Sony HT-S400 Soundbar Review

The Sony HT-S400 is a simple black soundbar that's mostly made of plastic. The plastic looks good, but it feels a little cheap when you touch it. There's a metal grille that wraps around the sides as well.

The subwoofer is plain and is built of a mix of wood and plastic. The port is on the front, and a metal grille protects the speaker above it.

The bar is a bit wide, so it doesn't fit between the legs of many 55" TVs. It isn't very tall, so it doesn't obscure your TV screen.

The sub is about the size of an average desktop computer. It connects to the bar wirelessly, so you just need to plug it into a power outlet to use it.

You can mount the bar to your wall, but you'll have to buy the brackets separately.

This setup has a decent build quality. The bar's mostly made of plastic, which feels a bit cheap, especially compared to more premium soundbars, but that's expected for the price. The metal grille on the sides helps protect the drivers inside, which is a nice touch. The sub feels pretty solid, too.

• Manuals
• Remote with 2x AAA batteries
• 2x power cables (4.9 ft / 1.5m)
• Optical cable (4.9 ft / 1.5m)

The Sony HT-S400 has a decent stereo frequency response. The overall sound is pleasing with stereo content, with balanced mids that reproduce vocals and lead instruments with clarity. There's extra emphasis in the mid-to-high bass range, adding extra boom to the mix. The subwoofer is pretty one-note, though—you notice the lack of rumble in the low-bass, especially with bass-centric tracks like EDM.

The Sony HT-S400 gets the closest to a neutral sound profile with its default settings. It is a bit bassy, so you can always use its subwoofer level adjustment feature if you prefer a different sound.

The bar has a decent stereo soundstage. It comes with Sony's always-on surround mode called S-Force Pro Front Surround, which uses psychoacoustics principles to expand the soundstage like similar features from other manufacturers. Sound seems wider than the bar itself, which is good, but it doesn't stretch to the walls of your room. The focus is decent, too, so sound effects seem to come from a more general region than an accurate, pinpoint location in the soundstage.

This soundbar gets loud enough to fill a large room with sound, and there isn't a lot of compression when you push it to max volume. As a result, audio reproduction remains clean and pure, even when you crank up the volume.

This soundbar has a good stereo THD performance. Distortion falls within good limits at a normal listening volume, so audio reproduction is clean and pure. As with most bars, there's a slight jump when you push the bar to max volume. Distortion is pretty hard to hear with real-life content, especially if you're a more casual listener, so it's not a huge deal.

Since it's a 2.1 bar, this soundbar doesn't have a discrete center channel to improve vocal clarity. Instead, it uses its left and right stereo channels to simulate a 'phantom' center channel. The resulting sound isn't as clear or as real. Overall, voices are still fairly clear and accurate, though a little muddy due to the extra emphasis in the bass range.

This 2.1 setup doesn't shine with surround sound, which is by design. It has to downmix 5.1 content like Dolby Digital into stereo in order to play it. As a result, you don't get a very clear or real sound. Audio seems like it's coming from a speaker placed in front of you, rather than from all around your room. The frequency response on these channels is also quite bass-heavy, which adds a boomy, muddy quality to the sound.

It's a simple soundbar without a lot of sound enhancement features. You can adjust its subwoofer levels through the button on the remote that reads 'Bass', but this feature only controls the amount of bass reproduced by the sub, not the bar. The remote also gives you access to its dialogue enhancement mode (called 'Voice') and its night mode, which balances the volume level in your programs. You can't adjust the amount of bass reproduced by the bar, and you can't control the treble. The S-Force Pro Front Surround feature doesn't turn off, either.

This bar has a limited selection of physical inputs. You can connect the bar to your TV over Optical or HDMI, which is nice. However, there's no Full HDMI In for video passthrough, and you can't wire other devices like smartphones with an AUX port.

This soundbar supports Dolby Digital over ARC. Dolby Digital is the most common surround sound format, so you're likely to come across it on most streaming platforms and some Blu-ray discs. However, there's no support for lossless or object-based formats like Dolby Atmos.

Over optical, this soundbar supports Dolby Digital. It's the most commonly-used surround sound format, but since it's a 2.1 bar, it has to downmix it to stereo to play it.

The bar has a decent latency performance, and the audio you hear is mostly in sync with the video you see. During our testing, we initially obtained higher-than-expected results with a Samsung Q80T TV, so we retried the bar with several other TVs to see how it performed. The results above represent the bar's performance with an LG NANO90 2021, which aligns more with what we see on the screen. Latency drops further when you pair the bar with a compatible BRAVIA TV over Bluetooth. Some apps and TVs compensate for latency differently, which is why these results seem so different across TV brands.

Without a Full HDMI In port, this bar can't serve as a hub between your TV and other devices for video passthrough.

You can wirelessly stream audio to the bar via Bluetooth. If you're an avid Apple or Google user, there's no Chromecast or AirPlay compatibility.

There's a small display screen on the front of the bar. It reads out the settings as you change them.

There are some physical controls on top of the bar to let you control its basic features. You can power the bar on/off, change the input, pair it with a Bluetooth device, and adjust the volume.

The remote is fairly simple and lets you control all the bar's features. For example, you can turn it on and off, adjust the volume, and access different enhancement features like night mode and dialogue enhancement. There's no companion app to control the bar from your phone, though.