This article is on how to pick out the best soundbar for your needs. With TVs being so thin these days, there is not much room for speakers like there used to be. As a result, most TVs provide far worse sound than they did in the past.
A good soundbar will make it easier for you to understand what people are saying on TV, which we call the dialogue track, give you a better music soundtrack experience, and provide far richer deep bass than any TV speaker. The best ones can even put you in the middle of the action with immersive effects speakers. But, even more so than with separate home theater systems, there are different types of soundbar designs.
Here, we will go over how your listening and content tastes, your room size and shape, and where you will place your soundbar will impact your decision. We will not get into recommendations on specific models in this article as we have separate videos on that subject, but we may call out a particular model as a good example of what we are referring to.
Sound bars are available with all sorts of built-in speaker options. Some are just designed to improve the sound of your TV speakers without really addressing surround sound. Others are pretty large with lots of built-in speakers to give you an immersive surround sound experience. Some even almost replicate a complete home theater system with external effects speakers and separate subwoofers.
The first question we like to ask people considering a sound bar is what is important to you about your TV experience? We find there are three categories of answers.
For many people, they simply are having a hard time hearing and understanding dialogue clearly. This can be very frustrating and almost any soundbar will make a dramatic improvement on dialogue intelligibility. If this is all you need and you do not care about full rich bass or immersive effects, you will be satisfied with a basic soundbar.
The next level up is the person who wants to have great dialogue but also wants to get some sense of audio immersion and have full, rich bass. This is probably the most common category of soundbar buyers.
The final level is someone who wants to recreate the experience of dedicated home theater separate components but wants either the simplicity and/or space savings of a soundbar, the cost savings compared to home theater separates, or all three. These types of soundbars can put you directly in the middle of the action and provide quite deep and impactful bass response.
You will want to ask yourself which one of these categories you might fit into.
Within these categories, some people only want to use their soundbar for enhanced TV viewing, while others may also want to use it to enjoy music. If you do want to add music, you’ll want to be sure your soundbar has a way to play music via Bluetooth, Airplay, or Chromecast. Fortunately, most soundbars these days do offer a music streaming option. If voice control is important to you, confirm the soundbar you are looking at has that option as well, but our advice would be to choose the better soundbar for your tastes and room instead of choosing one based on it having voice control.
We will now get into each category and also help you understand how your room and placement will be important to think about as well.
We hope as you go through this, you will understand how passionate Audio Advice is about helping you get the best performance possible. Our team of experts is here to help you with anything home theater or home audio related and our world-class support team will be there for you should you have any issues setting up your new gear.
Basic Soundbars for TV Sound Improvement
This category will be the least expensive and for the most part, will make voices far clearer, more natural, and easier to understand than your built-in TV speakers. These come in a few configurations. You’ll find 2.0, 3.0, 2.1, and 3.1 systems. The first number represents the number of speaker channels in each and the second number represents the presence of a subwoofer or not. The 2 speaker versions will play back in stereo, whereas the 3 speaker versions have a dedicated center speaker. On soundtracks that are recorded in surround sound, and so many are these days, the 3 speaker versions can decode the center channel information and direct it to the center speaker in the soundbar for even clearer dialogue.
This type of soundbar will almost always have all of the speaker drivers in the front of the cabinet, which gives you a great deal of placement flexibility. They can typically be wall mounted under or above your TV, placed on top of the cabinet your TV sits on, as most are pretty short, or even put into a cabinet.
The models with a subwoofer will give you much more bass and will be especially good if you plan to also use your soundbar for music or if your room is pretty large. Some even have the option of adding a subwoofer later on.
All of these will have either an optical or HDMI ARC connection for your TV which means they will be compatible with almost any TV, but it's always a good idea to check your TV first for an optical or HDMI ARC output on its rear panel.
This is a great category for a wide range of people as the better ones really step up your TV sound whether it is for your primary entertaining space or a master bedroom, exercise room, or other rooms in your home where you want better TV sound but do not need full surround sound.
A really good example of this is the Sonos Ray. It is compact, has the Sonos music ecosystem, and you can add a subwoofer to it later.
