Osaki OS Pro Soho 4D Massage Chair Review 2024

Do you suffer from constant pain? Are you in the market for a good-quality massage chair that will not only help make you feel better but also keep you from having to run to your local chiropractor’s office all the time?

If you answered yes to the questions above and your search for the right massage chair has led you to consider this model, we urge you to read our Osaki Pro Soho review before spending your money.

While this chair has a number of well-implemented features, it’s not one we can recommend, and in the sections that follow, we’ll tell you exactly why.

Before we even get to that, though, there are a couple of points we should clear up about this model.

First, it’s technically not an Osaki chair, even though it looks like every other Osaki massage chair and most people refer to it as such (a convention we’ll be following here, even though it’s technically not correct).

It’s actually made by Titan, but Titan is itself a subsidiary of Osaki, which explains why the two are used interchangeably.

It should also be pointed out that the chair we’ll be focusing on in this review is the Soho II. 

As you might guess, it is the successor to the Soho I, with the key difference being that the original Soho had an S-track and the updated version having a J-track.

We’ve provided the manufacturer’s links to both and note that the company charges the same price for both, so there’s literally no reason to get the short-tracked original if you can get the longer track without spending more money.

With those two things said, let’s take a closer look at this chair.

An Overview Of The Osaki 4D Pro Soho

The Soho’s design team sharpened some of the lines for this chair. It retains the same basic shape that most of the massage chairs on the market today boast—which gives it the signature futuristic look that massage chairs are known for—but this one is less rounded, and the sharper edges and corners give it a more industrial feel than its peers.

Ultimately, whether you like it or not comes down to personal tastes and preferences, but in our view, these subtle changes make the chair easier to blend in with your other living room furniture. And if you decide you want one of these, Titan makes it easy to color blend, offering this model in either black, brown, or taupe—neutral colors with a fairly universal appeal.

Even if you like the design, though, it’s worth pointing out that this is a fairly sizeable piece of furniture, with a footprint that measures 57.48” L x 29.53” W x 44.88” H when sitting upright and 64.96” L x 29.53” W x 42.52” H when fully reclined.

Despite its size, however, it’s easier than you might think to find a permanent home for the Soho—even if you have a smaller house or apartment—because it’s designed with space-saving technology, so you’ll only need 4.5” of space between the seatback and whatever wall you place it near.

Another important detail is the fact that the chair weighs in at a hefty 205 pounds, so it’s not easy to move around. You’ll either want to pay extra for White Glove service or have a friend (or two) on standby for the day the chair arrives.

The last thing to talk about before we leave this section is the fact that it’s got a really disappointing weight limit. The chair only supports 220 pounds of user weight.

That’s frankly awful.

While there’s no official standard, a broad survey of the massage chair market reveals that the informal average supported weight is 300 pounds. This chair falls well short of that mark, which is fine if you happen to weigh less than that, but if you weigh more, then it won’t matter how impressive you find this chair; the weight limit will be an absolute dealbreaker.

The Osaki Soho Utilizes Cutting-Edge Massage Chair Technology

This is a relatively strong component of our Osaki Pro Soho review, and to the design team’s credit, they didn’t cut corners here.

Let’s start with the fact that this chair features a J-Track design, which is a significant upgrade from the S-Track the original model sported.

The J-Track is functionally similar to the L-Track in that it allows the quad rollers on this chair to travel under the seat and massage your glutes and the backs of your thighs, but the angle is different and allows for a better body stretch and improved twist routines.

It’s also a “4D” massage chair, which means that not only do the rollers move along the X-, Y-, and Z-axis, making the chair capable of a good deep tissue massage (the first therapeutic benefit you’ll find on offer here), but it also boasts a 4D mode, which varies both the speed and intensity of the rollers depending on where they are on your body at the time.

That’s very good.

In addition to that, the Soho boasts Osaki’s excellent body scanning technology, which automatically adjusts the position of the rollers before your massage begins to make sure they’re hitting all the right spots.

This works the overwhelming majority of the time, but on those rare occasions where something goes wrong, you’ll find controls on the remote that allow you to manually tweak the positions of the rollers.

The Soho Sports An Above-Average Number of Massage Options

We’ve seen a number of Osaki OS-Pro Soho 4D massage chair reviews that really sing this chair’s praises on this front, and we largely agree. Compared to its similarly priced peers, the Soho brings a lot to the table here.

In looking at the basic massage chair techniques, we find:

The presence of two advanced techniques here makes this list shine. That’s huge, and Swedish is a hard-to-find technique in the massage chair world. 

There are maybe a dozen models in total that offer it, putting the Soho in elite company indeed.

The model doesn’t fare as well in terms of auto-programs as there are only six of these, but they’re all very good. They are:

The headline here is the Thai massage which incorporates a body stretch. Depending on who you ask, Thai stretching or Kahuna’s patented body stretch is either the #1 or #2 stretch in the industry.

We personally like Kahuna’s better, but this chair offers a phenomenal stretch, made even better by the aforementioned J-track. This is a powerful therapeutic feature, and if your favorite part of a trip to the chiropractor is the adjustment, you’re going to love this. Fair warning, though; it might be too intense for some!

In addition to that, you’ll find five different roller speeds and five different intensity levels. Note that the intensity levels are only available in 4D mode, which means that they don’t work with the pre-programmed routines, but rather only on manual massages you create for yourself. It’s a minor point but worth mentioning.

Finally, note that both spot and partial massage modes are available, so you can use this chair to really zero in on the parts of your back that hurt the most.

All of that sounds great, but here’s the bad news—the design of the remote is awful, and it makes accessing these features kind of a nightmare.

For instance, on most chairs, if you want to access the Shiatsu technique, you find a button on the remote labeled “Shiatsu,” and you press it, right? Because that would make sense.

Nope. That’s not what you get here. There’s one button for massage techniques; you just keep pressing it until you get the one you want. So you’ve either got to memorize what order the techniques come up in or just keep pressing the button like a maniac until you get something that feels good.

It didn’t have to be this way. The remote has an LCD. It would have been easy to design a menu with the various options available if there wasn’t room on the remote. This is just a sloppy design, making the chair frustrating and annoying to use.

Two-Stage Zero-G Seating!

This is a good component of our Osaki Pro Soho review, but poor implementation keeps this feature from being as strong as possible.

First, Zero-G seating is awesome, so the fact that it was incorporated into the Soho’s design is a definite plus. 

It is another powerful therapeutic addition to the chair because it helps lower your blood pressure, improves your circulation in general, and helps facilitate faster post-surgical healing. And on top of that, Osaki/Titan saw fit to include two different Zero-G seating options here, which is great!

Unfortunately, the feature implementation here suffers from the same problem that the massage techniques suffer from in the section we just left. You’ve got to press the same button multiple times to go to Zero-G 1, Zero-G 2, and then back to the upright position.

Granted, it’s not as bad here as when trying to find the technique you want, but there are better ways of doing this. So while we’re thrilled to see this feature included, we’re significantly less excited about the implementation.

Exceptional Heat!

We’d rate this as the strongest point of the Soho’s design and the strongest component of our Osaki Pro Soho review.

Only about half of the chairs on the market today offer heat, and most of those only offer heat in the lumbar region of the chair.

The Soho goes far, far above and beyond here. First, the rollers are heated, giving you heat from your neck to the backs of your thighs.

If that wasn’t enough, there are also heating elements in the upper portion of the leg massage ports, so your calves get the benefits of heat too!

In our view, this should be standard on every massage chair on the market. Heat is such a powerful therapeutic feature that users would be well served by its presence everywhere.

Sadly, we don’t make the rules, so that’s not what you find on the market today. But if your primary interest is heat and assuming that the scant weight limit isn’t a dealbreaker, this is the chair you want. The heat function here is best in class.

A Below-Average Air Massage

The Soho sports a total of 34 air cells, which is a bit below average for chairs offered in the mid-range. There are enough air cells to give a decent airbag-based massage, and this one can be customized from the remote via five different intensity levels, so that’s good. 

Our sense of it, though, is that the airbags are primarily present to support the Thai massage program, and the rest is kind of a bonus.

Even so, air massage is a nice feature, and we’re happy to see it here. It won’t be the reason you gravitate to this model over some other, but it’s a good addition to the Soho’s list of capabilities.

Oh, and before we forget, if you don’t want to activate all of the airbags for the full body treatment, you can selectively activate airbags by body region, but again, implementation is the problem.

Press the airbag button once, and you get full-body air. A second press gives you just the leg massage ports. A third gives you the arm airbags. A fourth gives you just the shoulders. Then off, then back to full air.

Bad design. So frustrating.

An Exceptional Calf and Foot Massage

We stand by our conclusion that heat is the signature feature of the Soho’s design, but this is a pretty close second. What makes the calf and foot massage so good here is the heated calf ports. Granted, it would be even better if the chair offered calf rollers to really knead and massage your calves, but honestly, even without that, this is a superb feature.

If your legs and feet are hurting all the time, this may well wind up being your favorite aspect of Soho’s design. We don’t think it’s a good enough feature to warrant a purchase for the calf and foot massage alone, but it is phenomenal, and for a certain subset of users, it’ll be a clear favorite.

A Few Extras Too!

We’re a little underwhelmed by the extras the Soho offers, but unlike some of the chair’s other shortcomings, we don’t find this a crippling or catastrophic weakness. The Soho provides a pocket to stash your phone in, Bluetooth speakers, and a massage timer.

All of the massage options on this chair default to a 20-minute duration, but you can set your massage lengths to 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, or 30 minutes, as you prefer. We would love to have seen even longer massage runtimes, but it’s not the end of the world, and it’s easy enough to just start a new massage after your first one ends.

There’s nothing outright wrong with these extras, but there aren’t enough of them for our tastes. 

This model would have been helped greatly by the presence of 2-3 memory slots, and a USB port would be a natural pairing with the Bluetooth speakers. Overall then, we were mildly disappointed.

Variants of Osaki 4D Pro Soho

Pros & Cons of Osaki Soho

So, where does that leave us?

We actually like a lot of what this chair has to offer. It has a good feature set and lots of options to play with.

Unfortunately, it’s saddled by what we feel are crippling weaknesses. For one thing, the weight limit is incredibly limiting, and even if that winds up not being a dealbreaker for you, then the design of the navigation system is enough to drive you mad.

Using this chair is simply harder than it needs to be. There’s no good reason for a user to have to just blindly press a button repeatedly to finally get to the massage technique they’re looking for or to memorize what order they come up in. That’s crazy.

Osaki 4D Pro Soho Conclusion

We can almost forgive the scant weight limit and just say that this is a very narrowly targeted chair, but the design flaws are just catastrophic. In our view, they make the chair more trouble than it’s worth, and we cannot recommend this model.

Other Options To Consider

If you agree with our reasoning and are looking for a good alternative to the Soho, here are a couple of models that we do recommend:

Boasting the industry’s best body stretch and offered by one of the finest companies in the industry, the Arete is a wonder. It’s brimming with features, and unlike the chair we just talked about, the impressively sized 7” flat-panel control system is super easy to navigate. This is implementation done right across the board.

The Paragon is a good value at any price, but the best thing about this chair is that Osaki often offers it at deep discounts, and if you can catch it on sale, it’s one of the best values on the massage chair market. This chair is amazing!

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Official Manufacturer Support

Reference & Resources

• Osaki Titan, Official Brand Website.
• Osaki OS Pro Soho 4D Massage Chair User Manual
• The Magical Massage: 4 Ways Massage Therapy Can Benefit Your Health, Penn Medicine.
• What is Holistic Massage Therapy?, Minnesota School of Cosmetology. 
• How Shiatsu Massage Reduces Both Stress and Pain, Dr. Axe.