The Ray Danz immediately endeared itself with user-friendliness, flashing ‘HELLO’ from large LED segments behind the front grille. The hardest connection to plug in is the mains cable, which lacks sufficient finger room to push it home fully. We plugged our TV in via ARC and later optical, and added first an Oppo Blu-ray player, later an AppleTV 4K into its HDMI input. Does this matter when the bar’s drivers are only delivering three channels anyway? Let’s see. That also, in theory, limits playback from smart TVs loaded with apps delivering Atmos, such as Netflix and Disney+ your TV is likely to drop the soundtrack to stereo or at best Dolby Digital before passing it to the TCL soundbar. The bar supports Dolby Digital, Digital Plus, TrueHD and Atmos soundtracks – however, to get Atmos to the bar, you may (we did) have to plug something into that HDMI input, since many TVs won’t deliver Dolby TrueHD-based Atmos through HDMI ARC. However, the remote control does have one button labelled ‘Vertical Surround’ – interestingly the same name used by Sony in its soundbars. We’ve seen too many false claims for soundbars past and present, so that TCL’s more honest approach is refreshing. TCL’s literature does not mention or claim height, and good on them. ![]() It means the unit accepts a Dolby Atmos signal and can translate its object-based data and conventional beds for whatever sound system is attached – here a 3.1-channel soundbar. No upwards drivers? How, then, can it claim Dolby Atmos, which brought height channels to the worlds of cinema and home cinema? As we regularly note, supporting Dolby Atmos doesn’t necessarily mean delivering height information. But it certainly promises an ability to create a wide stereo sound, supported by the additional centre drivers. This won’t create surround – there’s no dedicated driver to deliver rear information. Then the left and right oval drivers face sideways on the edges of the centre section, so they fire straight down those waveguides which purport to shoot the sound out sideways and possibly, room layout permitting, bouncing their sound from side walls. The front section houses two centre drivers (a tweeter and oval midrange generously quoted at 44 × 74mm). But with that reduced front area and grilles dense enough to prevent us peeking beneath, we were a bit baffled as to identifying the driver positions, until locating the ‘exploded’ diagram included overleaf. So as noted, this is a 3.1-channel bar, with a dedicated centre channel between the left and right, all the better to support dialogue clearly. The final inputs are wireless stereo – the aforementioned Chromecast and AirPlay streaming over Wi-Fi, plus Bluetooth. ![]() WAV and FLAC were limited to CD quality high-res files were skipped. ![]() There’s also a USB-A slot to play music from a stick or drive the manual says it plays only MP3, WAV and FLAC files, though once we’d managed to get our USB stick into the limited space around the slot (small sticks or an extender cable recommended!) we found it also handled WMA files. In the bays at the rear are those two HDMI sockets, plus the usual fallback soundbar inputs of optical and minijack analogue inputs for when HDMI ARC won’t work. There’s also an HDMI 2.0 input on the bar for an external device, which will be the best way to pass the bar any Dolby Atmos soundtracks, which it supports. TCL generously includes both an optical and an HDMI cable in the box, though we substituted a shiny new Austere-branded HDMI cable (pictured below right) to make the all-important connection between the HDMI ARC sockets of soundbar and TV. This bar is wall-mountable, with a kit included in the box. It’s not immediately obvious how to remove this cover – you have to turn the bar over before it slides off easily. The scoops of the waveguides are solid shiny black plastic: indeed most of the construction is plastic, sensibly matte on the top surface, and slotted (but solid) on the sides and rear, where a cover keeps the input sockets hidden and provides cable management from gaps it creates when slotted back into place. So only in the centre of the bar does a fabric-covered section protrude flush to the bar’s front, housing forward-facing drivers. The reason is obvious as soon as you remove the wrapping – more than half of its frontage is missing, scooped away for two extended waveguides this is the ‘Ray Danz’ technology referenced in the product name. Compared with the best of those, the TS9030 feels a lightweight when you draw the bar from its packaging.
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