Sound Blaster Katana V2

Overview

The Sound Blaster Katana V2 is a 2021 gaming soundbar from Creative, built to sit under a monitor or a TV. The bar is 600 mm wide, 62 mm high and 95 mm deep, comes in black, and can be wall-mounted with the brackets in the box. A separate subwoofer connects to the bar with a cable.

Creative lists two tweeters, two mid-range drivers and one subwoofer driver in a tri-amplified design, where each driver type has its own amplifier. Creative rates the system at up to 126 W RMS.

Sources connect over HDMI ARC, optical, USB, 3.5 mm AUX-in or Bluetooth 5.0. Over USB the bar plays audio from a PC or Mac; Creative lists 24-bit/96 kHz playback over USB, and 5.1 surround over USB from a Windows PC. The bar also has a headset output and an SXFI output for headphones with Super X-Fi, plus two built-in beamforming microphones for calls.

The remote control has six programmable buttons. The Creative app (Windows, Mac, iOS and Android) adjusts the EQ, the Sound Blaster audio processing and the RGB lighting, which Creative says can show up to 16.8 million colors. The box also contains the power adapter, an optical cable, the manuals and the wall mount kit.

What the specs mean

• 2.1 speaker setup: two main channels plus a subwoofer channel. The ".1" is the wired subwoofer in the box. There are no centre, surround or height channels, and the system cannot be expanded with extra speakers.
• HDMI ARC: the Audio Return Channel sends the TV's sound to the soundbar over an HDMI cable. ARC carries compressed surround formats such as Dolby Digital; the newer eARC is needed for formats such as Dolby TrueHD and Dolby Atmos.
• Audio formats: Dolby Digital. Creative states that Dolby Digital decoding works over HDMI ARC and optical.
• No HDMI passthrough: the bar has no HDMI input, so a console or streaming box connects to the TV, and the TV sends the sound back over HDMI ARC.
• Super X-Fi and gaming modes: Super X-Fi is Creative's headphone technology that recreates a multi-speaker setup in headphones, personalised with a head and ear scan in the SXFI app. SXFI BATTLE Mode works in headphone mode only; Scout Mode, which Creative describes as highlighting in-game audio cues, works with both the speakers and headphones.