i turned the subtitles off and understood the movie

On a Tuesday in September I sat down for a movie, a moody British detective thing where everyone mumbles into their collar, and forty minutes in I realized my hands were just sitting there. Not reaching for the remote. Not rewinding. Not turning on subtitles, which have been glued to every screen I own since college because TV dialogue has been mush to me for a decade.

The little bar under my TV finally made dialogue make sense. That's the review. Here's everything it cost me.

the honest bit, with receipts

The feelings part: I put off a soundbar for years because my apartment is five hundred square feet and my TV is modest and "good enough" felt like a personality. It was not a personality. It was a habit. I paid $249 during a sale, down from $279, and it's the first thing I've bought for the TV since the TV.

what it actually does, a list

Dialogue clarity is the whole reason this thing exists. Voices come out crisp and separated from everything else happening on screen, even during shootouts and orchestral swells. Professional reviewers made this the headline and I'm co-signing with my whole chest. I understand what British detectives are muttering now, and it turns out they're usually being devastating.

It's small, and small is the feature nobody markets. The Ray is 22 inches wide, light enough to carry one-handed, and it fits on my TV stand with room for the plant I refuse to move. The speakers face forward, so it doesn't care that it lives in a cabinet with a lip. It's sized for TVs up to about 55 inches, which is exactly my situation, and I suspect the situation of everyone I know who rents.

Now the optical cable, because you deserve to know. There's no HDMI on this thing. You connect it with an old-school optical audio cable, which means no Dolby Atmos, no fancy surround formats, and it only pairs with infrared remotes. My TV's remote took a full week of on-and-off attempts before the Ray accepted it, which is apparently a known personality trait. The workaround is the Sonos app on my phone, which I now use for volume most nights anyway, like a tiny remote I can never lose in the couch.

It's secretly a very good music speaker. Streaming over Wi-Fi with Spotify Connect or AirPlay, it fills my whole living room with a balanced, full sound, and reviewers noted it lands close to a Sonos One, which is high praise. The bass is competent rather than chest-thumping. For a studio apartment where the soundbar doubles as the stereo, that's the correct amount of thump.

It grows if you let it. This is the gateway product, and Sonos designs it that way: add a pair of speakers behind you and a sub later, and the Ray becomes the front channel of a real surround system. I have no plans. I have a browser tab. There's a difference and I'm aware of it.

Trueplay tuned it to my weird little room. With an iPhone you can run a tuning pass where you wave the phone around and the bar adapts to the room's shape. My living room is a rectangle with one giant window and zero soft surfaces, and after tuning it stopped sounding like a hallway. The catch: it's an iOS-only feature, so my Android friends can't use it, which is a real limitation worth knowing.

No Bluetooth, and this one's just silly. You can't pair a phone directly to it. Guests have to get on my Wi-Fi and use the app or AirPlay, which turns "can you put on your playlist" into a small IT support ticket. The group chat has opinions. I have printed nothing but I have considered laminating instructions.

tangent: subtitles were never a hearing problem

Here's what I figured out while rewatching that detective show with the sound off and the words gone: I didn't need subtitles because of my ears. I needed them because ten years of bad TV speakers trained me to read television instead of listen to it. My mom keeps her TV at volume 40 and my dad pauses everything to answer questions nobody asked, and somewhere in that house I learned that TV audio is a suggestion. The Ray broke the habit in one evening. I keep waiting to miss the captions and I keep not missing them, which feels like finding out a fear was optional.

Anyway, moving on before I write a follow-up about my dad's volume settings, which he will absolutely read.

the soft landing

Movie night got quieter and somehow fuller at the same time: one small bar, one cable, dialogue I can finally hear, and music that carries the room when the TV is off. If your television has been mumbling at you for a decade, this is the gentlest possible rescue, as long as you can live with one vintage cable.

I keep meaning to run Trueplay again now that the curtains are up, and I keep

Press play. Hear the whispering. Skip the rewind button.

• ava 🔊