With Alexa Home Theater, Amazon lets you assemble a surprisingly full-featured surround sound system that delivers Dolby Atmos spatial audio—without relying on a soundbar or running a single wire to your TV. Instead, compatible Echo speakers handle audio duties wirelessly, creating a clean, minimalist setup that’s far simpler than a traditional home theater system.
I first got a taste of this feature last year during a hands-on demo with the Echo Dot Max and Echo Studio, and it immediately stood out for the amount of sound it could produce from such compact hardware. After spending extended time testing Alexa Home Theater in my own living room, I can now say it’s more than just a clever trick—it’s a genuinely capable and flexible alternative to a conventional soundbar, especially for users already invested in the Alexa ecosystem.
What You Need: Echo Speakers and a Fire TV Streamer
Alexa Home Theater lets you wirelessly connect two to five Echo Dot Max or Echo Studio speakers and an Echo Sub subwoofer to a compatible media streamer, including the Fire TV Cube, Fire TV Stick 4K Max, and Fire TV Stick 4K Plus.
The Fire TV platform synchronizes all connected speakers and uses their built-in microphones to automatically calibrate them into a single spatial audio system. This approach offers several advantages over a traditional soundbar with dedicated wireless satellites and a subwoofer.
For one, the system is completely modular. You can start small with just two speakers flanking your TV, then expand over time into a full five-channel-plus-sub setup as your needs grow. In addition, Alexa Home Theater automatically detects and tunes each speaker based on its location. Even if your speakers aren’t positioned symmetrically or in conventional surround locations, the system intelligently balances and mixes audio across them to create the most immersive spatial sound possible.
Everything You Need for Alexa Home Theater
There are limitations, though. First, while you don’t need to run a cable from your TV to a speaker, you still need to connect a Fire TV media streamer to your TV, so you won’t be freeing up an HDMI port. Second, you can’t mix and match speakers; currently, an Alexa Home Theater setup must be only Echo Dot Max or Echo Studio speakers (besides the subwoofer).
Setup: Simple Enough, But Slightly Tedious
I tested Alexa Home Theater on my LG C4 TV using a Fire TV Stick 4K Max and four Echo Studios, with no subwoofer. The Echo Studio is more than twice the price of the Echo Dot Max, but it’s much better suited to spatial audio thanks to its four-driver configuration, including an upward-firing driver for height. The Echo Dot Max has just a single tweeter/woofer combination for one-directional audio.
Getting Alexa Home Theater up and running is incredibly easy (Amazon has a video guide), though it’s slightly tedious to do from scratch. Each Echo must be individually connected to your Wi-Fi network and Amazon account, as if it were a standalone speaker. This means running up to five identical setup processes via the Alexa app. The same must be done with your Fire TV device. Once they’re all online, it’s simple and mostly automated.
(Credit: Amazon/PCMag)
On your Fire TV device, go to Settings > Display & Sounds > Alexa Home Theater > Create Home Theater. Fire TV will show the Echo speakers on your network. Select them, then follow the setup wizard from that point. It will synchronize the speakers with the Fire TV streamer, then play a series of sounds from each to determine their positions and the optimal spatial audio settings. You don’t have to keep track of which speaker is which—the wizard will do that. That’s good because, unless you manually rename each one based on its position, you won’t have much of a clue.
(Credit: Amazon/PCMag)
Make sure the Fire TV device is connected to your TV’s ARC/eARC-equipped HDMI port, and set your TV to output audio through that port instead of the speakers. This will pipe sound through Alexa Home Theater, even if you use a Blu-ray player, game console, or even just want to stream media through your TV’s platform instead of Fire TV. Audio from both my PlayStation 5 and LG TV’s streaming apps came through without any issue.
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Performance: Spatial Audio That Truly Surrounds You
I started with just two Echo Studios to test how a typical stereo arrangement would perform. I placed them on either side of my TV, and they immediately started producing surprisingly powerful, detailed sound.
Even without a subwoofer, it produces some impressive bass. Low, dramatic stings in both Fallout on Amazon Prime Video and in gameplay videos on YouTube sound deep enough to almost feel. The opening chase in Shin Masked Rider is especially driving and bombastic, with a large sound field that clearly takes advantage of each Echo Studio’s multiple drivers. With just two speakers, it projects audio with a good sense of height, filling the space in front of me. In this configuration, the audio isn’t quite as directional or precise as a soundbar with dedicated center channel drivers situated directly under the TV, but it’s still better than you would get with most built-in speakers or cheaper soundbars with only left and right channels. A third Echo Studio for the center channel is possible and would probably improve the imaging precision considerably, but unless your TV is mounted on the wall above it, you’ll be contending with nearly six inches of speaker blocking your screen.
You should use four or five Echo speakers to get the most out of Alexa Home Theater (Credit: Will Greenwald)
After testing the two-speaker setup, I placed a third Echo Studio on the right armrest of my couch and a fourth on an unplugged subwoofer to the left. Adding them to the Alexa Home Theater was quick and easy. After setting them up individually, I went into the Fire TV Alexa Home Theater menu, selected Edit Alexa Home Theater, and the streamer automatically detected the two newly connected speakers. Then I simply toggled them to join the first two, saved the configuration, and the system ran another automatic calibration. That was it. My two-speaker home theater had become a four-speaker arrangement.
Moving up to four speakers makes the experience much more immersive, as expected. With sound pouring in from the sides and in front of me, the chase in Shin Masked Rider is more exciting. Fallout is even more impressive; a nuclear bomb explosion rushed from the front speakers to the side ones, panning through each and using their height channels to really give the impression of the shockwave moving around me. There wasn’t any furniture-rattling rumble, but it was still a powerful moment.
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The automatic calibration is good, but it can’t work miracles, and you still have to keep acoustics in mind. The left speaker, sitting lower than my couch armrest, was unsurprisingly less prominent than the right one, so I had to prop it up on a box and recalibrate the system to improve sound balance. Even then, the layout of my apartment made the right side speaker seem a bit louder because it was next to a bookshelf, while the left one had a few more feet of open space.
Can It Really Replace a Soundbar?
An Alexa Home Theater built around four Echo Studio speakers turns out to be a surprisingly compelling home theater setup, delivering immersive, room-filling sound. With front and side/rear speakers equipped with multiple angled drivers—including upward-firing ones—the system provides solid coverage for spatial audio content. Even without a dedicated subwoofer, it delivers impressive impact.
At under $900 for all the components, it’s competitively priced, especially compared with most soundbar systems with both front and rear height channels, which typically cost well over $1,000. While routing everything through a Fire TV device may sound cumbersome, HDMI eARC worked reliably in my testing, making it easy to ignore the Fire TV side entirely and use the setup like any other HDMI-connected soundbar. The system is also flexible, supporting anywhere from two to five speakers and automatically recalibrating to changes in speaker placement in about a minute.
The Samsung HW-Q990F has center channel drivers and a much bigger subwoofer than the Echo Sub (Credit: Christian de Looper)
That said, Amazon’s Echo Sub subwoofer is much weaker than the subs included with most high-end soundbar packages. Its center channel reproduction without a separate center speaker also isn’t super-precise. A bigger and more expensive soundbar system like the 11.1.4-channel Samsung HW-Q990F ($1,999.99) will outdo Alexa Home Theater on every front, even with five Echo Studios and an Echo Sub.
In addition, it’s too bad Alexa Home Theater doesn’t let you mix and match speakers between the Echo Studio and Echo Dot Max. Not only would it enable more affordable configurations that still provide height channels, but the shorter 3.9-inch-tall Dot Max could be places more easily as a center channel between two Echo Studios.
Even with these caveats, I’m impressed with the immersive experience you can get from four Echo Studio speakers using Alexa Home Theater. It’s a capable solution for wireless spatial audio—and one that becomes even more attractive if you already own some of the necessary components.
About Our Expert
Will Greenwald
Principal Writer, Consumer Electronics
Experience
I’m PCMag’s home theater and AR/VR expert, and your go-to source of information and recommendations for game consoles and accessories, smart displays, smart glasses, smart speakers, soundbars, TVs, and VR headsets. I’m an ISF-certified TV calibrator and THX-certified home theater technician, I’ve served as a CES Innovation Awards judge, and while Bandai hasn’t officially certified me, I’m also proficient at building Gundam plastic models up to MG-class. I also enjoy genre fiction writing, and my urban fantasy novel, Alex Norton, Paranormal Technical Support, is currently available on Amazon.
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