Dreame Aura TV S100 Review: Big Sound, Rough Edges

Would you buy a television from the people who sell you a vacuum cleaner? That has stopped being an absurd question now that robot-vacuum maker Dreame has launched its first set, the Aura TV S100, into one of the most fiercely contested markets there is.

The mini-LED technology inside is nothing new — TCL and Hisense have had considerable success with it, helped by prices well below OLED sets from LG and Samsung. Dreame breaks that pattern: the starting price for the 65-inch Aura is high by the standards of the category it is entering. So does the vacuum maker have a different secret weapon than good display technology at a low price? It does, and it makes itself known before the set shows a single frame.

Hauling the notably heavy Aura out of the box, you quickly notice a huge speaker opening on the back, roughly the size of a dinner plate. Next comes the soundbar integrated into the bottom edge of the set, which promises serious output.

Also hard to miss are the gaps between the housing sections. Dreame has gone heavy on the audio hardware and light on the build quality — a fairly unique first impression, and a mixed one that continues through assembly.

Instead of two wobbly legs or a fiddly stand kit, the Aura comes with a single-piece base plate. Unfortunately it is plain moulded plastic that does not match the set's four-figure price tag, and the token metal finish on the front of the stand will not fool anyone paying attention to build quality.

Before that, the surprisingly bulky lightweight base has to be fixed to the set with four tiny screws. That sounds easier than it is: the screw point sits deep inside the foot and is hard to reach, and if you do not own the right crosshead screwdriver you will not find a suitable tool in the box. With the tool and a little manual dexterity the rest goes reasonably quickly, though the result does not really convince — like the pre-assembled housing sections, television and stand do not meet flush. At least the construction is not wobbly.

The view round the back is more conciliatory. The Aura S100 accepts every important television signal source — cable, satellite and aerial — and offers three HDMI slots for a Blu-ray player, games console and AV receiver. Other televisions offer four, but Dreame has made all of them HDMI 2.1, choosing quality over quantity, which serves demanding console gamers well.

Cables sit flush and pleasantly firm without being stiff, so the connections are clearly better finished than the housing. The labelling is less good: blurry stamping with no colour contrast is not a great service. The good news is that none of these connections is strictly necessary — plug in the power supply and the rest works over Google TV without a cable tangle.

There is good news and bad news about the interface, and they are the same news: Dreame has gone with Google TV. What is good about the largest smart-TV system is that the supply of streaming apps is secure for the long term. What is bad is the still-awkward initial setup, particularly for newcomers without a Google account — without one there is no access to the app store.

Once an account is linked, the interface is easy to live with and the home screen can be personalised, taking you straight to part-watched content across providers or to favourite channels. Less straightforward is the route to many television settings: the remote sits well in the hand and has all the important buttons, but Google TV's menu structure is convoluted.

Many owners barely touch the picture and sound settings at all. On Google TV there is more available than on some rivals, but finding the right submenu quickly takes practice. It helps that some picture and sound settings can be called up during playback without fully covering the picture, because the menus are not very self-explanatory and in places awkwardly translated. The Google TV learning curve drags on regardless of the manufacturer, because the settings menus carry no explanation at all. Fortunately the picture settings are not critical — though anyone chasing the best image will have to experiment a little.

Dreame has gone for the successful QD mini-LED combination: boosted light output behind a fairly conventional LCD panel with a colour-enhancing film added. The result is a very bright picture whose colours do not wash out. The much smaller mini-LEDs can be dimmed more precisely than conventional LEDs, so visible contrast errors are rarer. TCL has perfected this class of display to the point where even strikingly deep black is visible, something that used to be the preserve of expensive OLED sets.

Dreame's debut delivers that kind of bright, HDR-capable display too — but the wow factor is considerably smaller, because by 2026 QD mini-LED televisions are everywhere.

The Aura TV S100 has a sensationally broad speaker configuration that outstrips many home cinema systems on paper: 4.1.2-channel sound means four standard channels plus a dedicated bass speaker and two 3D channels for spatial audio.

It reads impressively and it genuinely does not sound bad. It just does not take your breath away as you might hope. This is a very well differentiated television sound system — but its output is not half as imposing as the marketing suggests. The plain figures make that clear: 70 watts of output is around ten per cent of what a moderately powerful home cinema system with a subwoofer manages. Anyone expecting real punch from the Aura's audio is setting themselves up for disappointment.

Where it is genuinely excellent is for anyone who wants fine film sound without adding a separate soundbar. If you want real pressure behind the sound, the substantial audio premium the S100 asks is not worth paying.

Dreame lands its first serve on the television market respectably enough, but not as an ace. Display quality is genuinely good and the picture is very bright thanks to the mini-LEDs — but established Chinese manufacturers offer the same for considerably less money.

The Aura's biggest argument is its extremely well differentiated sound system, which has few equals in a television. In terms of sheer volume, though, it is no revelation. The rough edges in build quality weigh especially heavily because Dreame has set the price for the S100 fairly high. Get that balance right and the vacuum maker will soon be genuinely competitive in televisions too.

No Amazon UK listing for the Aura TV S100 was found when we checked on 2 August 2026, so no price is quoted here and the links below run a live search. Search on Amazon UK or search on Amazon US