled with the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus ($374.99 for both) is 100W.

(Credit: Will Greenwald)

The game Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 sounds excellent on the Theater Bar 6, even with its underpowered subwoofer. The booming impacts of hits are big and forceful, and I could even feel my floor vibrate a little from the sub. It still isn’t wall-shaking thunder, and it didn’t have any scattered remotes or controllers rattling in testing, but without reaching into the lowest frequencies, it still gives a good sense of impact. The game’s beautiful soundtrack sounds clear and full, with the piano and vocals coming through with balance and good high-mid and high-frequency reproduction. Character dialog in and out of combat is also easy to understand against the other sounds of the game.

For music, the Theater Bar 6 once again compares very favorably against the subwoofer-less Theater Bar 9, but it isn’t very impressive when held up against other soundbars with subs. When playing our bass test track, The Knife’s “Silent Shout,” with the default bass setting, the Theater Bar 6’s sub produces enough boom to fill my apartment and bleed into the hallway with reasonably strong low-end, but it just doesn’t reach low enough to shake the walls with the song's bass drum hits.

Music with less sub-bass, like Yes’ “Roundabout,” sounds reasonably good on the Theater Bar 6. The opening acoustic guitar plucks get strong low-mid resonance to sound nice and big, while the higher frequencies receive enough attention to convey string texture. It isn’t the most delicate treble reproduction, but it’s crisp enough to avoid sounding blunted. When the track properly kicks in, the drums, guitar strums, bassline, and vocals all receive plenty of attention and none is eclipsed by the others, though the vocals do sit just slightly in the background against the cymbals and bass. For most music like this, make sure you turn off the Sound Field mode so the soundbar plays only in stereo. Sound Field can make music sound bigger, but in doing so, it gets more liberal with crossover frequencies, so some notes get unnecessary and unnatural growling from the subwoofer when they wouldn’t otherwise set it off.