Bose has a new soundbar for the fall shopping season, and it includes some cool tricks for owners of the company’s clip-on earbuds. The Bose Smart Soundbar is a “smaller, sleeker” model with an AI Dialogue mode and a Personal Surround feature for owners of the Ultra Open earbuds.
The Bose Smart Soundbar has five transducers, including two side-firing (racetrack-shaped) ones, a center tweeter, and two up-firing transducers. This arrangement helps with Dolby Atmos content, with the side-facing ones focusing on horizontally positioned audio and the up-facing ones bouncing sound off the ceiling for an overhead illusion. The center tweeter handles dialogue.
If your content doesn’t support Dolby Atmos for a spatial surround experience, the soundbar’s TrueSpace feature can create a simulated surround effect by mixing them in real time. Bose claims this process produces sound “with the same spaciousness” as Dolby Atmos.
For owners of Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds — $299 clip-on doodads that leave your ears open — the soundbar can provide a more personal surround experience for an individual. Designed to add dimension to content, the feature uses the earbuds as rear surround speakers. Unlike most earbuds, the Ultra Open model doesn’t obstruct your ears, allowing you to still hear the soundbar’s audio. Bose describes the combined effect as “an immersive sound experience of sound all around you.”
The Personal Surround Sound feature launches with this model, but will come to the (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 AI to automatically adjust the audio mix in real-time when it detects speech, making it easier to hear voices “without losing the impact of an immersive sound effect.”
The smart soundbar is 27 inches long, 2.2 inches high and 4.1 inches deep. It has a black matte body with a wraparound metal grille. In terms of connections, 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 other Bose smart speakers (including the bass module) for a better living room or multi-room setup.
The Bose Smart Soundbar is available on Wednesday for $499. You can order it on Bose’s website.