TCL’s new Z100 speakers are the first with Dolby Atmos FlexConnect, which promises to make surround sound setup super easy

There’s a certain kind of LA day that looks color-graded for Dolby Vision, whether it needs it or not. Taking an early morning walk along Palisades Park, the marine layer is soft as gauze, palm trees contrasted against the Pacific lapping low and slow against the sand. Perfect conditions for a pilgrimage. But I haven’t flown all the way to Santa Monica for gazing at sky gradients or even screens. I’m here for another Dolby technology, stretching my legs before heading to Universal Music Group Studios to see how immersive audio mixes get made, and how TCL plans to unmake your assumptions about living-room sound with its Z100 speakers—the first-to-retail Dolby Atmos FlexConnect wireless surround sound system.

Leaving behind the sounds and stories swirling around the pier, I arrive from one immersive experience in search of another. Inside the recording facility’s lounge, small gray fabric-clad columns occupy every available surface along the perimeter. But before we have time to explore their significance, we’re ushered into one of the mixing rooms. It’s a tuxedo of a space, impeccably tailored, PMC monitors threaded along the walls and ceiling precisely to measure.  

This is a 9.1.4 room, which means nine ear-height speakers map a horizontal stage, one LFE channel handles the gut-check, and four overheads draw the Z-axis—basically a sphere for sound to skate on. Nick Rives, Grammy-nominated UMG recording engineer, eases us into the format: Atmos is object-based. You don’t aim a guitar at a rear surround; you place that guitar in space. You don’t just pan; you paint. The renderer translates that across speakers and then keeps it there across wildly different systems—temples like this, 5.1 holdovers, soundbars, headphones and earbuds—so the intent translates even if the speaker count doesn’t. That creative latitude, he explains, means fewer “sonic sacrifices” than stereo; with more real estate, clashing frequencies can move apart instead of elbowing for the same seat. There will always be a place for comb filtering and EQ compromises, but it’s nice when more elements coexist appropriately without carving away each other’s character. 

Rives cues a mix. The visualizer on the screen—green spheres tracking each element—looks like an orrery of audio: a brush of synth passes across the horizon, a whisper crawls behind us, as if the singer slipped in through a dimensional rift. Rives solos a part and just … moves it effortlessly from front to height to rear. The lesson lands as the sound floats: instruments and effects aren’t locked to lanes; they’re placed at coordinates in a three-dimensional field.  

If you’re new to this, a quick compression of history: we went mono to stereo to 5.1 (and its surround-sound cousins) to Atmos, which cracks the ceiling. Atmos showed up in cinemas in the 2010s, spread into streaming and music, and now sits everywhere from TVs to cars; Dolby’s role isn’t just an emblem on a box but a pipeline of tools from DAW plug-ins to the renderers that recompose a mix for your specific speakers. While different hardware manufacturers have their own interpretations and virtualizations, the core technology is less “special effect,” more “faithful map.” 

We exchange a few questions, discuss dynamic headroom and creative headspace, then we’re taken to another room to see how all that console choreography gets reproduced in the real world—where coffee tables, bookcases, and sofas could care less about canonical speaker angles. We take our seats in a simulated living room, a couch and stools placed in front of a TCL QD-Mini LED TV, flanked by two of those previously seen obelisks, another off to the side behind us.  

We’re then introduced to the Z100, which Scott Ramirez, TCL’s VP of product marketing, describes as “not just a new product introduction; this is actually a new category introduction.” These coffee table cylinders don’t announce themselves—they look more like home decor than pro gear or a new paradigm—but they have the auspicious distinction of being the first product on the market featuring FlexConnect.

The FlexConnect arc reads like a tour itinerary of a band that keeps getting upgraded venues: unveiled with TCL at IFA 2023; Hisense announced its own plans in 2024; deployments started in China; MediaTek showed off bar integrations in January 2025; TCL announced U.S. support in May; and now systems have landed stateside. We get a little more why before we find out if it wows. 

As explained by Dolby’s Chris Turkstra, FlexConnect takes the object coordinates from a movie or music mix and re-renders them based on two things it learns: where your devices actually are and what each device is capable of. TV speakers small? FlexConnect knows and assigns them work they can do gracefully while offloading the punch and presence to the Z100s, which, when connected to a compatible TCL TV (currently the 2025 QM6K, QM7K, and QM8K), report their own characteristics to the array. Think of FlexConnect as a conductor who not only knows the score but also the lung capability and grip strength of everyone playing.  

If Atmos maps intent and FlexConnect maps reality, the Z100 invites them to meet in the middle. Each Z100 speaker is a self-contained, 5-pound 1.1.1 acoustic structure (separate main, bass, and height drivers) rated at a muscular 170W RMS. A silk-dome tweeter sat behind the grille, a mid driver carried the body, and a discreet top-mounted driver with a 15-degree tilt handled height effects. The components inside include premium parts like neodymium magnets and deeply wound voice coils co-tuned with Dolby, so “wireless” doesn’t have to mean “weightless.” You can connect up to four of the $399 speakers, or three plus a wireless 130W subwoofer with a 5.25-inch driver—a cap influenced by chipsets and bandwidth, but not by any inherent ceiling in the Dolby tech. While today’s demo is TCL-to-TCL, FlexConnect itself is Switzerland, not a silo.

It’s the three satellite-one subwoofer configuration that we hear, which offers a frequency range of 45Hz – 20kHz. We start with Dolby’s “Nature’s Fury” sizzle reel, then a contemplative scene from The Two Popes, then Top Gun: Maverick for the “we get it, you like it loud” crowd. Finally, a spectral Billie Eilish track plays, followed by Elton John’s atmospheric “Rocket Man,” an Atmos chestnut. Wind spins around our shoulders as thunder crackles overhead. Jets strafe the sofa. A phantom singer manifests. Backup vocals billow. The motion stays continuous and the center image locked, despite speakers perched on side tables.

Admittedly, it’s still possible to localize the rear speaker with it all the way to our right, so we ask if it can be moved more centrally, which can also give us a chance to see if the “simple” in the “simply spatial” pitch is more than marketing confetti. The basic setup is simple: plug speakers into power; your leader device, in this case a TCL TV, detects them over Wi-Fi; a pop-up offers to configure; intelligent optimization runs via the TV’s built-in mic array—no bundled tripod mics, no sci-fi sweeps. A UI (shown below) displays a map of where the TV thinks you placed everything for visual confirmation and any needed adjustments; if someone stood in front of one during calibration (it happens), remap in seconds. 

You can migrate furniture, or not want to move the ficus, and the system should easily adapt to where you’ve situated the Z100 speakers. Should being the operative word. Connected audio demos aren’t without their gremlins. With everything rearranged, one speaker refuses to be recognized. Cue the universal fix: Off/on. One polite calibration later, and we’re back to rain showers and high-risk, low-altitude missile strikes. It can happen to you, it can happen to them. The tech is forgiving, so it hopes you are, too. 

The Z100 speakers also feature Bluetooth 5.3 for direct music streaming, though that’s a side quest—the main story is the Wi-Fi link to the TV, which meets Dolby’s latency/quality requirements. So you can use native apps, play Spatial Audio off Apple Music, or even stream AirPlay content to your TV and have it route to the system, knowing everything will be in sync, whether you’ve got two, three, or four speakers. 

No, it won’t replace the discrete components of a custom install. It won’t convert audiophiles and forum-reading home cinema enthusiasts. But it’s not designed for that. The primary goal of a plug-and-play system is to free the average living room from the tyranny of sweet-spot symmetry. It’s an ambient presence, making the room you have feel improbably bigger than its dimensions without taking up space you can’t spare. No diagrams, no measuring in degrees, no dread. More dopamine. With the Z100, TCL and Dolby Atmos FlexConnect want to add fidelity and remove friction, treating your room as full of resources, not restrictions.

 

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