Sharp Consumer Electronics has struck a distribution agreement with CANAL+ that will see the streaming platform pre-installed across Sharp’s TiVo-powered smart TV range in eight European markets.

The arrangement covers France, Hungary, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Belgium, and the Czech Republic, spanning the range of territories where CANAL+ currently operates its subscription service.

Nearly 30 years after Altec Lansing introduced the first multi-channel digital soundbar, Klipsch has just introduced another first: the first soundbar with integrated DIRAC Live room correction. Unveiled at CEDIA Expo 2024, the Klipsch Flexus Core 300 soundbar took a little longer than expected to hit the market, but it’s here now and we’re excited to put it through its paces.

What Is It?

The Klipsch Flexus Core 300 ($1,199.99) is the latest soundbar in the Klipsch Flexus line. The bar is described as “5.1.2-channel” as it uses both up-firing and side-firing reflective drivers to extend the soundstage above and around the listener. Amplifiers designed by sister company Onkyo are built-in, so you won’t need to add an A/V receiver or amplifier. The Flexus Core 300 supports both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X immersive surround as well as legacy audio formats like PCM, Dolby Digital and DTS surround. The company claims a frequency response of 43Hz–20kHz, though listening suggests that this is a bit optimistic, at least on the low frequency end.

The Flexus Core 300 bar features 285 total Watts of clean Onkyo power, driving 13 speakers. This includes four front-firing, two side-firing and two up-firing drivers as well as four integrated woofers for low frequency reproduction. The 13th driver is a dedicated ¾-inch horn loaded tweeter for the center channel.

At 54 inches wide, 3 inches tall and almost 5 inches deep, it’s one of the larger bars we have tested. It makes a great visual match for a 65 inch or 75 inch TV, though its depth will make wall-mounting a challenge. If you’re placing it on a credenza or console, be sure your TV’s stand or feet give you enough clearance so the bar doesn’t block the TV screen or IR sensor.

The bar includes an HDMI port with ARC/eARC for connection to a TV as well as a second HDMI port for direct source connection. This second HDMI port is particularly handy if you are using the bar with an older TV or projector without ARC/eARC support or one that is limited in its ability to pass through all audio formats.

The Flexus Core 300 also includes a fiberoptic digital audio input, an RCA output for a wired subwoofer, a USB-C port for digital music playback and firmware updates, an Ethernet jack for hard-wired network connection, as well as a mic input for the calibration microphone. The USB port marked “Transport” is for connection of a wireless transmitter dongle which enables optional rear speakers and up to two wireless subwoofers. The bar also includes Bluetooth and WiFi wireless connectivity with support for Apple AirPlay 2, Google Cast, Spotify Connect and TIDAL Connect.

Like most high-end soundbars, the Flexus Core 300 supports the addition of wireless rear channel speakers and a subwoofer. Actually the Core 300 can support up to two wireless subwoofers for enhanced immersion and low bass reproduction. And unlike most bars, the unit also includes a standard RCA subwoofer output so you can use it with virtually any third party powered subwoofer. In fact, you could connect two wireless subwoofers and a wired one for a prodigious amount of bass, even in a large room.

We tested the bar on its own and with the Klipsch Flexus SURR 200 rear speakers ($499/pair) and Flexus SUB 200 subwoofer ($599) for a total system price of around $2,300. A smaller SURR 100 speaker is also available which omits the up-firing driver. A smaller wireless subwoofer (SUB 100) is also available for use in smaller spaces.

The SURR 200 speakers include both front-firing and up-firing drivers, expanding the bar from 5.1.2-channels to 7.1.4 channels. They include a threaded stand mount, but no keyhole mount so you’ll need a stand or bookshelf for them (be sure not to block the upfiring driver for height sounds).

All That with a Side of DIRAC

What sets the Flexus Core 300 apart from any other soundbar-based system is support for DIRAC Live room correction. As soundbars and speaker systems expand to more and more channels, the speakers interact not only with their environment (walls, furniture and ceiling) but also with each other. DIRAC Live room correction identifies and corrects for room frequency anomalies by applying digital filters, adjusting phase, EQ and levels of each speaker. This allows the system to work more coherently as a whole, with all drivers helping to compensate for idiosyncrasies in the listening room.

The DIRAC version included with the Flexus Core 300 is the limited bandwidth version, though the full bandwidth version is available from DIRAC for a nominal upgrade fee (Currently $99).

Features and Functionality

In addition to DIRAC Live, the Flexus Core 300 has plenty to offer from a features standpoint. It decodes the two most popular immersive surround sound formats – Dolby Atmos and DTS:X – as well as other legacy versions of Dolby and DTS surround and PCM. It doesn’t support more obscure immersive formats like AURO-3D, Sony 360RA, MPEG-H or Eclipsa Audio, but few soundbars do. The Flexus 300 offers Night Mode for compressed dynamic range as well as a dialog boost in case you’re having trouble hearing voices over the action. Surround modes include “Movie” and “Music” which change the overall surround presentation and EQ curve. There’s even a tri-band equalizer (Bass, Midrange, Treble) in the mobile app.

The Flexus comes with a fairly robust remote control that handles all of the essentials, including direct buttons for each input selection, volume and mute. The remote also includes access to surround modes (Movie or Music), Dialog mode and Night mode. Another nice touch is that the remote provides adjustment of the surround channel levels (side, rear and height) as well as a variable bass control. Many bars require that you dive into the app for these kinds of adjustments.

While you can get sound out of the bar without doing a full set-up, you’ll be best-served installing the Klipsch Connect app for Android and iOS. This allows you to connect the system to the internet for firmware updates, enable Google Cast, adjust options, and make direct adjustments to the levels of the various speakers from within the app. The app is also essential to perform DIRAC Live calibration using the included microphone.

Pro Tip: If you want to see what audio format is coming into the bar, press and HOLD the LED light button on the top right of the remote control. This will display the surround format, e.g. Dolby Atmos or DTS:X on the soundbar’s LED screen.

The Set-Up

For the most part, the Flexus Core 300 is “plug and play.” If your TV has an HDMI port with ARC (Audio Return Channel) or eARC (enhanced Audio Return Channel), then this is the connection you should use. Connect an HDMI cable between the bar’s HDMI/eARC port and the TV’s HDMI/eARC port and this will get you sound from the TV, its on-board tuner, any built-in streaming apps and any devices connected to the TV. Though it should be automatic, you may need to get into your TV’s “audio output” settings menu to set the output to “external speakers” (or something similar) in order to enable the audio output over HDMI.

Once connected, we’d recommend installing the Klipsch Connect mobile app on your phone or tablet. Connect your phone or tablet to WiFi, load the app and click on the “+” button to add the Flexus Core 300 bar. The Klipsch Connect app will then walk you through the rest of the set-up. Be sure to enable “Google Cast” in the app if you intend to use that feature to cast audio from a phone, PC or tablet to the bar.

We listened to the bar on its own for a while, then added the optional Flexus Sub 200 wireless subwoofer and Flexus Rear 200 wireless speakers. Note that adding a wireless sub or wireless rear speakers requires connecting a wireless transmitter dongle to the rear USB port marked ”Transport” on the back of the bar. A dongle comes with the subwoofer and with the rear speakers.

The dongle that comes with the subwoofer is identical to the one that comes with the rear speakers, except for the pairing. If you use the dongle that came with the sub, you’ll need to manually pair the rear speakers by pressing the pairing buttons on both the speakers and the soundbar. And if you use the dongle that came with the rear speakers, then you’ll need to manually pair the subwoofer by pressing the pairing button on the sub and the bar. One dongle can support up to two wireless subwoofers and a pair of rear speakers.

After adding the rear speakers, rear channel height adjustments were automatically enabled on the remote and in the app.

I do have to mention that, after adding the rear speakers, I started hearing dropouts and other audio glitches coming from the rear right speaker. It was bad enough that I sent them back to Klipsch for a replacement pair, only to have the same problem with the new pair. Doing a bit of research, I found that the Flexus products can be subject to wireless interference from other wireless devices. Klipsch uses a proprietary low latency wireless “Transport Link” connection among its products. It transmits on the 2.4 GHz band and apparently this connection can be disrupted if your speakers are too close to a wireless router or network repeater.

After some debugging, I found the interference was not being caused by my main router, but by my TP-Link mesh network extender, which was around 5 feet from the right speaker. Fortunately I was able to move the repeater about 2 feet. And in that position it was far enough from both rear speakers not to cause any audible distortion or interference to either one.

DIRAC Live in Action

While I did do some listening before setting up DIRAC, most of my testing was done after running through the basic (bandwidth-limited) DIRAC Live correction and calibration process. Getting through it was simple, moving the included mic to three different positions while the app went through its test tone generation and measurements. The entire process took less than 15 minutes.

With the DIRAC profile applied, the biggest improvements were in bass definition and imaging precision in the lower midrange. A slight boominess in the lower bass in my listening room was pretty much eliminated by DIRAC and vocals stood out more clearly after calibration. Within the app, you can toggle back and forth, with and without DIRAC. I found the sound was pretty noticeably improved with DIRAC processing applied and didn’t notice any significant artifacts.

The limited bandwidth version only measures and corrects the speakers from 20 Hz to 500 Hz, so upper midrange and treble frequencies are unaffected by the calibration. If you’ve got a highly reflective or problematic room, you might want to invest the $99 to upgrade to the full bandwidth version of DIRAC Live.

Listening

On its own, the Klipsch Flexus Core 300 provided a huge upgrade in sound compared to the built-in speakers in our TCL QM8K TV. And those speakers are actually pretty decent as they were designed in partnership with Bang and Olufsen. Bass was more solid and extended, soundstage width and height was improved, and dialog intelligibility was dramatically improved. On Dolby Atmos and DTS:X content, sounds extended to the sides of the room, but nothing sounded like it was coming from behind me.

On clips like the intro scene from season 1 of “Andor,” rain fell gently from vaguely above and in front of me, while dialog in the nightclub was articulate and audible above the background music. On a more complicated Dolby Atmos scene like the worm attack on the spice crawler about an hour into “Dune,” the swirling sands, music and Bene Gesserit voices were a bit less coherent and distinct, though still vastly better than the sound from the TV speakers.

Moving onto Dolby Atmos music tracks like the EDM track “Alive” by KX5/deadmau5, spatiality on this track was pretty good with a wide, tall and deep soundstage but the bass drop was not super impactful. Additional Dolby Atmos music tracks, like “Rocketman” by Elton John reinforced this opinion. Good dynamics, nice width, some height, but not truly “immersive.”

Send in the Reinforcements

Truth be told, I’ve never been that impressed with a one-piece soundbar, except maybe the $70,000 one from Steinway Lyngdorf. The cabinet of a soundbar just isn’t large enough to do deep bass, and as good as virtualization has gotten over the years, nothing can substitute for a real pair of speakers behind the listening position to create an immersive surround soundstage. So I was eager to add the SUB 200 and SURR 200 speakers to the mix. Doing so was pretty simple. Since I used the wireless dongle that came with the SURR 200 speakers, they were pre-paired with the bar, and all I had to do was plug-in the subwoofer and hit the pairing button on both the sub and the soundbar in order to establish a link.

Adding the subwoofer and rear speakers immediately expanded the soundstage to encompass the whole room with a dome of sound, and bass took on much more impact, heft and substance with the SUB 200 active. Tracks that were a bit thin-sounding, like EDM tracks from Kx5, now had power and substance. And, when the chorus kicked in in Elton John’s “Rocket Man” in Dolby Atmos. the room exploded in sound, with my listening seat at the epicenter.

Diving back into music listening, I queued up my Dolby Atmos playlist on Amazon Music, which includes the Dolby Atmos remix of Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon.” The cash register sounds that open the song “Money” were spaced all around the room making me feel like I was inside the mix. The SURR 200 speakers were particularly effective at creating a full wall of sound behind the listening position. Integration from left rear to right rear was seamless. It literally sounded like there was a third rear speaker between the two actual ones.

Other favorite Dolby Atmos music tracks like Ed Sheeran, “Shape of You” and A-Ha “Take On Me” were reproduced on the Flexus system with great spatiality and seamless motion as voices and instruments moved around the room. And on mellower singer/songwriter tracks in Dolby Atmos like Aoife O’Donovan’s “Prodigal Daughter” and Freya Ridings’ “Lost Without You,” female vocals were presented naturally, without excessive stridency while the natural acoustics of the recording space were captured nicely.

It wouldn’t be a Dolby Atmos test without some content from Channa Da Silva, a.k.a. “Technodad.” On the Flexus Core system, his original track “Echoes” (available in Dolby Atmos on Apple Music) made awesome use of the entire soundstage, front to back, side to side and top to bottom with percussion and synth tracks dancing all around the room. Technodad also offers a Dolby Atmos calibration toolkit, which is super helpful in setting up a home theater or surround sound system. You can check out at SpatialCD.com.

For DTS:X we put on several UHD Blu-ray Discs, including “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.” About 20 minutes into the film, when Harry enters the magical world of Diagon Alley with Hagrid, the soundscape expands to encompass the entire room with sounds coming from above and behind the listening position. And on “Ex Machina” (also about 20 minutes in), we’re treated to a more claustrophobic sonic experience when a power failure leads to a series of warning tones and foreboding chirps.

The 4K UHD Blu-ray of “Blues Brothers” also features a remixed/remastered DTS:X soundtrack, used to great effect during scenes like the mall chase, with destruction, broken glass and debris raining from all directions. The DTS:X soundtrack also captures the ambiance of a live performance when Cab Calloway takes the stage for his performance of “Minnie the Moocher” in a huge auditorium and the Blues Brothers themselves follow with their own performance. The space of the concert hall was captured nicely in DTS:X on the Flexus system.

A Few Words About Stereo Music

Unlike some soundbars, the Klipsch Flexus Core 300 doesn’t currently offer a pure stereo mode. Any stereo content is automatically upmixed to Dolby Surround. You can choose between “movie” and “music” modes, both of which do a pretty good job keeping the stereo soundstage intact, with some air and ambiance added. Movie mode is a bit more dynamic and punchy, while music mode is more laid back, with nice clarity of male and female vocals in the center channel.

Caveats, But Not Deal Breakers

As I noted above, initial set-up of the rear speakers required me to move my mesh network repeater around to prevent interference with the rear speakers, but eventually I was able to find a suitable spot for it. Also, when casting music from my phone via Google Cast, the connection was inconsistent. Qobuz couldn’t reliably connect to the bar via Google Cast. Amazon Music could connect via Google Cast, even passing Dolby Atmos tracks to the bar, but it would sometimes randomly lose the connection, requiring a power cycle to reconnect.

I should note that this issue was device dependent – it worked better on a Google Pixel 10 Pro phone vs. Samsung Galaxy S21FE phone. But even on the Google phone, the bar would occasionally lose the plot, requiring manual disconnect and reconnect of the bar from Amazon Music. If you just access a playlist and hit “play,” you’ll probably be OK, but if you start moving around between tracks or experimenting with surround modes on the bar, you may lose the connection.

If you enjoy listening to music encoded in Dolby Atmos, you’re probably best off using a dedicated streamer like an Apple TV 4K (for Apple Music) or a Fire TV stick (for Amazon Music), either connected through the TV or directly to the Flexus Core 300’s dedicated HDMI port. This provided a much more reliable and stable listening experience. Of course, we still can’t get gapless playback for Dolby Atmos music tracks via streaming music services (which made listening to “Dark Side of the Moon” a bit annoying), but that’s not the soundbar to blame. For gapless playback on Dolby Atmos tracks, you’ll need to get your Dolby Atmos music on physical media like the amazing “Dark Side of the Moon” 50th Anniversary Dolby Atmos remix on Blu-ray Disc (which sounded particularly sweet on the Flexus Core 300 system).

Physical specifications of all components included in this review:

• Flexus Core 300 soundbar: 54 x 3.07 x 4.96 inches (WxHxD) | 18.7 lbs
• Flexus Sub 200 subwoofer: 15.25 x 15.25 x 15.25 inches (WxHxD) | 36 lbs
• Flexus Surr 200 rear speakers: 4.13 x 8.75 x 4.31 inches (WxHxD) | 2.5 lbs

The Bottom Line

Despite a few hiccups in the set-up process, as well as inconsistent Google Cast performance, the Flexus Core 300 soundbar put in a strong audio performance on music and movies. While I personally wouldn’t be satisfied with the bar on its own, I found that the full system – Flexus Core 300 bar, SUB 200 subwoofer and SURR 200 rear speakers provided a dynamic, expansive, almost cinematic experience at home and was equally competent with both music and movies. While the system price tag ($2,300) isn’t exactly “cheap,” it’s actually less than comparable flagship soundbar-based systems from Sonos and Sony. And with DIRAC Live room correction and calibration thrown in, the system actually provides solid value.

Pros:

• Punchy dynamic sound for music and movies
• Second HDMI port supports direct source connection
• Can do Dolby Atmos music from Amazon Music via Google Cast
• DTS:X support worked flawlessly from Kaleidescape and Blu-ray Discs
• DIRAC Live optimizes sound for your specific room

Cons:

• Rear channels are a bit low in the mix (but can be adjusted)
• Google Cast connection was a bit unreliable
• Rear speakers were subject to wireless interference from Wi-Fi router (but fine once I moved the router)
• No analog/aux input
• No support for IMAX Enhanced, 360RA, Auro-3D

Where to buy:

Related Reading:

The enterprise software industry spent two decades selling seats. Buy a licence for every employee who needs access, multiply by the number of employees, and the revenue model was as predictable as the quarterly earnings calls that reported it. Then AI agents arrived, and the arithmetic broke. In the first quarter of 2026, AI-native spending surged 94 per cent year on year, according to market data cited by enterprise platforms repositioning themselves for the shift. Traditional SaaS grew at eight per cent. The gap is not narrowing. It is the gap between an industry that sells tools and an industry that sells outcomes, and the companies on the wrong side of it are running out of time to cross.

The reckoning

On 3 February 2026, a date the financial press now calls the SaaSpocalypse, approximately 285 billion dollars in market capitalisation was erased from software-as-a-service companies in a single 48-hour window. The trigger was not a single event but an accumulation of them: Anthropic’s release of open-source enterprise agent plugins, a wave of agentic AI product launches from Salesforce, ServiceNow, and Google, and a growing body of evidence that AI agents could compress the number of human users a company needed to operate its software. Wall Street looked at the per-seat pricing model that underpins most enterprise SaaS revenue and concluded that hundreds of companies were structurally overvalued. If one AI agent could do the work of ten employees, why would a company pay for ten seats?

The numbers have not recovered. Public SaaS growth rates have declined every quarter since their 2021 peak. For the first time in the modern era, software stocks trade at a discount to the S&P 500. Gartner predicts that by 2030, at least 40 per cent of enterprise SaaS spending will shift from per-seat pricing to usage-based, agent-based, or outcome-based models. Seat-based revenue’s share of enterprise software contracts has already fallen from 21 per cent to 15 per cent in twelve months. The model that built Salesforce, ServiceNow, Workday, and every enterprise software company that followed them is not dead, but it is no longer the default, and the companies that have not begun the transition are watching their valuations compress in real time.

The pivot

Into this environment, a Hong Kong-based omnichannel messaging company called Omnichat has announced its rebrand as an AI-native agentic customer experience platform, rechristened Omni AI. The company, which serves more than 5,000 enterprises across Asia-Pacific, the United Kingdom, and the United Arab Emirates, is replacing its rule-based automation tools with what it calls AI Employees: autonomous agents that can be onboarded with brand-specific knowledge, manage customer interactions across WhatsApp, LINE, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, WeChat, TikTok, and KakaoTalk, and execute marketing campaigns from concept to deployment using natural language instructions rather than manual configuration. The company claims two consecutive years of 130 per cent year-on-year growth in Southeast Asia and says its platform has processed more than three billion messages and generated over 100 million dollars in revenue for its clients in the past twelve months.

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Omnichat’s pivot is not unusual. It is exemplary. Across the enterprise software landscape, companies that built their businesses on workflow automation, customer relationship management, and marketing technology are racing to reposition themselves as AI-native platforms before the market decides they are legacy. The difference between the companies that survive the transition and those that do not will be determined not by the sophistication of their AI models, which are increasingly commoditised, but by the depth of their integration into customer workflows and the switching costs that integration creates.

The new architecture

Wonderful, an Amsterdam-founded enterprise AI agent platform, raised 150 million dollars in a Series B round in March 2026, reaching a reported 1.7 billion dollar valuation just eight months after emerging from stealth. The company has deployed production-grade agents across more than 30 countries in telecom, financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare. Nexus, a Brussels-based startup backed by Y Combinator and General Catalyst, raised 4.3 million dollars to let non-technical enterprise teams deploy AI agents in weeks through natural language descriptions rather than code. Orange, the French telecom, deployed a customer onboarding agent through Nexus in four weeks and reported a 50 per cent increase in conversion rates, generating more than six million dollars in annual lifetime value from a single agent.

Tencent launched ClawPro, an enterprise AI agent management platform built on OpenClaw, allowing businesses to deploy agents in as little as ten minutes with controls for template selection, model switching, and compliance. More than 200 organisations adopted the platform during its internal beta. Anthropic shipped a suite of pre-built AI agents for financial services, targeting anti-money-laundering investigations that previously took hours and compressing them into minutes. Salesforce rebuilt Slackbot around more than 30 new AI capabilities, transforming it from a conversational assistant into an agentic system that can transcribe meetings, monitor desktop activity, and execute tasks through third-party tools. The pattern is consistent: every major platform is embedding autonomous agents into its core product, and every startup that raised money in the past six months positioned itself as the infrastructure layer for the transition.

The economics

The shift from seats to outcomes changes the fundamental economics of enterprise software. Under per-seat pricing, revenue scaled linearly with headcount. A company with 10,000 employees paid for 10,000 licences. Growth came from expanding the customer base or increasing the price per seat. Under agent-based or outcome-based pricing, revenue scales with the value the software delivers rather than the number of humans who interact with it. A single AI agent that resolves a thousand customer service tickets generates more economic value than a thousand seats on a help desk platform, but it might be priced at a fraction of what those seats cost. The vendor captures a larger share of the value it creates, but the total addressable market shifts from the software budget to the labour budget, which is an order of magnitude larger.

This is the economic logic behind the 94 per cent surge in AI-native spending. Enterprises are not simply replacing old software with new software. They are replacing headcount-dependent processes with agent-driven ones, and the budget for that replacement comes from operational expenditure, not the IT line item. Deloitte predicts that more than 50 per cent of digital transformation budgets will be allocated to AI in 2026. Gartner forecasts that 40 per cent of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by the end of the year, up from less than five per cent in 2025. NeoCognition, which raised 40 million dollars in seed funding from investors including Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan and Databricks, is building self-learning agents designed to improve over time within a vendor’s specific operational context, addressing the reliability gap that currently limits agent autonomy: current agents complete tasks as intended only about half the time.

The question

Omnichat’s rebrand captures the tension at the centre of the enterprise AI transition. The company is not a frontier AI lab. It did not build a foundation model. It raised 2.6 million dollars in total disclosed funding, a rounding error compared to the billions flowing into companies like Wonderful and Anthropic. What it has is 5,000 enterprise customers, integrations with the messaging platforms that dominate commerce in Asia, and a decade of data on how businesses communicate with their customers across WhatsApp, LINE, and WeChat. The bet is that those assets, the customer relationships, the workflow integration, the channel-specific knowledge, are more valuable in the AI-native era than the AI models themselves, which any company can access through an API.

It is the same bet that every enterprise SaaS company is making, and the market has not decided whether it is right. The SaaSpocalypse repriced the assumption that per-seat software companies would grow indefinitely. The question now is whether the companies that pivot fast enough can capture the new economics of agent-based value delivery, or whether the AI-native startups that were built for the new model from the start will take the market before the incumbents complete their transformation. Gartner says 35 per cent of point-product SaaS tools will be replaced by AI agents or absorbed within larger agent ecosystems by 2030. That is not a prediction about technology. It is a prediction about which companies will still exist. The 94 per cent growth rate in AI-native spending is not a trend line. It is a countdown, and every enterprise software company in the world is watching the clock.