Interestingly, the on-board speakers can certainly handle their own, and testing with some music pumped up, as well as the sound from movies, you can see that these little side-speakers are handling themselves a little better than most of the built-ins we see on other TVs, but there’s more to the Sony X9400 sound system than magnetic speakers.
You see, buyers of this TV will also receive a dedicated wireless subwoofer made just for the TV.
Sadly, it won’t work with another soundbar or home theatre system, and this is made solely for the X9400, but we’re not so sure you’ll need another system for a while.
Testing it with music, you can push this thing pretty aggressively, and around the 60 percent volume mark with some of the hip-hop found on the GadgetGuy Sound Test for 2015, we had more than enough sound to scare the neighbours. The jazz of Miles Davis did have to be pushed to its limits, hitting between 90 and 100 percent to get the same amount of volume, though this is something we can likely attest to differences in mixing and mastering throughout the years.
Sufficed to say, we were impressed with the sound, with a solid amount of bass, and good mids and highs from the built-in speakers, and that’s not something you can say very often about TV speakers.
Helping the sound is support for 24-bit audio, with Sony bringing its love for high-resolution audio to this TV, ideal if you want to let the television search for high-res FLACs or DSD files on your home network and storage devices, or alternatively plug them into one of the X9400’s USB ports.
That last part is a little tricky, as the ports aren’t found on the side, but rather on the back.
We didn’t feel game enough to move the X9400 by ourselves, being a big TV that weighed more than we expected, so if you do go for this model, make sure you setup a USB cable before you’re done installing it, as you’ll want it all ready to go for when you want to plug in a drive.
The design is also intriguing, with Sony continuing with its angular almost mountain-inspired side framing, but we’re more interested in the interface.
Yes, in this TV Sony’s frustratingly-named Xrossbar is well and truly gone, with Google’s Android TV now sitting in its place.
Now this isn’t the same Google TV we checked out from Sony back in 2012, and that’s a good thing. Back then, the Android-based concept felt unfinished and poorly developed, and made us just want to leave the box aside and use, well, anything else, because anything else would have been a better choice.
Fast-forward three years and its easy to see both Google and Sony have made progress, providing a clear icon based interface of apps on a screen, offering up some YouTube choices from the get-go, and an easy way into some of the apps you’re probably keen to use, like catch-up TV, web browsers, Google Movies, and even Google Music.
There’s a new remote for you to use, too, with a touchpad controller complete with a microphone up top, and when you press the microphone button on that remote, you’ll be able to speak into the remote and tell the TV what you want, with Google’s “Now”-like voice control at your disposal.
For instance, we wanted to find “Kind of Blue” by Miles Davis, and we did, playing the album on the TV through Google Play Music, but you can do other things, like switch to a different HDMI port, find videos, or get some of Google to do its little tricks, like asking it what the answer to life the universe and everything is (hint: it’s 42).
We picked up a few bugs here and there, though for the most part, it was fairly smooth sailing, and we’re particularly interested in the games feature on the TV, which will provide some of the games from Google’s Play Store for use on the Sony Android TV operating system. You’ll want to bring your own game pad, but when you do, you’ll find you may not even need a video game system (though we’ll still keep ours).
After only about half an hour with the Android TV interface, we’re already game to play with it some more, though that might be because we’re fans of Android as it is, and this is just a continuation of that work, except here on a big screen.
The good news, however, is that it won’t just be the X9400 that gets Android TV, with most of Sony’s range netting the new platform.
Even the smaller variant — the X9300C — will get it, with the difference being size (65 inches compared to 75 inches on the X9400C), a less advanced backlight technology, and a difference in price, with the smaller of the two (X9300C) chiming in for $6999 and the larger — the one in most of this article, the X9400C — clocking in at $11999.
Both should be available in stores now, and we’re hoping to get a review done on at least one of these shortly, so if you’re keen and you can wait, hold on, because our TV reviewer is just as itching to get his mitts on one as you are.
