It's no secret that while they're great for movies, soundbars tend to fall down on the music department. Marshall wants to change all that, so it's launched a brand new soundbar called the Heston 120 — an ambitious first for the firm.
The Heston 120 is built from the ground up to not only make your movies sound epic with Dolby Atmos, but also your favorite tunes as well. It's priced to compete with the top end of the best soundbars though, so it has a bit of a task on its hands.
Style in buckets, and good sound to boot?
The most notable thing about the Heston 120 is the way that it looks. Marshall hasn't just made a plastic bar to stick under your TV and forget about it; that's not the Marshall way. Instead, it's a device that, as always, harkens back to its amps and speakers from the '60s and beyond.
To that end, it's wrapped from end to end in a fabric grille that looks just like what you'd find on one of the brand's speaker cabinets. The on device controls are brass control knobs like those you'd spot on it's amplifiers, although with all the lights and buttons you'd find on its other home audio equipment.
The end result is something that could be quite divisive. Putting one of these bad boys on your TV stand is going to be a choice of looks and performance with its unique style.
But it's a choice you'll want to make if all the specs are anything to go by. Marshall wants to make sure that this is a musical device, so it's packed in Wi-Fi streaming and Bluetooth 5.3 with top-notch codec support to make sure your music sounds excellent.
Dolby Atmos support for Amazon Music Unlimited and Apple Music tops things off — and thanks to 11 different drivers, it looks like it'll sound pretty good too.
The Dolby Atmos is going to do wonders for movies, TV, and video games as well. HDMI eARC makes connecting to your TV a cinch, and support for DTS:X is the icing on the cake.
“We spent hundreds of hours fine tuning Heston 120. It was important to us that we spent equal time and effort on both TV and music, not one over the other," says Marshall's Audio Technology and Tuning Lead Ed Camphor.
Environmentally concious
Almost every part of the soundbar will be replaceable, with parts available from Marshall's website. That means the soundbar will last a whole lot longer than the competition — should something break, you can just replace it.
That's a big bonus over the likes of the Sonos Arc Ultra, which has to be sent to Sonos in order to get repaired should the worst happen.
The Heston 120 is not going to come cheap, however. It's $999 in the U.S., and £899 in its home U.K.. That's around the same as the Arc Ultra in both markets, so it's going to have to do a lot to vie for your hard-earned cash.
The Heston launches September 16th, and we can't wait to test it to see where it ranks amongst the best soundbars.
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