Bose has a new soundbar for the fall shopping season, and it includes some neat tricks for owners of the company’s clip-on headphones. Bose Smart Soundbar is a “small, elegant” model with artificial intelligence dialog mode and personalized surround function. Ultra Open Headphones.
The Bose Smart Soundbar has five transducers, including two side-firing (basement-shaped), a center tweeter, and two top-firing transducers. This arrangement helps Dolby Atmos side-facing content aimed at horizontally positioned audio, while upward-facing ones bounce sound off the ceiling for an overhead illusion. A central tweeter drives the dialogue.
If your content doesn’t support Dolby Atmos for a spatial surround experience, the soundbar’s TrueSpace feature can mix them in real-time to create a fake surround effect. Bose claims this process produces “effective” sound with “similar breadth” to Dolby Atmos.
Owners of Bose’s Ultra Open Headphones – $299 clip-on doodads leaving your ears open – a soundbar can provide a more personalized ambient experience for one person. Designed to add dimension to content, the feature uses the headphones as surround-back speakers. Unlike most headphones, the Ultra Open model does not obstruct your ears, allowing you to still hear the sound of the soundbar. Bose describes the combined effect as “a sonic experience of sound around you.”
Personal Surround Sound is enabled with this model, but (more expensive) Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar later this fall.
The soundbar also supports the AI Dialogue mode from the company’s Smart Ultra Soundbar. The feature uses artificial intelligence to automatically adjust the audio mix in real-time when it detects speech, making it easier to hear sounds “without losing any of the impact of immersive sound effects.”
The Smart Soundbar is 27 inches long, 2.2 inches high, and 4.1 inches deep. It has a metal grille topped with a black matte body. On the connectivity front, it supports HDMI eARC (required for Dolby Atmos) and standard optical cables. You can set it up to work with Google Assistant and Alexa, and it works with others Bose smart speakers for enhanced living room or multi-room installations (including bass modules).
The Bose Smart Soundbar goes on sale Wednesday for $499. You can order on it Bose website.
