A Sonus faber soundbar

With that HDMI connection to the rear capable of receiving TV audio (stereo only) via the Audio Return Channel, the Omnia is ready to roll as a rather grand TV speaker. It’ll be too high to sit in front of pretty much any modern TV, and the side-firing speakers preclude encasing it in cabinetry below the TV. But if your TV is wall-mounted, then the Omnia can look fabulous sitting directly below, ready to double up on movies and music.

Again, the first thing you should do is turn Crescendo off, via the secret IP settings menu (see main text). While Crescendo may enrichen music in soundtracks, the way it spreads sounds to the side-firing speakers can make dialogue sound strangely double-tracked, unpleasantly echoey. With Crescendo off, it’s a rock-solid, clear and dynamic audio system that will never overperform in the manner of soundbars that process movie sound to deliver size, but sacrifice clarity.

There was some delay in getting our TV (a 2021 Samsung) to recognise the Omnia, which we thought might be because we needed to select the HDMI input before it would handshake with the TV. But how to know which input to select? With no display on the Omnia, do you have to pick the right colour for the Senso light on the front? (HDMI is orange, for the record.) Thankfully no, that’s not the case; the Omnia eventually sensed the incoming signal and switched over on its own.

One problem: if you pause your TV for 30 minutes, the Omnia is likely to turn off again, and your TV will likely revert to TV speakers, with the Omnia then requiring a second period of reconnection. A lot of soundbars do this too; the answer is to turn off their automatic standby mode, but here you can’t do that entirely.

Still, with those few operational quirks, the Omnia did a top job. There’s not the bottom octave of a subwoofer, nor the width that stereo speakers will bring, nor the immersion some soundbars try to create. But it’s solid, powerful and musical when required, and always clear. Good result.