Ultra-short-throw projectors have a sound problem, and What Hi-Fi? editor in chief Alastair Stevenson has spent enough hours with them to say so bluntly. In a column published on September 19, 2026, he wrote that you will struggle to find a UST projector in the magazine’s reviews with a five-star score for audio. The surprise was that one of this year’s contenders briefly made him forget that.
A shootout that wore him down
The moment came during the UST group test for the What Hi-Fi? Awards 2026, where rival units are run head-to-head to decide the Best Buy winners. Stevenson is the lead tester for the category, and he admits that by the end of a long process he had grown “shamefully jaded” by the mediocre audio most of the units offered.
Things changed with the last projector he plugged in. Stevenson deliberately does not name it, so the Awards reveal is not spoiled, but he does describe the test: the Sinners 4K Blu-ray, specifically the speakeasy scene in which Sammy plays the blues before the performance turns into a medley spanning decades of black music.
What “a hint of musicality” sounds like
According to Stevenson, the difference was that this unit handled music with some finesse, where the others mostly didn’t. He heard:
- a hint of rhythmic drive, carrying the scene through its genre-hopping rooms;
- a pleasing but controlled swell in volume when the screaming psychedelic guitar arrives;
- just enough bass extension to make the breakdown land with some impact.
He is careful not to overstate it. The built-in system did not come close to a moderately capable soundbar or a full 5.1 multi-speaker setup. Still, it did enough to remind him what good, musical sound adds to a film. His wider criticism is that too many integrated speaker systems focus on dialogue and on covering up an underpowered low end, to the detriment of everything else.
The mantra behind the column
The piece is built around a line the What Hi-Fi? team repeats: good sound is good sound, whether it is hi-fi or home cinema, and audio quality matters as much as picture quality in a home cinema. Stevenson makes the same point about system matching, citing his time helping test the five-star KEF R Meta 5.1 Speaker System.
Audio was not the only weak spot in the UST category. In a companion piece from the same shootout, Stevenson again found setup frustrating: the online autocorrection never worked for him, and manual keystone adjustment was painful. He also noted that every model struggled to some degree with black levels, even though some went deeper than earlier USTs. He himself uses a Hisense PX3 paired with a JBL Bar 1300 soundbar at home, which rather proves his point about sound.
When the winner is revealed
The unnamed projector’s identity is due at the What Hi-Fi? Awards ceremony in London on November 12, 2026, where an overall Product of the Year will also be named in each category. Reader voting went live on September 14, 2026 and closes on September 28, 2026. The magazine turns 50 in 2026 and is adding two extra categories to mark it.
His advice to anyone building a home cinema is simple: give audio the attention it deserves, or you will not get the “as the director intended” experience, however good the picture is.
