I unboxed the Heston 120 at nine in the morning and was playing the new Bowie reissue at eleven the following Tuesday, because the unboxing was an event. There is a brass nameplate. There is a vinyl wrap. There is a script logo and a satisfying knurled volume knob on top of the bar, of all places, and turning it past three with the right record makes the wine glasses on the shelf vibrate. This is a soundbar that has opinions about itself.
What Marshall got right is the thing it had to get right: this sounds like a Marshall. The low-mids have the warm, slightly forward push that the brand built its name on, and it carries from the kick drum into a vocal in a way that flatter, more clinical bars (you know which) do not. I ran Led Zeppelin, Frank Ocean, a Hans Zimmer score, and the dialogue from a Bond movie back to back and never wanted to touch an EQ.
The Atmos implementation is the other thing this bar pulls off. There are upward-firing drivers, side-firing drivers, and the bar is wide enough that the height channels actually have somewhere to bounce off your ceiling. In a normal living room with normal eight-foot ceilings, helicopter passes do the thing you want them to do. It is not the same as a real ceiling-speaker setup. It is much closer than the price would suggest.
There is no separate subwoofer in the box and, for most rooms, you do not need one. The bar packs two woofers and the cabinet is big enough to give them room to breathe. I ran it for a month before I thought about adding a sub, which is unusual at this size.
The catches are mostly about ecosystem and software. The Marshall app is fine for setup and EQ but it is not Sonos, and the multi-room story is much weaker than the competition's. AirPlay 2, Chromecast, Spotify Connect, and Bluetooth are all there; a proper Marshall whole-home system is not. If you already own Sonos and you want the new bar to join the rest of the house, this isn't the bar.
The other complaint is the included remote, which is small, plastic, and doesn't fit the rest of the design language. Use the HDMI-CEC pass-through with your TV remote and pretend the included remote doesn't exist.
At around $1,000, the obvious comparison is the Sonos Arc Ultra. The Arc is the smarter ecosystem choice and the better-mannered listener. The Heston is the more fun one. Which one you want is a question about what you actually do with a soundbar, and if you spend more evenings on the couch with a record than with a Marvel movie, this is the answer.
Verdict: Buy this if you care about how music sounds and you want a soundbar that's also a piece of gear.