Yamaha YAS-408 Soundbar Review

The Yamaha MusicCast Bar 400 is very straightforward. It's made mostly of solid plastic and has a metal grill in the front to cover the speakers.

The sub is made of wood except for the front face where the port is located which is made of plastic. The speaker on the side of the sub is covered with fabric, which can get dirty or damaged.

The Yamaha MusicCast Bar 400 doesn't have satellites.

The Yamaha Bar 400 is a little wide and might not fit between the legs of most 55" TV stands. On the upside, it isn't very tall and won't block your view of the screen if you place it in front of the TV.

The subwoofer is slightly large and resembles a large desktop PC. Since it connects wirelessly to the bar you should have no issues placing anywhere in the room as long as you can provide it with power.

There are no satellites in this setup.

The back of the bar has two openings, one for the power cable and one for the ports. If you wall-mount the bar it won't sit flush to the wall and will protrude a little due to its design.

The back of the sub is made of wood and looks very plain. The power cable jack is located in the middle of the sub's height, so the cable might be hard to hide.

This setup has no satellites.

The YAS-408's build quality is good. It's mainly made of plastic except for the bar's front face, which is covered with a metal grill. The sub is made of wood and the setup's only weakness is the fabric that covers the subwoofer speaker, which can get dirty or damaged.

• Manual
• Remote (batteries included)
• Optical cable
• Power cable (x2)

The Yamaha YAS-408 has a great frequency response. Its low-frequency extension is decent too, which will help to recreate the deep thump, punch, and rumble of movies and bass-heavy music. Its overall sound profile is also very neutral and accurate, which is suitable for a wide variety of music genres and other content.

While listening to the YAS-408, the soundstage is decent. It doesn’t feel to be wider than the bar itself and the bar doesn’t do any tricks to try and widen it. On the upside, the focus is great and objects in the soundstage come from a pinpoint location rather than a general area.

The Yamaha Bar 400's dynamics performance is good. It can get to a good volume level that'll be suitable for large rooms and crowded environments. However, there's a small number of noticeable compression artifacts when pushing the bar to its maximum capacities. Most people won’t notice this with real-life content.

At a normal listening volume, the amount of THD is within very good limits, so it produces a clean and pure sound. However, when pushing the bar to the max volume, there’s a big jump in THD throughout the range, especially in the mid and treble ranges, which is more noticeable than in the bass range. However, not everyone will notice this.

The Yamaha YAS-408 is a 2.1 soundbar setup that doesn’t have a dedicated center speaker but still has a good overall performance. It uses the left and right speakers to create a sound in the center, which will sound more diffused and less clear compared to a discrete center. When sending a 5.1 surround sound signal, the bar down-mixes it to 2.1 which won't sound as good as a stereo signal. However, there’s a high amount of THD at max volume, so pushing the bar to its max limits isn’t recommended.

Like most 2.1 stereo soundbars, the surround performance of the Yamaha Bar 400 is sub-par. Due to the system configuration, the soundbar will downmix surround signals down to stereo, which will greatly affect the localization of objects in the soundstage. This means the result won't be very immersive and the objects are perceived to come from the front instead of from the side or behind you.

The Yamaha YAS-408 setup doesn’t have height channels and doesn’t support Atmos.

Like the YAS-207, the Yamaha YAS-408 has sub-par sound enhancement features. It's missing Room Correction, which means this soundbar may sound differently depending on your room. There's also no Auto-Volume/Night Mode, so it can't normalize the sound between types of content like a TV show and the sound level of a commercial. On the upside, it supports a dialogue enhancement feature to help you hear the dialogue more clearly, even at lower volumes. You can also separately adjust the level of the subwoofer, which is great to adjust the amount of bass the sub is producing. Although the bar has a 3D surround mode, the sound quality isn't the best when using it. You'll be better off using the normal surround mode, which doesn't sound as bad. If you like to tweak your sound even more, check out the 3.1 LG SL6Y.

The Yamaha Bar 400 has a full set of physical inputs so you should be able to connect most of your devices one way or another.

Over HDMI ARC, this soundbar can playback surround sound encoded in Dolby Digital and DTS downmixed to 2.1. Dolby Digital is very common in platforms like Netflix and Blu-ray discs. DTS however, isn't so common on its own but rather as the fallback of the high-quality lossless surround format DTS-HD MA widely found on Blu-rays. Unfortunately, object-based surround sound formats, like Dolby Atmos or the lossless 5.1 PCM, aren't supported.

Thanks to the Full HDMI In port you can place the bar between an external device like a PC or a Blu-ray player and the TV. You will be able to playback surround sound due to Dolby Digital and DTS support but you can also playback lossless 5.1 PCM. However, all these will be downmixed to 2.1 limited by the bar's design. Unfortunately, it can't decode more advanced object-based sound formats like Dolby Atmos or lossless formats like Dolby TrueHD.

The YAS-408 can playback surround sound encoded both in Dolby Digital or DTS formats when connected through its optical port. Content encoded in Dolby Digital is common in Blu-ray discs or streaming platforms, while DTS is rarely available on its own, but rather as the fallback of the DTS-HD MA, widely used in Blu-rays.

Excellent wireless connectivity. You can easily connect your mobile devices to this bar using Bluetooth. You can also connect the bar to the Wi-Fi network or cast directly from your Apple devices using AirPlay, which the Yamaha YAS-209 can't do. Unfortunately, this bar doesn't support Chromecast built-in.

The Yamaha YAS-408 will passthrough the highest quality video signal. This means that if you place it between your PC and your TV using its HDMI ports, text will look crystal clear on your TV.

The subwoofer connects wirelessly to the bar, and all you have is the power cable.

There are no satellites in this setup.

The interface consists of a set of lights on the top side of the bar indicating the settings in use. They can be difficult to see if you wall-mount the bar, or if the bar is at your eye level.

There are a few touch-sensitive buttons at the top of the bar that can control the volume, choose the input, switch the bar on or off, and pair with external devices.

The remote is fairly small. It can control many more features than the touch-sensitive buttons on the top of the bar and contains a few preset modes.

Update 12/10/2021: The Yamaha YAS-408 doesn't have built-in voice assistant capabilities. However, the manufacturer says that you can use a third-party Google Home or Amazon Alexa device for voice assistant support. You just have to set it up in the Google Home or Amazon Alexa app.

The Yamaha MusicCast Controller can control most of the bar's functions, but can’t completely replace the remote as you can't control functions like the subwoofer volume. On the upside, you can cast music to the bar using the preset access to some well-known apps like Pandora and Spotify.

The Yamaha YAS-408 will enter into a standby mode after a short time of inactivity. Thanks to HDMI ARC and HDMI CEC support, you can have some basic control of the bar.