Sound + Image

SOUND + IMAGE magazine offers a comprehensive package focused on lifestyle home electronic entertainment. It provides easy-to-read information about audio and video equipment and how ordinary consumers can assemble extraordinary systems that look and sound fantastic.

In praise of visualizers. • Righting the 45-year wrongs of MTV.

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Sound + Image

STAR BARS • We put eight soundbars on trial, with prices rising from $699 to $2299, and configurations from a one-piece lone bar up to full packages with clever and versatile surround speakers. But are they all star bars? Or are any dive bars hiding among them?

Hisense AX5140Q • The pricing is attractive - provided that the package can perform. And it does, when used correctly. Here’s how to harness this award-winning soundbar system.

Yamaha True X 50A • Yamaha's first ‘True X' bar arrived far more affordably than the later ‘90A' package, and has since dropped further in price, despite including bar, subwoofer and independent wireless rear speakers.

LG Sound Suite H7 • A powerful processor and full music streaming bring all manner of smart operations to this bar-only solution. So does this Sound Suite solution sound sweet?

Sonos Arc Ultra • Sonos builds on the success of its Arc soundbar with the new flagship Arc Ultra. It can build into an expensive system by adding subs and rears, but can it also hold its own as a soundbar alone?

Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9 • Sony’s Bravia Bar 9 is fairly pricey for just an unsupported bar, but it does deliver on the original soundbar promise of simplicity and performance, while allowing for expansion options later.

JBL Bar 1000MK2 • Want something different? Pull your soundbar apart and place the ends behind you, retaining soundbar neatness while having true immersion for special occasions. And there’s more…

Samsung HW-Q990H • Samsung has been a soundbar leader since setting up a Californian audio lab a decade ago. But with things a-changing, does the new package hold up?

Bluesound Pulse Cinema • It’s quite the lounge-room dream: immersive Atmos movie and music from just a soundbar at the front of the room. Can the BluOS- equipped Pulse Cinema oblige?

Focused on the sound • With few trendy extras on this deck other than a built-in phono stage, all your turntable dollars here go towards getting the best sound from your vinyl.

Silver linings playback • We move from the black stuff to the silver discs, welcoming Marantz’s replacement for a long-time standard CD player recommendation.

Personal best • It’s small and it’s relatively low-powered, but Rotel’s little DX-5 has all the quality required to shine through when used in the personal context intended.

Peak impact • We confess to rather getting the horn over one of LBL’s latest ‘Project’ designs, smallest of the relatively newly-christened Summit series, which did indeed prove to rise to Himalayan heights of reproduction.

Is this Year Dot for Samsung hi-fi? • Samsung’s sonic abilities underwent a revolution in 2014 with the building of its California Audio Lab. For its first decade this Lab focused entirely on soundbars and subwoofers. Now it has made a streaming speaker. And it’s an absolute doozie.

The Professionals • We sometimes find bargains in the pro and semipro headphone market, yet these Sennheiser ‘Pro’s are pushing into higher price territory. So how do they perform?

Fluid dynamic • Elegant wireless noise-cancellers bring a new driver technology to challenge the class leaders, inside a comfortable design and an appealing if slightly polite sonic balance.

Achieving closure • Yamaha follows up two high-end pairs of open orthographics with a carefully-considered closed-back design introducing a new ‘armodynamic’...