We absolutely love the settings option that allows adjustment of the surround effect, dialogue enhancement, late night mode, deep bass, and best of all, Lip Sync. If you’re watching TV and the lips seem out of sync with the sound, this option will allow you to fix it on the fly. We can’t wait to test it out with the sub and play around with the delay on the sub to fine tune it to the Pulse Soundbar. Finally, you have bass and treble adjustments.
Unlike many of the other streaming players on the market, Bluesound has created an ecosystem capable of playing back high-resolution audio files up to 24/192. They were also one of the first to implement MQA, a soon-to-be-released system that allows music companies to stream high-resolution audio files without eating up a ton of bandwidth.
Bluesound offers access to most music services, including Tidal, Deezer, Spotify, Napster, TuneIn, Slacker, HD Tracks, and Radio Paradise. As of the writing of this review, Pandora is not an option. In our opinion, though, Pandora has a pretty limited library, and there are plenty of other options.
Performance
We already had a Bluesound component setup in our testing environment, so adding the Soundbar to the system was a snap. For our test, we listened to the Soundbar by itself -- no sub. Sources were Tidal streaming in High-Resolution and a 4K Roku player.
We used some of our old standards and a few new pieces to test out the audio. The first cut was the classic, “Pink Houses” from John Mellencamp’s 1983 Uh-Huh album. This song has a bass line that can be somewhat hard to follow. You could clearly hear even the bass note tones fade away here. Turning on the deep bass eq made the bass line even easier to hear.
Next, we went back to an old favorite, Jimi Hendrix’s “All Along the Watchtower.” We thought it would be fun to experiment with the different wide settings to see if his guitar would get thrown out into the room. We concluded that music sounds best with wide turned off. It became a little screechy to us with wide turned to its max setting. Although, the sound was pretty amazing for an all-in-one, $1,000 unit.
Next, we used Bruno Mars & Mark Ronson’s “Uptown Funk” to see if the Soundbar could fill the room with dance music. Again, we were pleasantly surprised at the performance for what it is. The deep bass notes were very clear, and the music filled our large testing room with sound. We are looking forward to running this same test again with their sub added for even more punch.
Next was our “British TV dialogue” test. We enabled TV mode, which turns on “dialogue enhance” and sets the “wide” setting to the middle. Hearing the nuance of voices can be difficult, especially for all-in-one speakers like soundbars. Our favorite tests for this are shows where the characters have heavy accents. This time we used Paranoid (which, by the way, is a great murder mystery on Netflix). This particular show has both British and German characters. No need for subtitles with the Pulse Soundbar; it passed with flying colors!
We also found “late night” mode to be pretty cool. It is designed to reduce the bass and make the dialogue easier to understand. During our testing of Paranoid, we turned the volume way down, and setting to “late night” was a big improvement if you have it so quiet you are straining to hear things.
We then tried a couple of action clips to see how the Pulse Soundbar would do with big explosions while still keeping the dialogue intact, and once again, it performed really well.
Being able to fine tune all the settings turned out to be educational and a lot of fun.We think you will like music best in Music mode with all of the enhancements turned off. If you want to get more bass, feel free to push the “deep bass” button. For TV, we preferred the default “TV” setting, and for action movies, we liked the default settings achieved with the “movie” setting.
Finally we tested several 24/192 albums on our NAS drive. These albums were streamed wirelessly to the Pulse Soundbar. We never had a single drop out, which is saying a whole lot. When the Bluesound products first came out, we had tested the same thing on some of their wireless speakers and did not have as much success, so the team at NAD has obviously stepped up this circuitry.
