Hey,
It’s Pete Matheson with a new issue of Experiments in Progress.
Everyone wants cinema sound at home. Almost nobody wants an ugly black box and speaker wire trailing across the living room.
So the whole home theatre world has basically split into camps and there's a genuinely new one this year worth knowing about.
Home Theatre: Sony vs LG vs Sonos
Here's how I'd think about the four routes, from easiest to best-quality:
🔊 Sonos: the easy default
It's popular, widely known, and about as painless as this gets. You plug each speaker into the mains, drop them into roughly the right surround positions, wave your phone around to calibrate, and it just works.
If you want zero hassle and don't want to think about it again — Sonos is the one. Good value if simplicity is the whole point.
The trade-off:
You're locked into Sonos — expanding later means buying more Sonos, at Sonos prices
It's not cheap once you go past a single bar
You're paying for convenience, not the last word in sound quality
🔌 Wired AV receiver: still the best-quality route
On the complete opposite end, you've got the traditional wired setup.
Your TV feeds into an AV receiver (basically a big amp), and your speakers are physically wired into the back of it.
This is, ideally, still the best way to do it.
Highest possible speaker quality — you're not limited to one brand's ecosystem
Upgrade one speaker at a time whenever you fancy it
No reliance on the latest wireless features to make it work
The catch is obvious: that receiver is big, heavy, ugly, and generates heat… and you need to run speaker wire to every single speaker. The speakers don't need mains power, but they do need that cable back to the amp.
Source: World Wide Stereo
📡 LG Sound Suite: put the speakers literally anywhere
Here's the properly new category.
LG has gone all-in on Dolby Atmos FlexConnect with its Sound Suite — the H7 is the world's first FlexConnect soundbar (around $1,000).
The clever bit: the speakers connect wirelessly, and each one has built-in mics that map where it's actually sitting in the room. The system then adapts the sound so it still feels like proper surround.
Even better — LG is rolling FlexConnect out to its 2026 TVs (and select 2025 sets like the C5 and G5), so the TV itself becomes the hub. No soundbar needed.
Now the honest bit.
When we tested it a few months back, it was still quite buggy — the position-tracking "Sound Follow" feature in particular was hit and miss, and every time you move a speaker it needs to recalibrate. It may well have been patched since. And one gotcha: LG's TVs only work as a FlexConnect hub with LG's own speakers.
🎬 Sony BRAVIA Theater Trio: the new flagship middle ground
Sony has just launched the BRAVIA Theater Trio (HT-A8).
It's a three-unit system (left, centre, right) that talks to a small box wired to your TV over a single HDMI cable. You place the speakers roughly where you like, it calibrates, and 360 Spatial Sound Mapping fills in the gaps (up to 24 "phantom" speakers for a full surround bubble).
Two things I like versus Sony's existing Quad:
A dedicated centre channel so dialogue is anchored properly, not faked with a phantom centre
Support for two subwoofers, where the Quad only takes one
There's a little receiver box, but it's a fraction of the size of a traditional black amp.
If you want wireless flexibility but want it to just work today — this is the safer bet right now.
Source: Sony Electronics
📺 One quick word on the screen
Sound is half of it. A big, bright TV does a lot of the heavy lifting for that cinema feel.
The buzz this year is RGB LED backlights (Samsung and Sony are both pushing "true RGB" sets).
But the standout for me is the TCL X11L, which actually took a different path: SQD Mini-LED, with up to ~20,000 dimming zones and eye-watering brightness. It's one of the best screens I've seen.
Source: Hi-network.com
🎯 How I'd pick between these
If you care about… | Get this |
|---|---|
Zero hassle, plug-and-play | Sonos |
Best possible sound quality | Wired AV receiver + speakers |
Speakers anywhere, no amp, bleeding edge | LG Sound Suite (FlexConnect) |
Wireless flexibility that just works today | Sony BRAVIA Theater Trio |
A dedicated centre for clear dialogue | Sony BRAVIA Theater Trio |
Keeping the room clean and modern | Sony Trio or LG Sound Suite |
Upgrading one piece at a time | Wired AV receiver |
The brightest picture to match it all | TCL X11L |
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