Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

As a preface to this review, I'll say that I've been working with surround home audio equipment since the earliest days of the first Dolby units for VHS started appearing on the market. Like many people, I'm in a position where I really wanted far better sound than was available through my TV, but not really willing or able to spend half or more than what I had already plunked down for the TV. I settled on a budget of $200-300 for a soundbar and began my research. Since I'm an apartment dweller at this point in my life, I did consider bars with external subwoofers, but focused mostly on those with subwoofers built-in. The HTX8500 is the third soundbar that I've purchased for my Sony 950G on this quest (the first two being a Yamaha and a Polk Audio), and so far, the best at doing what I wanted the bar primarily for in the first place, movies. You aren't going to get true surround out of any stand alone soundbar, but, in the case of the 8500, you CAN get a sonic experience that draws you more into the film without drawing attention to the soundbar itself. The good: Sony has done its homework pretty well on the 8500. As with most stand alone pieces, it does its job best when you are seated nearly directly in front of it, and about eight feet or closer. When watching the Dolby Atmos encoded movie Midway (2019), the soundstage was amazingly large, with it sounding like Japanese aircraft were zipping by your head during the Pearl Harbor sequence. Moving to a DTS feature, I tried Independence Day, a film that had a great surround track even on DVD, and things got even better. Sony's proprietary vertical sound engine once again was quite impressive. That said, the Yamaha 1080, with its DTS Virtual X did this job as well or better than the 8500, but because of the Yamaha's poorer ability to bring dialog to the foreground, the 8500 is, in my opinion, the better choice. The not so good: Like most soundbars, the 8500 takes a stab at trying to keep dialog more intelligible through internal processing. It does a decent job of this about 70-75% of the time, which is a far better percentage than either the Polk Audio or Yamaha soundbars that I tried before it. The bad: Sony offers a mere 3 settings for the bass on the 8500, -1, 0, +1, and those aren't nearly enough. More often than not, I found the 0 setting to be not quite enough, but the +1 setting to be enough to clearly be overwhelming the built-in subwoofers. This was an area where the Yamaha, with a far more adjustable level for its built in subwoofers, to be the better choice - that said, the Sony's ability to create a nearly as large soundstage and better at dialog enhancement still make it the better choice. The ugly: Although I really don't plan on using the soundbar for music, I thought it only fair to include it in my review. The 8500, while producing a nice soundstage, is absolutely dreadful in comparison to both the Yamaha and Polk Audio bars. The Yamaha in particular, while naturally lacking in bottom end due to the small size of its subwoofers, actually produced a smooth soundstage fairly close to that of my 25+ year old Infinity towers driven by a Onkyo receiver. If you're looking for a soundbar that covers both bases, the 8500 is clearly not for you. Positives + Wide soundstage + Decent dialog enhancement + Amazing surround-like effects + HDR10 and Dolby Vision passthrough Negatives - Limited adjustment for bass levels - Not great at music reproduction - Need to be 8 feet or less away for the best "surround" My quest is still not quite over. I'm going to be trying a Denon model with built-in subwoofers and DTS Virtual X in the very near future, and will be updating this review to take it into consideration as well. Thanks for reading, and happy viewing.