Sony Bravia KDL-52XBR9 LCD HDTV Review - Audio & Menus

Audio & Menus Summary
• The speakers produce plenty of volume • Sound quality is good • Sony's XBR menu style can be awkward to use
	Connectivity	Page 11 of 18	Formats & Media

Audio Quality (7.25)

The Bravia KDL-52XBR9 has two large speakers located below the screen pointing downwards, and we found that they produced both plenty of volume and good quality sound; in our test sequences, we heard loud, thumping bass and plenty of fine detail in the high frequencies. The S-Force pseudo-surround sound was also surprisingly effective; although it was not as good as a proper surround sound speaker system, it definitely added more prescence to the sound and widened the pereceived field of the sound significantly.

Menu Interface (6.0)

Like most recent Sony devices, the Bravia KDL-52XBR9 uses their Xross Media Bar menu, which presents the main options (such as Inputs, TV, Music, etc) on a left to right scrolling menu, and the sub-options on an up and down scrolling menu. It generally works well, and makes it easy to find things such as the various widgets and Internet features it offers, but some options are also a little deeply buried; to get to the backlight setting, for instance, you have to go into the main menu, scroll over to settings, scroll down to Picture & Display, press okay, then select picture adjustments, hit okay, and then scroll down to backlight. So, while the menu is easy to use, it does bury some important settings several layers deep.

The Sony Bravia KDL-52XBR9's menu system is the same Xcross system that you see on the Playstation 3.

The picture options include a custom mode.

Manual (7.5)

This display comes with a set of operating instructions and a quick setup guide, both of which are well written and are pretty comprehensive. Sony also offers a very good online setup guide, which covers all of the settings and controls for this screen. This can be accessed online here.

The online manual for the KDL-52XBR9