The television screen stopped being the hard part of home entertainment a while ago. Walk into any electronics store today and the picture quality on offer — 4K, OLED, mini-LED, take your pick — is rarely the issue. What still lets the experience down, more often than not, is what comes out of the speakers built into an increasingly thin TV chassis. As screens have gotten slimmer, the space for decent built-in audio has shrunk along with them, which is precisely why the soundbar has quietly become one of the most consequential purchases in a modern home theatre setup — arguably more transformative, watt for watt, than the next TV upgrade itself. Sony’s latest move suggests it sees that shift clearly, expanding its BRAVIA Theatre lineup well beyond a single soundbar into a full ecosystem of bars, subwoofers and rear speakers built to work together.
The expansion is anchored by the flagship BRAVIA Theatre Trio, alongside six other new products — the BRAVIA Theatre Bar 7, BRAVIA Theatre Bar 5, BRAVIA Theatre Sub 9, BRAVIA Theatre Sub 8, BRAVIA Theatre Rear 9 and BRAVIA Theatre Rear 8. Together, they lean on a cluster of Sony’s audio technologies aimed at one core problem: making sound feel like it’s coming from everywhere in the room, not just from a slab of metal sitting under the TV.
The Trio is where that ambition is most literal. Instead of cramming left, centre and right channels into a single bar limited by its own width, Sony has broken the system into three separate wireless speakers, a structural decision meant to widen the soundstage and sharpen dialogue clarity in ways a conventional bar can’t quite manage. It supports Dolby Atmos and DTS and works with compatible BRAVIA TVs, and when paired with the Sub 9 and Rear 9, the full setup can conjure up to 24 phantom speakers — scale created through processing rather than extra hardware in the room.
The Bar 7 sits just below it, using Sony’s 360 Spatial Sound Mapping to build its own virtual phantom speakers, backed by Sound Field Optimisation, Dolby Atmos and IMAX Enhanced support. Inside its chassis are nine speaker units in total, mixing up-firing and side-firing drivers with four passive radiators.
The Bar 5 takes a simpler, dialogue-forward route. It’s a 3.1-channel soundbar with a wireless subwoofer, running Dolby Atmos and DTS:X through Sony’s Vertical Surround Engine and S-Force PRO Front Surround processing to simulate surround sound without needing rear units. A dedicated centre channel anchors dialogue, with Voice Zoom 3 sharpening speech further on compatible BRAVIA TVs, alongside Sony’s upmixer and Voice Mode tools.
On bass duty, the Sub 9 and Sub 8 fill out the range. The Sub 9 is the more powerful of the two, running a 600W amplifier across a dual-subwoofer design with what Sony calls vibration-cancelling dual opposing drivers, meant to hold distortion in check at higher volumes, all housed in an aluminium unit. The Sub 8 follows the same dual-subwoofer, aluminium-bodied approach at a lower 300W output. Both connect to compatible BRAVIA sets via the BRAVIA Connect app or Sony’s new Direct Connect feature.
That Direct Connect system is the quieter but genuinely useful addition here. It lets compatible BRAVIA TVs pair directly with BRAVIA Theatre subwoofers and rear speakers without a soundbar acting as the go-between at all, opening up combinations like a TV with just a subwoofer, a TV with just rear speakers, or both together — flexibility that doesn’t force buyers into the full ecosystem on day one.
Rounding things out, the Rear 9 echoes the Trio’s design language with large up-firing drivers, aluminium bodies, wireless connectivity and a swivel wall-mount bracket, while the more compact Rear 8 offers a simpler wireless rear-speaker pair for anyone who just wants added surround depth without much fuss.
Speaking at the launch, Sunil Nayyar, managing director of Sony India, said: “The bulk of the new soundbar happened inside the cinema where our engineers have spent a considerable time.”
Nezu Daisuke, global head of home product business division at Sony Corporation, said at the launch: “Indian customers are looking for clear dialogues, meaningful bass and immersive surround sound. We have come up with a new sound solution with the system.”
On pricing, the BRAVIA Theatre Trio carries an MRP of ₹2,39,990, available at a launch offer of ₹1,69,990, while the Bar 7 is priced at ₹99,990 with a best-buy price of ₹82,990; both go on sale from July 1.