Yamaha True X 50A Soundbar, True X Wireless Surrounds | What Took So Long?
I am utterly baffled as to why it took so long to finally get this product this is something that I expected to see 7 years ago and technically speaking it was probably feasible at least that long ago but you know what I'm just going to set all that aside because I'm just thrilled that it's finally here now welcome back everyone I'm Caleb Denison and as you can probably tell today we're checking out a soundbar system the Yamaha True X BAR 50A sorry I got to look because I can't memorize that name anyway this portion of the system is not actually what I'm so excited about what I'm excited about is right here wireless surround speakers but Caleb you say wireless surround speakers have existed for a really long time yes they have but these are battery powered but Caleb you say wireless battery powered surround speakers have existed for quite some time yes they have but these are different these are also Bluetooth speakers yeah makes sense right I mean why hasn't this product existed before look here's the deal in case you don't follow soundbars like I do for quite a while now we've had Soundbar surround systems that came with wireless surround speakers the addition of a rechargeable battery to power them is more recent uh JBL has been selling a soundbar that did that for a few years now but for whatever reason no major manufacturer at least not as far as I'm aware has ever taken those wireless battery powered surround speakers and armed them with Bluetooth so that you could take them out of your living room and use them in your bedroom or your bathroom or at the campsite or at the beach or wherever you might want to use Bluetooth speaker it seems really OB obvious doesn't it and yet I I I did a little bit of research before I started this video just to make sure maybe I didn't miss a product and if there is another system out there that does what well what these speakers do uh I haven't found it a lot of Soundbars have Bluetooth in the description but what they're referring to is your ability to stream uh audio via Bluetooth to the Soundbar and the rest of the system as a whole none of them as far as I'm aware let you take your surround speakers one or both of them and tote them wherever you want and just use them as a regular old Bluetooth speaker I mean I'm all about utility if a piece of technology can notot be a unitasker I think that's an Alton Brown term uh that is all the better for me so yeah I know that surround speakers for a lot of people are kind of a treat uh I even know folks that kind of hide them until they actually want to use them and then they bring them out well these you you can hide them if you want to or you can use them in other areas of your house pretty simple right so at this point all the Soundbar has to do is not suck and I'm going to be pretty excited about it something tells me that it's going to go beyond just not sucking I think I should give it a little bit more credit before we even unbox it because Yamaha has not made a terrible Soundbar ever as far as I can recall everyone that I've tested has been at least decent and at best absolutely stunning uh this one has a lot of the fun stuff that you would hope to see on the box um it's a support Spotify connect and apple AirPlay uh which means that it's going to accept music over Wi-Fi and not just Bluetooth it also supports Amazon you know who um along with Dolby vision and Dolby Atmos so you can connect devices to the Soundbar and then run a signal up to your TV if that's how you prefer to do things it also supports Arc and eARC so that you can just run everything into your TV and then dump an audio signal down to the Soundbar I'm sure there are some other features that I'm missing but we're going to discover those in just a minute for now I need to unbox this thing which let's be honest unboxing sound bars is maybe my least favorite thing to do because I mean I get it this packaging probably makes sense for a soundbar but this whole armchair style get up is just uh with all these tabs and everything it's a pain in the butt anyway so we'll show you a little bit of that uh you can see some of my frustration but oh almost forgot one thing just a second ow ow ow ankles uh these wireless charging pads for the surround speakers uh so that the speakers can just sit on them and run off of uh Power uh if you can plug them in uh or as I said before you can uh remove them and run them off batteries all right let's start unboxing this thing and uh see how it sounds because like I said before as long as it's decent this is a must buy kind of thing for me okay so it looks like USB B is what powers these guys I must assume that's what's in this it's not just manuals the cable no cables not in here okay so maybe the cables are in the speaker boxes let's hope so otherwise I shall feel very put out is that a quote from um Die Hard otherwise I shall feel very put out I'll find out soon almost time to watch die hard because as we all know Die Hard is a Christmas movie cool so it looks like it's just like a one button press thing that kind of converts it from being a surround speaker to a solo speaker one thing I've not figured out yet and I will is whether or not you can join the two surround speakers as a stereo pair uh of bluetooth speakers and here is that power cable that I was hoping to find out unfortunately it is USB-A to USB-C it's a little unnecessary bulk in this day and age I don't know what do you guys think are we ready to just like ditch USB-A finally I know we all have a ton of wall warts that you know power USB-A but like kind of feel like we can move on all right I got to be honest these are a little bit smaller than I thought uh they were going to be maybe it's because the Box you know yeah I'm sorry but check out that box so look that speaker looks way bigger on the box than um it does in real life still you know we'll check the price on these again but I think for the price that you pay and for their flexibility and utility probably going to be all right um I do not however expect massive amounts of surround audio uh from these though I think they're going to be mostly just kind of backfill I will say though that uh if this idea takes off and a bunch of people buy this Yamaha system I would like to see yaha make a bigger surround speaker just take the take the whole premise and boost it to be a bigger surround speaker I mean they're cute like if you're wanting a surround speaker um that isn't going to call a lot of attention to itself and would be easy to hide uh there certainly that you know what never put it past Yamaha or Bose or even JBL to be able to you know manage to a lot of punch out of a speaker of a smaller size all right so that's the surround speakers and the charging plates oh this is my least favorite part of everything so let's see don't cut yourself Caleb this ridiculous box needs to be able to open from the bottom you know honestly if I didn't need to repack this whole thing I'd probably just tear it apart there we go when and doubt muscle it out what do we have here uh mounting plates for keyhole style mount one power cable for the sub one for the Soundbar and a little remote now let's see if we can get to the main event what have I missed here God have I mentioned how much I hate these things I feel like people won't return a soundbar just because it's such a hassle I mean TVs are easier to deal with than this all right here's our sub let's see what we're working with here all right driver's there I'll look up the specs later but I'm going to say that is H I'm going to guess a five and a/4 in maybe six we'll take a look here in a second a USB port for firmware updates firmware update your sub what a world we live in let's go ahead and set you over here for now build quality is respectable uh the the Cabinetry bites back um it's got kind of a anthro site sort of coating on the outside uh anti-fingerprint which is nice uh so it's not gloss black um and uh yeah it feels like you can't really remove the speaker Grill cloth but it's side firing the subwoofer is and what else forward ported but slim you know you can slide this off to the side of the entertainment center and it doesn't call a ton of attention to itself all right Soundbar time will it be smaller than it looks in the Box you go over there um no it's about what I expected just rip it off like a kid at Christmas right yeah all right so there's our Soundbar we'll get some pretty b-roll shots of it um it does have up firing uh drivers very small ones simple little command interface at the very top and then on the back looks like we've got one HDMI in and one out which doubles as the arc port um and it is e-ARC compliant there's also an Ethernet jack uh in case you don't want to connect it via Wi-Fi um there is an optical port in here interesting that they're still including an optical cable but not an HDMI cable I think it's time to convert honestly and then uh yeah real simple keyhole style mounting system so a couple of screws in drywall anchors and you're set it's not that heavy um it's respectively heavy though uh like it's it's going to be fine for keyhole mounting but it's got enough heft to it that I I feel like this is not a piece of junk and that's really really important uh also really nice thick padding on the bottom uh to isolate it from your media cabinet if you're placing it right on the media cabinet as we will be doing today all right well at this point I think uh it's time to get this plugged in powered up um connected I'm sure there's an app so we'll want to see what's up with the app and uh and and then yeah I'm going to light this thing up and get some first impressions it's not going to be a full review uh but I can tell a lot in about five minutes honestly on a soundbar like this um again we're just kind of trying to gauge what the general product quality is um and uh see how these surround speakers sound as Bluetooth speakers on their own going to be a lot of fun let's do it okay so I did manage to get everything set up uh and I got to experience the system for a little while I have some good news to share but first some uh clarifications and criticisms the clarification would be around the pricing uh of the system and the fact that you kind of have to piece it together so the surround speakers the true X 1A surround speakers are sold separately they cost about $150 right now as I'm recording this video which gut check U given their size I feel like they should be 100 bucks each instead of 150 each uh but a surround pair is going to add $300 to the price of the Soundbar and subwoofer which comes in right now at about $600 so right there you're up to $900 for this system which is is fairly pricey then there's the charging pads I think that the model number is cct1 a for those we'll have a link Down Below in the description the charging pads are $25 each and I feel that uh maybe just don't get them uh it's an extra 50 bucks if you like the idea of having pads for the speakers to charge on great I kind of thought you know it'd be really neat to just sort of have them be on their charging station in the surround position but when your USB cable is only about uh you know 3 ft long or so and also not very pliable it's going to be really difficult to plug in those charging pads where you would want to place your surround speakers I mean this is just not long enough and also you need a little adapter so that you can plug it into an outlet I would probably just skip them and use the the cable to charge them when you need to because they do have about a 12-hour uh battery life obviously the louder you play them they're going that that time will go down I think you know 9 to 10 hours is probably reasonable uh at almost any volume um but that's a great battery life that's that's good news right like I imagine that you could take one of these speakers out uh and use it while you barbecue dinner and then put it into the surround system and watch a movie and you'd still have plenty of juice left to watch the football game the next day so that's that's pretty great um in terms of setup I feel like um it could have been a little bit more intuitive I'm used to turning on surround speakers in a soundbar and having everything just sort of uh connect automatically that is not the case here uh to be fair there is a QR code on one of the many pieces of paper inside the surround speaker that will direct you to online instructions uh for registering the surround speakers with the Soundbar and once you find those instructions It's relatively easy but I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole I'll take ownership for this my fault I thought thought that the key was to download the Soundbar controller app from Yamaha which for whatever reason would not install on my phone however it did install on my iPad and once I got it on there I realized I really don't need you don't need the app at all I mean it's a fun interface but really you don't need it the remote control uh gives you all the control that you need but I will say that once the system was finally connected it worked flawlessly uh the the speakers has Bluetooth speakers let's talk about that first that was intuitive I mean you know when you turn the speaker on it's already in Bluetooth pairing mode I was able to instantly connect with my phone uh I had a listen using music and I'd say it sounds good enough for a $100 Bluetooth speaker maybe not $150 Bluetooth speaker uh the base is surprisingly good for a speaker of that size and I think that's because it's got passive radiators on at least one side if not two kind of hard to tell by looking but by list ing it sounded like it had a couple of Base radiators in there so that plumps up the low end uh it does indeed give a bigger sound than you would expect from such a small speaker my complaint though was as a Bluetooth speaker the treble was a little bit crispy and I mean like some folks are going to like that but it was a little bit on the aggressive side it reminds me of some Yamaha receivers from like 15 to 20 years ago but overall not bad perfectly I mean I think they'd sound great outside it was just inside at close range a little shrill for my liking but to my delight when they're involved with the whole system as a surround speaker uh I got none of that in fact the the Fidelity from the Soundbar is excellent it's fantastic uh and I definitely think it's right in line with a $600 Soundbar and subwoofer combo no shrill High plenty of detail and plenty of clarity in the treble region but not shrill or harsh which I appreciate quite a bit the subwoofer is definitely quality uh for a bundle system like this the system does rely quite a bit on the subwoofer for all of the low mids and uh even part of the mid-range but it doesn't call attention to itself so long as you don't put it in a corner where it's going to get naturally boomy and easier to localize uh it gets pretty deep um it's fairly tight and it's not a cheap boomy you know home theater in a box subwoofer I was really really pleased with it overall the system sounded great now I think these surround speakers are going to be best at close range I don't know that you would want to position them much further than say five to six feet uh they're just too small to have the presence that you would need sure you'll hear surround cues there but you're not going to get the enveloping surround uh effect that you would want to get if they're that far away keep them close as for the Atmos effect from the system uh not a whole lot of dome of sound or top down sound uh happening at least not in this particular space uh then again we also have ridiculously high ceilings with sound absorption panels up there uh so we'll try it in a different spot and see if that changes anything like I said this is not a full review so I'm not really in a position to uh compare this Soundbar system uh to others in its price class I do think it's a little on the expensive side however I will say that the novelty or at least the uniqueness and the utility of having surround speakers that can function as independent Bluetooth speakers goes a long way with me I think it's uh I don't know I think that's something that we should have had a long time ago like I said at the beginning of this video I don't know why we had to wait this long to get it um but I would highly recommend the system for anybody who likes the idea of being able to repurpose the surround speakers in their home theater system and use them for something else it's a great idea and it works really really really well here overall I'm going to have to give this system probably somewhere between a 7.5 and an 8 honestly and that's taking everything into consideration the cost the Fidelity the ease of use and the functionality and features that come with it it's slim it's sleek it's non-intrusive it offers a very big sound subwoofer is uh kind of a shining star uh of this show actually which goes a long way for me as well uh so yeah that's my take on the Yamaha true X system I think anybody who needs a sleek compact home theater system with a little extra utility 100% needs to check this out thanks as always for watching everyone what do you think of this not quite review we can do this more with some other products that definitely deserve some attention but maybe don't need a super deep dive let me know down in the comments don't forget to like And subscribe I'll see you on the next one and until then here's two other videos I think you might like
2023-12-05 12:12
