The Sony ULT TOWER 9AC wants to turn your lounge into a karaoke bar. Whether that’s a good thing depends on who you ask.
South Africans don’t really do karaoke bars. Not in the same way as Tokyo or even Joburg’s K-pop-postered private booths. Here, karaoke is a side dish, not the main event — a thing you stumble into at a dodgy pub between Castle Lites and a cringe-worthy rendition of Whitney Houston.
Sony’s new ULT TOWER 9AC doesn’t care about any of that. It’s not here to preserve the vibes of karaoke past. Instead, it’s a maximalist, LED-laced monument to volume and vocals, designed to turn your lounge into a chaos-fuelled concert. Paired with the ULTMIC1 wireless mic, it’s a karaoke setup that doesn’t need to be good in the traditional sense. It just needs to be fun.
And in that regard, Sony gets the assignment. The ULT TOWER 9AC is big, brash, and unapologetically over the top. There’s 360-degree sound. There’s a full light show. There are dual mic inputs, guitar jacks, and a TV sound booster. Even the name feels like it was tuned for maximum volume.
It’s clearly part of Sony’s wider push into lifestyle audio. You can see the same design language in its ULT POWER SOUND range, which launched globally earlier this year. The vibe is simple: big sound, big mood, less audiophile, more attitude.
The 9AC takes that idea and stretches it into a home setup that’s as much about performance as it is about playback. It has four tweeters pushing sound out front and back, plus two midrange drivers that keep vocals at the centre. It even lets you chain a second speaker for stereo output, assuming you’re fine dropping R38,000 to recreate a festival crowd in your kitchen.
The mic experience is, honestly, better than expected. The ULTMIC1 pairs instantly through a dedicated dongle, which avoids the classic Bluetooth delay that ruins so many duets. There are physical knobs on the speaker for echo and pitch control, plus an app for more granular tuning.
But none of this changes the fact that you’re paying nearly R19,000 for a party speaker. That’s not a minor investment, especially when portable JBLs or even an old Sonos can already do 80 percent of the job — just without the strobes and mic support.
It also raises the question: who is this really for? Bedroom singers? Extroverts with disposable income? Parents trying to keep teens off TikTok for one more evening? Maybe all of the above.
Still, for all its sensory overload, there’s something refreshingly uncynical about the Sony ULT TOWER 9AC. It doesn’t pretend to be a smart speaker. It doesn’t promise to improve your life with AI. It just wants to be loud and silly and maybe a little obnoxious — like karaoke itself.
If that’s your thing, the ULT TOWER 9AC delivers in full. Just don’t expect your neighbours to love you for it.