Marshall, the brand best known for providing the amps used by many of the world’s biggest rock acts over the past 60 years, has today revealed that it’s adding its first soundbar to its rock’n’roll product portfolio.

Called the Heston 120, Marshall’s debut soundbar is built on a combination of the brand’s ultra-distinctive classic product design and huge experience in delivering acoustic excellence at serious volumes.

That design looks like an elegantly stretched out version of a classic Marshall speaker or amp, complete with PU leather-wrapped trims, knurled metal control knobs, paper fret and a brushed metal panel. Tucked inside this stylishly retro form are 11 drivers, all positioned to face in difference directions so that Marshall’s spatial audio technology can cast the sound out to where it’s needed to create as immersive a movie sound experience as possible from the Dolby Atmos and DTS-X sound mixes it’s capable of playing.

The drivers comprise a pair of built-in 2-inch x five-inch subwoofers, a pair of three-inch mid-woofers, a pair of 0.8-inch tweeters, and five two-inch full-range speakers. They deliver their sound in a 5.1.2-channel configuration with a maximum 95dB of claimed sound pressure, created from a rated total peak power output of 150W.

Movie fans and gamers can connect external sources directly to the Heston 120 if they wish thanks to an HDMI pass-through system that impressively supports both 4K/120Hz and Dolby Vision high dynamic range signals as well as the more predictable HDR10 and HLG formats. The HDMI output also supports eARC, though, if you’d prefer to pass sound to the soundbar from an eARC-capable TV.

Other connections include RCA stereo inputs, an RCA mono sub line out, an Ethernet port, plus support for both Bluetooth 5.3 (5.1 Bluetooth classic) and Wi-Fi 6 signals if you want to stream music into it wirelessly from networked or smart devices. Again impressively for a debut soundbar, the Heston 120 ships with integrated support for Airplay 2, Google Cast, Spotify connect and Tidal Connect, and can handle the SBC, LC3, AAC Mpeg4, ALAC, FLAC, LPCM, Ogg Vorbis, and WMA/WMA9 codecs.

While the Heston 120’s design pleasingly includes a classic set of analogue Marshall control knobs, it can also be fully controlled using a new Marshall app that includes an option to run a room calibration system to adapt the soundbar’s sound to your particular room layout.

One last cool touch of the Heston 120 is that extremely unusually for a soundbar, its design features a number of replaceable parts, including the fret, end caps, drivers and circuit boards, so that if something goes wrong or the soundbar gets damaged you may not necessarily have to replace the whole thing.

While the Heston 120 appears to very much have what it takes to become a serious home cinema audio device, Marshall is also unsurprisingly keen to talk about its music potential. “We know that soundbar owners use their soundbar to listen to music,” says Anders Olsson, Senior Product Manager at Marshall Group, “yet most soundbars are not built for both music and TV. This gave us a reason to exist and an opportunity to really shine with our legacy in music and audio.”

“We spent hundreds of hours fine tuning Heston 120, and it was important to us that we spent equal time and effort on both TV and music, not one over the other,” adds Ed Camphor, Marshall Group’s Audio Technology and Tuning Lead. “Everything inside is tailored and engineered to have very specific roles to give you an optimal audio experience, no matter what you’re watching or listening to.”

The Heston 120 is available to pre-order now for $999.99/£899.99 from marshall.com, from where it will start shipping from June 3rd. It will also become available to buy from select third party retails from September 16, and Marshall has confirmed that a cheaper Heston 60 soundbar and Heston Sub 200 subwoofer accessory are also set to be launched later this year.

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