Yamaha B200A brings Dolby Atmos to a tiny sound bar
Yamaha's smallest bar gets Dolby Atmos, a built-in subwoofer with Bass Extension and Clear Voice dialogue processing when it replaces the SR-C20A in November.
Yamaha has quietly posted its smallest sound bar yet with Dolby Atmos on board. The B200A is a compact bar with a built-in subwoofer, and it replaces the SR-C20A that has been the company's entry point for people who want better television sound without giving a subwoofer its own patch of living room.
Dolby Atmos in a bar this small is a virtual affair rather than a hardware one — there are no upward-firing drivers hiding in that 60cm chassis. What Yamaha is selling instead is processing: Bass Extension to fake more low end from the built-in subwoofer, Clear Voice to pull dialogue out of a busy mix, and four sound modes covering Movie, Standard, Stereo and Game. The last of those is aimed squarely at consoles, and Yamaha is pitching positional audio cues as a competitive advantage rather than a nicety.
Connections and price
Inputs run to HDMI eARC, optical, a 3.5mm aux jack and Bluetooth for streaming from a phone, which covers the current generation of televisions and consoles without any adapters. The bar is wall-mountable through built-in keyholes and Yamaha lists it at $250, with availability in November. UK and European pricing has not been announced.
The B200A sits in an awkward but popular spot: the sub-€300 bracket where virtual surround, compact dimensions and decent dialogue handling matter far more than five-speaker bragging rights. Buyers in that bracket are usually filling a bedroom, a study or a small flat, and they are usually comparing the bar against a television's own speakers rather than against a proper home cinema kit.
Our opinion
Yamaha makes genuinely good compact audio hardware, but $250 is a lot to ask for a bar whose Atmos badge is doing more marketing work than acoustic work. The SR-C20A it replaces was not a bad speaker — just a small one — and virtual Atmos in the same cabinet is unlikely to rewrite that physics. The sensible move is to wait for reviews and for the inevitable first discount, because that price puts the B200A within striking distance of bars with a real dedicated subwoofer. At $199 this would have been the easiest call of the autumn; at $250 the argument has to be about the shape of your room rather than the sound of your films.