Sony has delivered a host of soundbar and headphone products in recent months designed to make enjoyment of its 360 Spatial Sound Mapping technology as convenient as possible. We hadn’t expected this project, though, to extend to a portable speaker system targeted at surround sound-loving home theater fans – yet that’s exactly what Sony has announced today in the unique shape of the HT-AX7.
The single most surprising thing about the AX7 is that it actually comprises three separate components. So as well as the main coffee-table friendly speaker you get two smaller circular speakers designed to be placed in other corners of your room to create an immersive, true surround sound experience.
Once you’ve spread the speakers out, Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping technology kicks in to create multiple phantom speakers to go alongside the three real ones, generating an array of front, rear and even overhead sound channels in a bid to deliver a hemisphere of sound all around the listener.
To make sure you can always enjoy the maximum benefit from the 360-degree soundstage, the AX7 is equipped with Sony’s Upmixer Algorithm which, as its name suggests, can transform even a basic stereo mix into three-dimensional surround sound. Something it does, says Sony, by analysing sound in real-time to separate out and intelligently redistribute individual sound objects.
The three speakers all communicate with each other wirelessly, as you’d expect these days, while the main ‘host’ speaker of the package is also able to receive sound wirelessly from sources using Bluetooth, enhancing the ease with which the package can be set up each time you move it to another room.
The AX7 is properly portable, too, in the sense that it doesn’t need to be connected to the mains. The system can be powered on rechargeable batteries, with the main speaker doubling up as a charging station for the two satellite speakers when they’re ‘docked’ onto the main speaker’s top edge. Battery life is rated at a very respectable maximum of 30 hours, in fact – though obviously this could reduce substantially if you run the AX7 particularly loud.
Sony has also equipped the AX7 with a handy quick-charge mode that can give you 150 minutes of playback (enough for most non-Avatar films…) on a 10-minute charge.
Continuing the ease of use theme is Sony’s Home Entertainment Connect app. Once downloaded to your smartphone, this holds your hand through the whole initial set up procedure, complete with troubleshooting options.
Once the initial out of the box installation is out of the way, the beauty of the AX7 – on paper, at least – is that setting it up in different rooms should be no more complicated than putting the main unit on a surface in front of you, and then detaching the two light-weight satellite speakers and placing them at other locations around your seating position. Everything else happens more or less automatically.
Obviously as it isn’t out yet and Sony hasn’t held any in-person press events for it, I can’t say how well the HT-AX7’s unusual proposition might deliver on the sound quality part of its portable home theater promise. Sony has, though, gained a handy reputation over recent years both for its portable speakers, and for getting good results from its 360 Spatial Audio system with soundbar and headphone products that might not have appeared on paper to be particularly well geared up for it.
If the thought of easy to set up surround audio in any room sounds right up your street, the HT-AX7 will be available from August in the US, UK and Europe for $499, £499 and €550 respectively.
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