Sony Master Series A9G 4K OLED TV review: Premium performance for a price

Note: This article was first published on 10 Feb 2020.

Mastering OLED

For some background, Sony’s OLED TVs are divided into two ranges — the regular series and the Master Series.

It’s easy to differentiate both from just the model names: the regular series goes by the name A8, with another letter after it to tell you its new-ness (e.g., A8G is launched in 2019 and A8H is coming in 2020).

On the other hand, the current Master Series is called the A9, and the model that's in wide availability now is the A9G. Available in 55-, 65- and 75-inch screen sizes, Sony will continue to sell this 2019 flagship model through 2020. Sony has announced an A9S at CES this January, but this is only available in a 48-inch screen size.

What makes a Master Series?

To paraphrase Sony marketing, the Master Series is designed to convey as best as possible the creator’s intent. This is largely achieved through Sony’s trademarked Sound-from-Picture Reality tech, which as the name suggests, is a speaker implementation that creates the effect that the sound is coming straight from the screen. We've covered in great detail about the Master Series when they were first launched, but here are the main points relevant to the current Master Series A9G:

1.) Acoustic Surface Audio+

Long story short, instead of lining speakers at the sides like most other TVs, Sony’s Acoustic Surface Audio+ uses two actuators and two subwoofers on the TV’s back to send sound through the screen. It’s a tad different from how it’s done on the 2018 A9F, which I’ll talk about more in the next page.

Anyway, the Acoustic Surface Audio+ is the greatest difference between the Master Series A9G and the regular A8G. The latter has Acoustic Surface Audio (no plus!), which uses less powerful actuators.

Additionally, the A9G has a TV Centre Speaker Mode that lets you use the TV’s speakers as one big centre speaker with your external speakers. This ensures that you don’t lose the sound-from-screen effect in a multi-speaker setup that usually requires you to place the centre channel under the TV.

On a related note, when table-top-mounted, the bottom of the TV almost touches the surface, which means there’s no way to put a soundbar under the screen without blocking the picture. On the other hand, the A8G, which doesn’t have this centre speaker mode, has a stand that you can rotate 180° to elevate the TV so that there’s clearance for a soundbar.

2.) Picture Processor X1 Ultimate

The Master Series uses a different processor than the other Sony OLED TVs. Called the X1 Ultimate it’s more powerful (roughly 2x) than the X1 Extreme, handles high brightness and frame rates better, and processes more objects to produce a more detailed picture (Sony calls this feature Object-based Super Resolution).

There’s also Pixel Contrast Booster, which is used to enhance colour contrast at high brightness.

3.) Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos

Both the A9G and A8G support Dolby Vision, standard HDR10 and HLG HDR formats but only the A9G supports lossless Dolby Atmos and DTS:X object-based audio because it has an HDMI port (port 3) that supports eARC. This is a plus if you’re serious about audio and want to pipe Atmos or DTS:X signal to an external receiver.

4.) Netflix Calibrated Mode

The A9G also has this Netflix Calibrated Mode to, once again, preserve the creator’s vision and intent.

So, A9G or A8G?

I’ve more to say about the TV’s performance in the next page, but in a nutshell, unless you must have the A9G-exclusive features listed above, the difference between it and the A8G isn’t night and day. Not to mention both run Android TV, so the software experience (Google Play store, voice search, built-in Chromecast) is largely similar. Yes, the A9G has a slightly better build and offers a slightly better picture quality, but I think most people won’t be able to tell these two OLEDs apart.

And here’s the SRPs for the TVs:

• 55-inch — A9G: S$7,999 | A8G: S$6,499
• 65-inch — A9G: S$11,999 | A8G: S$10,499
• 77-inch — A9G: S$27,999 | A8G: NA

Unless you’re going for the 77-inch model (like our test unit), which only the A9G has, the price gap between the two series is about S$1,500. To be clear, these are Sony's suggested retail prices, which means street prices will be lower.

Performance

For the most part, Standard is a decent picture mode to start for the A9G. But I prefer the pre-tuned Custom mode as I find its defaults give me the most accurate colours out of the box.

Being a Sony TV, you can expect to see a handful of Sony proprietary settings, such as Reality Creation. Closely tied to the X-Reality feature you often see in Sony’s marketing materials, Reality Creation, when enabled, is somewhat of an enhanced upscaling tech that smartly sharpens an image to bring out more detail. Purists will want to turn this off; but I think you should at least try it (especially for SD content) and see if you like what you see.

Like all modern 4K TVs, the A9G is able to detect an HDR signal (from both native apps and external sources) and change its settings automatically, which means you don’t need to configure anything unless the picture looks wrong. In HDR mode, brightness will automatically shoot up to the highest level — as it should be.

All four HDMI ports on the A9G support 18Gbps, which Sony calls ’Enhanced Format’. There’s a setting in the menu to toggle this feature (under External Inputs > HDMI Signal Format) and is the first setting you should investigate if you’ve any picture issues with an HDMI-connected device (e.g., a cable box or an old DVD player).

1.) Bright vs. dark room

One thing you need to know about OLED is that it can’t go very bright like high-end LED-LCD TVs like Samsung’s Q900R QLED TV. Which is to say if your room is very bright or the TV is placed just right beside the window, you’ll find that the A9G can’t go bright enough to fight the high ambient light. To prevent washed out colours and glare, it’s best to give the A9G some shade.

Of course, the A9G totally shines in a dimly-lit room. Like all OLED TVs, you can expect perfect blacks and infinite contrast from the A9G. Viewing angles are also very wide, which again, is something we already come to expect from OLED.

2.) Colours

For the most part, colour accuracy out of the box is good. The default colour temperature remains in the day white range, but is a hint more towards yellow-white (warmer). Overall, nothing too off if you want to use it as-is, and nothing unsolvable if you’ve the tools to calibrate it.

In terms of colour gamut, the A9G is on a par with other OLED TVs such as LG’s C9 and E9. Colour volume performance is decent, but trails slightly behind the LG C9. The comparatively lower brightness also means that its colours at high brightness can’t be as saturated as those from a high-end LED-lit LCD TV like the Samsung Q900R QLED TV.

3.) 4K & HDR

OLED’s Achilles’ heel when compared to something like Samsung’s QLED is that it can’t go very bright, even with the inclusion of white sub-pixels to boost brightness.

Because of that, OLED TVs, including the A9G, aren’t the best TV for very bright room use. If you find the TV too dim, there are a few things you can do (at the expense of colour accuracy) other turning up the brightness level, such as using the Vivid mode.

To give you an idea of the difference I'm talking about, the Samsung Q900R easily crosses 1,000 nits for HDR, but the A9G seldom breaches 700 nits typically. The result is a bright white snow cap vs. a dirty-white snowcap.

Like LG’s OLEDs, the A9G supports the Dolby Vision HDR format. In theory, Dolby Vision content, which packs dynamic metadata, should look better than baseline HDR10 content. Samsung TVs don’t support Dolby Vision because the company is behind another dynamic metadata HDR format called HDR10+.

4.) Motion

The TV's Motionflow settings deal with motion interpolation and frame interpolation. While I usually disable it during testing, for a more realistic usage that involves both interlaced and progressive sources, I suggest enabling it (set to Custom) and having the Smoothless level just a notch above Minimum.

The Clearness slider governs black frame insertion and will help to reduce motion blur — so adjust it to taste (I prefer Low, by the way). Overall, like most Bravia TVs, the A9G handles motion very well.

5.) Gaming

While the A9G has an almost negligible response time, its input lag, at around 27ms, is only about average. For comparison, current LG OLED and Samsung QLED TVs easily dip below 20ms even for 4K gaming. And strangely, despite making the PlayStation, the A9G doesn’t support ALLM (Auto Low Latency Mode) for auto-switching to Game mode when a game signal is detected.

The A9G also doesn’t support any VRR (variable refresh rate) tech, unlike LG’s OLEDs, which support both HDMI Forum VRR and NVIDIA G-Sync. Even Samsung’s QLEDs support FreeSync (since 2018).

6.) Sound

The A9G’s Acoustic Surface Audio+ system is slightly different from what we saw on the A9F: unlike the 2018 model’s six actuators and two subwoofers, the A9G is using a pair of actuators and a pair of subwoofers. While each actuator is now more powerful (20W vs. 13W), the overall output power is reduced due to fewer actuators. The speaker cabinet is redesigned, too, which is probably a result of the redesigned stand.

That said, the A9G doesn’t sound very different from the A9F. More importantly, the sound-from-screen effect is maintained, which is crucial for voice tracks.

As mentioned earlier, the A9G supports HDMI Enhanced Audio Return Channel (eARC), which means if you must get lossless Dolby Atmos, it can do Atmos passthrough via Dolby TrueHD (or lossless DTS:X via DTS-HD Master Audio).

Conclusion: A very good OLED TV (with a few caveats)

I’m starting to sound like a broken record here, but I still have to say it for the benefit of readers who aren’t familiar with OLED: because the Sony A9G is a top-end OLED TV, unless you got a lemon, you can expect traditional OLED hallmarks from this TV, including perfects blacks, infinite contrast, excellent viewing angles, and near-instant response times.

To differentiate itself from other OLED TVs, Sony has to add its own homemade ingredients; and the most prominent one is the Acoustic Surface Audio+ system. You know this idea is a great one when other TV manufacturers such as Samsung and LG try to create the same sound-from-screen effect for their newest TVs.

While I don’t have any problems with Acoustic Surface Audio+, I’m a bit disappointed that Sony has dropped the A9F’s kickstand design and gone for a more traditional table-top stand. I know some users don’t like the tilt of the A9F’s stand, but to me, that opinionated design element is what makes the TV a Sony TV. The fact that a soundbar will block the picture is another bummer.

If you’re a gamer, the A9G makes for a good, but not excellent, gaming display. While the panel’s response time is excellent, the TV’s input lag is about average for today’s standards. The lack of any form of VRR support is also glaring.

In terms of futureproof-ability, the A9G doesn’t come with any HDMI 2.1 ports, though all its HDMI ports are full HDMI 2.0 18Gbps capable. The addition of eARC is another plus.

For Apple device users, the A9G will support AirPlay 2, but its Apple TV app continues to be in the 'coming' state.

Finally, let’s talk about price. The A9G starts at S$8K for the 55-inch model, and goes up to S$12K for the 65-incher. While the ‘Sony premium’ these days isn't as high as yesteryears', it’s still substantial in this case when you consider that the price for the 65-inch LG E9 is only S$7K. And its value proposition drops further when you compare it to the LG C9.

And you must have really like Sony to get the S$28K 77-inch A9G (that's the one I tested) when there’s a 77-inch LG C9 that’s going for S$19K. And for what it’s worth, Samsung is ready to sell you a 75-inch QLED 8K TV for just S$17K — and if that's too small for you, there's a bigger 82-incher going for S$30K.

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