Sennheiser’s Ambeo Soundbar Plus is designed to replace your dedicated front, rear, and center speakers in a home theater setup. The heavy yet sleek soundbar features a new design that’s built to offer spacious sound. It packs a slew of features and offers wireless sound playback through Chromecast, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, and Bluetooth.
The Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar Plus is heavy at 6 kg yet remains sleek. It looks elegant with a hard plastic top (equipped with capacitive controls) and fabric coating around the front and sides. The weight allows it to accommodate a 7.1.4 channel setup, which consists of nine drivers, including seven full-range speakers and two 4-inch subwoofers. Overall, it is sturdy and well-built.
You get 1x HDMI eARC port that can be used for delivering 24bit/192kHz uncompressed audio through your TV, 2x HDMI 2.0, 1x aux, 1x USB-A, an ethernet port, and 1x mono RCA port. Notably, only the eARC port is HDMI 2.1, you won’t be able to play games in 4K/120Hz using Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 because your TV is likely to be connected through this port.
To set up the Ambeo Plus, you need to install the Sennheiser Smart Control app, which is well-designed and straightforward. You can easily calibrate the soundbar to your room with a single tap. This calibration process utilizes the four built-in far-field microphones to accomplish the task within a couple of minutes.
Throughout my testing, I preferred using the Adaptive mode as it suited my preferences the best. However, there are also other modes available, including Music, Movies, Sports, News, and Neutral modes. You get a remote that offers basic features such as toggling between presets, activating night mode to reduce deep bass, enabling dialog mode, and more. You can also configure Alexa or Google Assistant to the soundbar.”
On the inside, the nine drivers consist of a combination of front-firing, up-firing, and side-firing arrays designed to deliver an immersive experience. The soundbar produces wonderful audio with rich sound quality. However, having a subwoofer is highly recommended. In my case, I used the Amber Sub. To make the most of the subwoofer, you might need to experiment a bit to find the best placement. I connected the Ambeo Plus to my 65-inch OnePlus TV Q2 Pro and placed it under the TV.
In the first episode of Last of Us, you feel right in the chao with shots being fired and sound of flights and bombing. The dialogues were clear with no muffling. The soundbar takes the thrill of action or trhiller movies and shows to the next level. In terms of sound quality, it tends to be on the brighter side. That’s not to say that the bass is inadequate. It’s detailed, deep, and further enhanced with a subwoofer. The vocals can be made clearer using the controls from the app.
Sennheiser offers a phantom surround sound experience, which is created by reflecting sound off the ceiling and walls. This approach effectively provides a room-filling sound. In fact, it feels like having speakers at multiple locations in the room. I recommend switching off the Ambeo mode if you are only listening to music for a better experience. However, turn it on for movies and sports. Streaming music through Bluetooth is easy, and works well in terms of tonality and loudness. Although, I preferred playing music through my TV for better clarity.
The Sennheiser Ambeo Plus simplifies the process of setting up a home theater system. You don’t need to deal with multiple speakers, wires, or their placement. While other soundbars might offer a more impressive surround sound experience, they come with the added complexity of setting up individual speakers.
If you’re looking for a high-end soundbar that eliminates the need of managing multiple speakers, offers good sound quality, is easy to set up, and provides access to Alexa/Google Assistant, it’s a good buy for $1200 / INR 1,39,990. But if you need a home theater-like experience, I recommend adding the Ambeo Sub subwoofer, which comes at an additional cost of $600 / INR 69,990.
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