This was purchased as a Christmas gift for my Son and his girlfriend. I usually don’t purchase audio equipment without listening to it first, but this model was not on display. They live in a small apartment where a base box would take up too much room, so I went with this one because Yamaha is a great brand. The kids said this soundbar is amazing and has great sound and fits nicely in their apartment.

YAMAHA YAS-109 Soundbar with ALEXA
I was pleasantly surprised by the easy setup and the very nice sound that the YAS-109 produces. It beats the sound of any flat panel TV I know, for a reasonable price. I switched back and forth between my TV, which advertised its superior sound, and the Yamaha YAS-109, and it was night and day. This significantly elevated my TV sound and recreate a movie theater experience in our large guest bedroom. Add in ALEXA features, the ability to play playlists from my phone, and App access to Spotify, Amazon Music and a few others sources and I feel like I got a bonus goodie bag along with a straightforward soundbar.
SETUP: The Yamaha leaves a nice impression right out of the box. While it’s not especially heavy (7.5 lbs), it has a nice, modern, rounded design that sits fairly flush (projecting only 2”) from our wall. It looks great either under or over a wall-mounted TV. It will mostly disappear from view except for the small LEDs which confirm input or sound control changes. If your TV is still on its stand, you can simply lay the Soundbar in front of it. I did that during some of my pre-install period
In the box is the 35” x 5.13” x 2.13” Yamaha Soundbar (measurements assume wall mount orientation), the small remote, a thin optical cable, power cable, a useful mounting template, and instruction guides. There are no mounting screws or HDMI cable, which you may need in order to exploit all the Yamaha Soundbar’s features.
The VERY SIMPLEST SETUP: Mount on the wall or lay the Soundbar on a counter under your TV. Find the Optical Jack on your TV and connect the provided optical cable to the Soundbar. (Make sure you pop off those tiny protective shields at each end of the cable). Plug in the Soundbar to an outlet. Turn on your TV and go into your sound setting where you’ll turn off the TV SPEAKERS and select AUDIO SYSTEM or something similar. Turn on the Soundbar, increase the volume and you’re ready to hear movies as the director intended. There are a variety of sound fields, voice enhancement and subwoofer management. Play with the remote and modify sound all you want. But, there is a lot more with a little added effort.
The FULL FEATURED SETUP: Do you want ALL those other voice managed and connection features in the YAMAHA YAS-109? Download the Yamaha Soundbar App from the iOS or Google Play store. You can connect ONE streaming or set-top box or game console directly to the Soundbar (HDMI cable). Connect your TV (ARC Input if possible) to the Soundbar with an HDMI cable. In order to use ALEXA, you need to either use the Ethernet connection or use wireless to connect the Soundbar to the internet. [I found that I needed to unplug my ethernet. I may talk to Yamaha about this.]
PERFORMANCE: Because I like to have my new equipment playing within minutes, I did my VERY SIMPLEST SETUP and was watching a movie while I learned about enabling the more advanced Yamaha features. This is a nice sounding Soundbar, with a balance of sound which projected itself into the room. It was very difficult to tell where the sound was coming from at times, because it nicely filled this large bedroom location. Clean voice (which could be brought forward with the CLEAR VOICE button), detailed treble and rich bass. This is a great improvement over the TV’s best sound. The settings allowed a choice of sound fields, which I generally ignore. But, Yamaha is not over-the-top with its digital processing, so I found myself experimenting with all of them. I was really shocked by the bass. There is no extra bass module, but there is definitely extra bass when it’s called for by the program. Surprised me. Nicely done, Yamaha.
I began the FULL FEATURED SETUP by downloading the Yamaha Soundbar App from the Apple store. I allowed the iPhone App to find the YAS-109 using my home wireless which needs to signed into upon initial install. This was fairly fast and new FIRMWARE (2.72 dated 2019-12-25) was installed. The APP provides all of the features of the remote control. But, the remote is limited to the sound fields, input selection and overall sound level as well as a separate subwoofer level. The phone APP opens up the world of the Internet and ALEXA. I found that I could directly select music from my iPhone music library, or select Spotify, TIDAL, etc, or go back to the TV output (remember to connect ARC output from the TV) or choose the device connected via the HDMI input of the Soundbar. I could request (using my voice) that ALEXA play music, and it offered music from the Amazon Music play. I could even specify (by voice) music selections. If I chose to play “My Music” the App let me survey my iPhone’s Playlists and select a song from my collection, directly. This was all fairly easy to master. Spotify Connect relies on the App on my phone, but the music is playing beautifully on the Yamaha Soundbar. The YAS-109 doesn’t work with Google Assistant. Although I primarily use Google Assistant to control lights. locks etc in my house, I wasn’t limited in any way using ALEXA to control the YAMAHA and call up music as I wanted. Those other ALEXA type features like weather, traffic and the news reports are all here. I will need to go explore some more.
SUMMARY: Whew. Lots of features going on here. I wish Yamaha covered this more completely in the instructions, because I had quite a few trial and error moments which better instructions might have lessened. If you’re a novice looking for a simple Soundbar, the Yamaha YAS-109 can be quickly and easily set up. Don’t let my extended review frighten you away. You’re going to love it. If you see the usefulness of ALEXA and want to add a really great voice-controlled music source to a room, this Soundbar will easily outperform many standalone wireless speakers while practically disappearing in the room. And, who doesn’t want to be able to ask their TV wall to give them the weather or traffic on command? The price is nice and the features go on and on. Recommended.

My wife didn’t want a huge sub woofer in our living room so I went with this one, since they are built in. The sound quality is good. I have a large, open living area and the sound bar performs well. The bass is good enough for my needs but audiophiles will want to look elsewhere. I had no issue connecting to my network through the app. The sound profiles work well, especially clear voice. I connected through ARC and it has worked well for the most part. I did lose connection once and had to reboot but this may have been an issue with my Vizio TV. The Yamaha app is not intuitive and needs some work. We have it sitting on our tv console and it looks great.

So let’s be honest, most folks unless they are in a small space or apartment would not consider a 2.1 channel compact soundbar for their primary home theater or TV set-up. However at this pricepoint, this soundbar is still an attractive option with solid Yamaha sound and Amazon Alexa extension functionality. Why buy an Echo spot for $50 when you can get a real competent soundbar in that guest room, kitchen or office attached to your TV?
A few negatives, this unit is deeper/thicker than most soundbars. This is due to the subwoofer exhausts on the back of the unit, but that’s why the unit is so big.
The remote is pretty low-quality with an IR sensor that you see the bulb on. Barely functional although it is well laid out, you have to literally point it directly at the soundbar with nothing obstructing it.
I couldn’t get ARC to work correctly from my Hisense TV. Not a huge surprise and it may be partially my TVs fault since it had issues with my Vizio Soundbar as well, but ARC works perfectly and auto-switches to my Samsung soundbar with the same TV setttings and connections. I don’t hold this against Yamaha so much but I simply could not get audio over HDMI ARC from the TV apps to the soundbar which was very frustrating. I set it to TV and it wasn’t as obvious if the settings were correct or not.
I didn’t love the capacitive touch button settings on the unit itself, and the lights show the level of volume from left to right re-using function displays.
Some positives:
The sound is excellent! Fantastic for a smaller room, bedroom, kids play room. HDMI passthrough works perfectly and is also 4K capable. Would be amazing for a dorm room for TV and music since you can stream directly to it with Spotify or Alexa.
Includes Alexa which is a huge boon for any smart device for Alexa users. One less other Amazon device in a room. No video of course, but maybe one day they’ll have a native app like the Portal TV.
Set-up was actually very fast and easy despite a large update. It went through without an issue. Only works on 2.4GHz networks but my mesh network has both 2.4 and 5GHz on the same SSID.
Includes a template and doesn’t require additional hardware to hang off the wall, it just hangs vertically, but this also includes its size and profile on the wall (its kinda fat).
Overall a solid sound bar, I’m going to try it with ARC on my Samsung TV and see if it does better.