Sony has just announced the Bravia Theatre Trio, which is a new Dolby Atmos wireless system that splits the difference between a proper surround system and a soundbar, and is particularly designed with huge TVs in mind, to make sure the soundscape is wider than the TV itself — but will be tempting to anyone who wants a physically more separated sound than the best soundbars alone can deliver.

It can also be expanded into a fuller wireless surround setup, and I got to hear this full-force system in action. But first, let's go over the basics.

The Sony Bravia Theatre Trio is, as the name implies, three wireless speakers in a package. It's what home theater fans call an 'LCR' system — meaning left, center, and right channels.

There's a center speaker that's like a mini soundbar, which connects to your TV over HDMI eARC. And there are left and right speakers that look like little pillars with a flat section added to the back, so they can be wall-mounted.

The center speaker has two woofers and a tweeter, while each of the the side speakers each has a woofer and tweeter facing forward, and then an 8cm upfiring driver for Dolby Atmos height channels.

In the simplest terms, this is a 3.0.2-channel system, though Sony says that the system is built heavily around virtualization of more in-depth speaker setups. This initial three-speaker system can apparently mimic 24 phantom channels.

Sony says that it's done some smart stuff with its virtualization tech in the Bravia Theatre Trio, including rethinking how those phantom channels work: they're now designed not just to mimic the placement of a more elaborate speaker setup, but also to mimic the "indirect sound sources" of a cinema room's acoustic signature, including reflections.

So yes, for those keeping track of how psychoacoustic virtualization works, it may be the case that this system is using the reflections of your room to create the sense of an entirely different set of reflections…

To help the system do this as well as possible, it comes with a USB-C microphone that you can use for room calibration. Just plug it into your phone or tablet, fire up Sony's app, and follow the instructions so it can do its best work.

As I mentioned above, this three-speaker core setup can be expanded with add-on rear speakers or a subwoofer as well.

You have two choices of subwoofer: the new Sub 8 is a mid-range option, while the Sub 9 is an absolute massive beast of a sub by lifestyle tech standards. It looks like two Sub 8 units glued together with a vent in the middle, and while Sony didn't confirm the specs, I wouldn't be surprised if that's not far from the truth.

You also have two choices of rear speaker: there's the existing Bravia Rear 8 or the new Bravia Rear 9, which are more or less the same speakers as the front left and right (woofer, tweeter and upfirer combo — in the same design).

Of course, these add-ons will cost you — and the core Bravia Theatre Trio package isn't cheap either. Here's the breakdown of all those options (Sony was only able to provide UK pricing pre-launch and Australian info for the Theatre Trio only, but we'll update with other pricing as we get it):

Sony eats Sonos' lunch

Before I get to my experience of the performance of these speakers, something that immediately struck me is that this kind of setup is what Sonos' users have been begging to company to do for years.

Given that Sonos' whole thing is wireless satellite speakers, its users have asked many, many times (directly and on the r/sonos subreddit) for the ability to use separate front left and right speakers in an LCR setup with its soundbars.

There's even a third-party app that enables this called SonoSequencr, which is quite popular among Sonos home theater enthusiasts.

It seems wild that Sony has offered this before Sonos, and with a better spec list than Sonos can offer, because the Bravia Theatre Trio offers both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X support (Sonos lacks DTS), and has an HDMI passthrough port (supporting 4K 120Hz) so you don't lose an HDMI port by using it.

Of course, if Sonos did end up offering a setup to compete with this, it could have a major price advantage. You can get a Sonos Beam Gen 2 (as the center channel) and two Sonos Era 300 speakers (as spatial audio side speakers) for £1,077 at the time of writing, compared to £2,000 for the Sony system.

And there's also the small issue that in my demo of the Sony system I found it to be quite hit and miss…

Mixing it up

I didn't get to hear just the Bravia Theatre Trio core setup on its own at Sony's event; instead I heard the fullest setup, with the original trio, two Rear 9 speakers, and two Sub 9 subwoofers (though, somewhat oddly, these were placed next to each other rather than spaced for even bass distribution).

In terms of pure physical channels, this is a 7.2.4 setup, but Sony was unable to confirm exactly what the virtualized channel setup it creates using the phantom channels would be — though Sony confirmed that you get 24 phantom channels regardless of how many physical speakers are involved.

First up we watched the big music performance in Sinners at the juke joint. What jumped out straight away is that the system provides a really powerful and warm sound, which is really well suited to the pounding of drums and making the tonality of guitars feel solid and electric.

However, I wasn't that impressed with separation of different elements in the mix, despite all the Dolby Atmos power going on — and in particular I felt that the vocals were more subdued than I'd expect, especially for a system with an actual separate center speaker.

Moving onto the car shoot-out in No Time to Die, the surround and positioning effects got a particular chance to shine. The rear effects were solid, but the side effects were especially impressive considering there are no real speakers there.

Building on that, I thought the way sound moved from the front, around the sides, and to the back was especially impressive — it felt like the sound moved smoothly the whole way, and didn't jump from the front to the back, which is how it can feel in some simple five-channel systems.

But this demo also showed the same apparent weakness with vocals, with dialogue feeling soft and a little muddy even in the quieter moments — and even some of the mid-frequency effects seemed to not pop quite as strongly as they should (I have seen this scene a lot in demos).

The final demo was the first racing scene in Ready Player One, and the system produced a lot of sound and fury all around me here… but I thought there was a slight softness to the fine details that held it back — the very sudden sounds didn't seem quite as dramatically sudden as they should, which robbed them a little of impact, scale and spectacle.

That last point wasn't helped by the fact that in all three demos I noticed that the sound and visuals weren't quite in sync. This isn't uncommon in HDMI ARC-based systems at all, but I don't normally notice it as strongly as I did here — and I think it made a difference when experiencing the crunching crashes of Ready Player One if you see the impacts before you hear them.

Of course, this is far from a review — and I'm really interested to see how just the core Bravia Theatre Trio set performs on its own. But at this early stage, I'm kind of torn: I love the overall concept and the design, but I'm concerned about the high price based on the performance I heard so far.

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Matt is TechRadar's Managing Editor for Entertainment, meaning he's in charge of persuading our team of writers and reviewers to watch the latest TV shows and movies on gorgeous TVs and listen to fantastic speakers and headphones. It's a tough task, as you can imagine. Matt has over a decade of experience in tech publishing, and previously ran the TV & audio coverage for our colleagues at T3.com, and before that he edited T3 magazine. During his career, he's also contributed to places as varied as Creative Bloq, PC Gamer, PetsRadar, MacLife, and Edge. TV and movie nerdism is his speciality, and he goes to the cinema three times a week. He's always happy to explain the virtues of Dolby Vision over a drink, but he might need to use props, like he's explaining the offside rule.