Sony HT-CT770 Home Theater Soundbar

Pros Large, powerful sound field. Well-balanced with booming subwoofer. Excellent movie and video game audio. Built-in Bluetooth. Supports HDMI.

Cons Music sounds tinny with soundbar turned down. No simulated surround features. Bottom Line The Sony HT-CT770 is a thunderous-sounding soundbar thanks to its wireless subwoofer, but even with Bluetooth it's better with movies and games than it is with music.

By Will Greenwald Sony's HT-CT770 soundbar packs a lot of features and a surprising amount of power into a sleek, streamlined package. Not only does it have built-in Bluetooth and include a wireless subwoofer like the Editors' Choice Sony HT-CT260 soundbar , but it can also handle HDMI inputs from up to three sources, and it produces a remarkably large sound field with its slim, two-way speaker system. At $399.99 it's a bit pricey compared with the HT-CT260 or Polk's one-piece N1 Surroundbar, but it makes movie and game soundtracks sound so full and booming it justifies the added expense. That said, while its slim profile is easier to fit unobtrusively in front of your HDTV than the other two soundbars, it relies much more on the subwoofer to produce bass as a result, so music playback suffers a bit accordingly.

Design
The soundbar is a nearly flat, unobtrusive, 41-inch-long, 5.7-pound black bar covered on the front and top with a cloth grille, broken only by an NFC zone in the center and the Sony logo in the top left. From the side, it looks like a rounded parallelogram with chrome-colored highlights on each end. Completely flat, it measures 2 inches tall and 4.5 inches deep, but with the combination stand feet/wall mount screwed on to the bottom, it lifts up to an angled 3.2 inches tall. The grille covers the soundbar's two-way stereo speaker system, which consists of 2.4-inch woofers and 0.8-inch tweeters. The entire sound system puts out a maximum of 330 watts, with 105 watts going to each stereo channel and 120 watts going to the wireless subwoofer.

The top back edge of the soundbar holds Power, Input, Pairing, and Volume Up/Down buttons, though you're more likely to use the included remote to control it. When you turn it on, a colored LED lights up in the center of the bar and a previously invisible alphanumeric LED display appears above it from behind the cloth grille. It helpfully shows the active audio source, and quickly responds to remote inputs to show the selected mode, volume level, and other settings. The back panel of the soundbar holds an additional, mechanical power button and a pairing button for connecting to the subwoofer, which comes pre-paired out of the box.

The back of the soundbar holds all of the ports, including an optical audio input, a 3.5mm analog audio input, three HDMI inputs, and an HDMI output. It can work like a conventional soundbar by simply connecting it to your HDTV through the optical audio output with the included optical cable, or you can use it as an HDMI switching device by plugging in up to three HDMI sources and connecting it to your HDTV through the HDMI output. All HDMI ports are HDMI 2.0, so you can pass through both 3D and 4K video to your HDTV. Besides wired options, you can connect your smartphone or tablet to the soundbar through Bluetooth, either through a simple pairing process by pressing the Pairing button on the remote or soundbar, or by tapping your NFC-compatible Android device to the NFC zone on the bar. I had no problem pairing my Google Nexus 5 to the HT-CT770 with a tap.

The remote is a plain, button-filled, 5.8-inch-long black rectangle designed for function far more than form. It has volume controls for the soundbar itself, individual buttons for sound modes, simple television controls, a direction pad surrounded by Voice, Night, Return, and Amp Menu buttons, and a set of playback buttons for controlling Bluetooth devices.

The included wireless subwoofer is the largest and simplest part of the package. It's a monolithic black enclosure measuring 15.6 by 10.6 by 10.4 inches (HWD) and weighing 17.6 pounds. The sides are completely solid except for the bottom, which holds the downward-firing driver just above four small legs. It's extremely simple to set up; once it's plugged in, it will turn on and seek out the soundbar. They're paired automatically, so as soon as the light on the front of the subwoofer turns green it has a connection. The subwoofer is completely wireless, with no auxiliary input options (which makes sense, considering the soundbar doesn't have a wired subwoofer output).

Music
With the dedicated wireless subwoofer, the HT-CT770 can put out plenty of power. It handled our bass test track, The Knife's "Silent Shout," with gusto, shaking the walls of the test room without showing a hint of distortion. Even the soundbar itself put out an impressive amount of force with no popping or crackle sounds, leaving the subwoofer to focus strictly on the sub-bass.

Other types of music sounded huge and thunderous, thanks to the contributions of the subwoofer. Iron Maiden's "The Number of the Beast" gave the sense of an arena performance, and the famous introduction reverberated sinisterly. Oingo Boingo's "Who Do You Want to Be Today" got a distinct sense of energy with the heavy thump of a kick drum shaking the floor.

While some soundbars that can stand on their own without a subwoofer, the HT-CT770 relies on a true collaboration between the soundbar and the subwoofer. On its own, the soundbar misses out on a lot of lows and mid-lows, getting quite tinny when playing music. The horns in "Who Do You Want to Be Today" in particular stood out brightly against all other parts of the mix when I turned the subwoofer down. Maxing out the subwoofer gave every track I threw at it a booming, operatic quality that really wasn't necessary or complimentary, but turning it down to two notches below maximum made all genres sound full and warm.

Movies and Games
A soundbar is primarily for movie, television, and game audio more than music, and the HT-CT770 handles such media with ease. While it doesn't have rear satellites or perform any simulated surround sound tricks, its two-way speakers and down-firing subwoofer produces a very wide, room-filling sound field. I watched The Amazing Spider-Man on Blu-ray, and the scene with the Lizard on the Williamsburg Bridge was full of forceful crashes and explosions as he tore through cars. With the subwoofer turned up, even the flames of a burning car as it fell into the river shook the floor.

Three Voice modes, separate from the soundbar's six Sound Field modes, tweak high-mids and highs to bring out dialogue in different ways. This is helpful if you want to make sure you catch what people are saying during loud scenes, but the more powerful Voice modes tended to make the scene sound a bit tinny and hollow, even with the subwoofer.

Platoon also sounded very good, though the much more oppressive, atmospheric soundtrack of the film highlighted the soundbar's tendency to sound too bright. The constant, intentionally grating sounds of insects certainly held the tension of the film during "quiet" scenes, often just before sudden and explosive death. Abrupt gunshots and booby traps, given more presence by the subwoofer, cut through the relative quiet of the shrill jungle with room-filling booms.

Video games are similarly served well by the HT-CT770. Resogun on the PlayStation 4 is a relatively simple arcade shooter, but with the soundbar handling the crisp, synth-filled soundtrack and the subwoofer giving a distinct sense of power to the constant explosions of ships, it became quite a spectacle.

Conclusion
The soundbar half of the Sony HT-CT770 is attractive and full of connectivity options, but its performance isn't as impressive, thanks to almost no power in the low-mids and lower end. On its own, it's tinny and overly bright, and desperately cries out for the subwoofer. Fortunately, the other half of the HT-CT770 comes through. This soundbar package is more than the sum of its parts, producing a room-filling force ideal for action movies and video games and with just enough finesse to make a respectable showing of music. You should look elsewhere (like the one-piece Polk N1 Surroundbar) if you primarily want to listen to tunes on your home theater system, but if you want a compact, easy-to-use, affordable sound system that can shake the walls when things on your HDTV explode, the Sony HT-CT770 is an excellent, affordable choice.

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