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Jul 01, 2023

Majority Everest 5.1 Soundbar review: Cinema sound for popcorn prices

Gareth Butterfield reviews a bargain home cinema setup that's almost perfect Sign up to our email newsletter for daily updates on what's happening in and around Birmingham We have more newsletters

Gareth Butterfield reviews a bargain home cinema setup that's almost perfect

Sign up to our email newsletter for daily updates on what's happening in and around Birmingham

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Sign up to our email newsletter for daily updates on what's happening in and around Birmingham

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Modern televisions are getting thinner and thinner. And while this is a welcome development in terms of cutting down the space they take up in your living room, it's bad news if you like a bit of high-quality audio.

If you're like me and you enjoy a movie night at home, you'll know that TV speakers just don't cut the mustard. And so we need a soundbar, or perhaps a more high-tech surround sound setup.

The trouble is, achieving high-quality cinema sound at home is an expensive business. Trick soundbars can offer virtual surround sound, but if you want a cinema-style setup with properly immersive audio and stereo separation you'll need to invest quite heavily in a multi-speaker unit. Or will you?

Majority, a consumer electronics brand making waves in the audio world, has launched a genuinely affordable Everest 5.1 Dolby Surround system that adds true surround sound to any space - without taking up too much room.

What's more, it's a wireless setup, at least to some extent, so your rear speakers don't need to be hooked up to the unit. Great news if you hate having cables trailing around your room.

Out of the box, it's basically a very long soundbar with two detachable rear speakers, and then a subwoofer unit.

Those detachable rears can run off their own built-in batteries for up to eight hours, and they can just clip back onto the powered soundbar to charge up.

So the soundbar takes care of the centre and left and right sound, the subwoofer delivers that deep rumble, and the rears add in the immersive background. It's a classic 5.1 setup.

And, here's the best bit, it's just £200 on Amazon at the moment, if you apply a £25 coupon. So that's £200 for a wireless 5.1 Dolby surround system that can hook up to any television and transform your viewing experience into something truly remarkable.

The complete setup equates to around 300w, so it's not as if the sound is anything other than premium. There's a lovely crispness to the main soundstage, the rear speakers are very effective, and the bass is absolutely terrific.

I set it up in my master bedroom, on a modern 40" television and, once I'd got everything properly set up and balanced - which always takes a while, I was able to enjoy cinema sound from the comfort of my own bed - without really taking up much space at all.

The soundbar is barely wider than my television with the speakers detached, and the sub is chunky, but easy to hide away.

The rear speakers sit on our bedside tables on supplied stands, and I chose to power them permanently with USB cables.

I love the fact it comes with HDMI ARC built in, because it means the control unit, built into the soundbar, can respond to the television remote's inputs. This basically means when I turn my telly on, the sound system powers up, and it powers down when I turn it off. Volume is also controlled through the television remote. I only needed Majority's remote to set up the sound levels.

Overall I found hardly anything to dislike about the Majority Everest system, but there is one big hitch. The rear speakers, if you use them in the way I've been doing, permanently hooked up as wireless satellites, power themselves down after a while.

This might not sound like a problem, but they don't power back up again when you use the unit again. So if you come back to watch TV the next evening, you have to turn each speaker back on independently with a little button on the rear.

It feels like this is a disappointing oversight, and I wish they could have a standby mode, or something like that, because other than that, this really is the perfect setup.

Brushing that aside, to be able to buy this surround sound system for just £200 is an absolute bargain, and I'd recommend it to anyone. It's the perfect way of creating a home cinema experience on a budget.