Bose’s new Sonos Beam rival uses your earbuds as surround sound speakers

Bose's Smart Soundbar delivers the full surround sound experience without filling your front room with speakers

Bose Smart Soundbar
(Image credit: Bose)
Carrie Marshall
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Quick Summary

The new Bose Smart Soundbar has a really clever idea: it can use Bose Ultra Open Earbuds instead of surround sound speakers to deliver an immersive audio experience.

When Bose launches a new soundbar you know what to expect: premium design, superb sound, cutting-edge tech... the usual. But the new £499 Bose Smart Soundbar offers something out of the ordinary and potentially very exciting too. Bose calls it Personal Surround Sound.

Personal Surround Sound is designed to connect your new Smart Soundbar to a set of Bose Ultra Open Earbuds, and to then use those earbuds as your surround sound speakers. If you live in a small space or just want to get a serious surround experience without upsetting the neighbours, this could be just the trick.

Bose Smart Soundbar: key features 

The new Bose Smart Soundbar is the replacement for the Bose Smart Soundbar 600, which got four stars in our review: despite its relatively small size it delivered an impressively big Dolby Atmos sound. And spec-wise it's very similar with five drivers: one centre, two side-firing and two upward-firing. Connectivity is decent too: there's HDMI eARC and optical input (although only the former supports Atmos), Bluetooth, Google Cast, AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect.

The key features here are software rather than hardware. There's Bose TrueSpace, which analyses non-Atmos signals to produce a multi-channel audio experience; the aforementioned Personal Surround Sound; and the same AI dialogue mode as the more expensive Ultra model, which aims to make dialogue clearer during the noisy bits.

The Personal Surround Sound feature is specific to the Open earbuds because of their design: because they don't sit in your ear canals they don't completely block the audio that's coming from the soundbar, so in theory at least they should enhance the audio from your soundbar rather than replace it. Whether it's as good as Bose claims we'll discover soon enough when we get the new Smart Soundbar in for testing, but it's definitely interesting and potentially amazing. 

The Bose Smart Soundbar is available to pre-order with shipping expected from 9 October. The RRP is £499.95.

Carrie Marshall
Carrie Marshall

Writer, musician and broadcaster Carrie Marshall has been covering technology since 1998 and is particularly interested in how tech can help us live our best lives. Her CV is a who’s who of magazines, newspapers, websites and radio programmes ranging from T3, Techradar and MacFormat to the BBC, Sunday Post and People’s Friend. Carrie has written more than a dozen books, ghost-wrote two more and co-wrote seven more books and a Radio 2 documentary series; her memoir, Carrie Kills A Man, was shortlisted for the British Book Awards. When she’s not scribbling, Carrie is the singer in Glaswegian rock band Unquiet Mind (unquietmindmusic).

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