Give your living room a boost with our top soundbar picks
Time was – and it’s not all that long ago – that a soundbar was simply a solution to chronic flatscreen TV sound rather than a multifunctional product in its own right.
Sick of listening to what sounds like two wasps trapped in a glass bottle every time you turn your television on? Get yourself a top smart soundbar.
Happily, these days the humble soundbar is an altogether more confident and ambitious device.
As well as putting a rocket up the audio accompanying your video, the best soundbars feature some top smart speaker functionality and are perfectly capable of joining in with a wider Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant-based multiroom audio system.
They are sometimes accompanied by wireless subwoofers, for the true shock and awe demanded by a blockbuster movie soundtrack.
They can sometimes connect wirelessly to rear speakers for a truly surround-sound experience. They might be able to give a facsimile of Dolby Atmos spatial audio. In a few instances they have more streaming options than your smart TV.
Here we’ve rounded up the best pound-for-pound smart soundbars you can buy. Admittedly they’re all pretty much the same basic shape, but we’ve covered all sizes and all price-points – and they’re all a big improvement on the sound your television makes by itself.
Denon Home 550

$649
Here’s the proof that your soundbar doesn’t have to be big to be premium, and just because it isn’t big that doesn’t mean it’s not clever.
The Home 550 is tidy enough (75 x 650 x 120mm) to sit happily below TVs between 40 and 55 inches, and made from material good-looking and tactile enough to make it look the part when it’s there.
And thanks to its pair of HDMI sockets (one of which is eARC-enabled) it’s not about to hog your TV’s HDMIs. Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Apple AirPlay wireless connectivity don’t do any harm either.
It’s got smarts, thanks to Amazon Alexa voice control, and it’s part of the HEOS family of products both Denon and its sister company Marantz have been having such success with.
The HEOS app includes all sorts of chances for fiddling with performance, building a multiroom system, adding your favourite music streaming services and what-have-you.
Despite the fact that its pair of 19mm tweeters, four 55mm full-range drivers and three 50x90mm ‘racetrack’ passive radiators all face forwards, the Home 550 wants to deliver a bit of Dolby Atmos-derived height to its sound. It does this by deploying some fearsomely complicated digital sound processing.
And the results are very listenable indeed. Oh, you’re unlikely to be fooled into thinking there are speakers above your TV, let alone in the ceiling above you, but the Denon does a good job of delivering sound with appreciable width and height.
It’s a chunky and precise listen, several orders of magnitude better-sounding than the TV you hook it to. It’s even a half-decent speaker for music.
It won’t thank you for winding the volume right up – at high levels quite a bit of the Home 550’s composure deserts it. But keep the volume levels civilised and there’s plenty to admire here.
Sonos Arc

$799
The biggest and most expensive speaker in the entire Sonos line-up is also one of its very best. As long as you can find the space for its slim-but-extensive 87 x 1142 x 116mm chassis, no other accommodations need to be made.
As you might expect, the Sonos Arc is a thoroughly specified soundbar. A total of 11 drivers, each with discrete amplification, are angled to provide appreciable height and width to the sound; eARC HDMI, Wi-Fi and Apple AirPlay 2 offer ample connectivity; the Sonos S2 control app allows you to specify your favourite voice assistant.
In fact, the S2 app comes a close second to outright sound quality when considering what’s most impressive about the Arc.
It’s stable, logical, and an absolute model of clarity – getting what you want done takes no time and is no struggle. Sonos is well on the way to ubiquity, and that’s just as much thanks to the user experience as is the audio performance.
Mind you, audio performance here needs no excuses made for it. It’s detailed in every part of the frequency range, and communicates through the all-important midrange with something approaching relish.
The soundstage it serves up is plenty bigger and wider than the soundbar itself, and with some appropriate content playing it’s capable of delivering authentic height to its sound.
Tonality is even and naturalistic, dynamism is considerable… basically, the sound the Arc makes relates to the sound of your TV alone in the same way a battleship relates to a rowing boat.
In terms of smartness, you can choose between Google Assistant or Alexa.
Sonos Beam (2nd-gen)

$449
Somehow the second version of Sonos’ handily sized entry-level soundbar has met with just as much acclaim as the first, despite the fact that its biggest upgrade over the product it replaces (Dolby Atmos sound) is the least impressive aspect of its performance.
To be fair, though, in many ways it’s quite easy to understand the appeal of the Sonos Beam Gen 2.
It’s usefully compact (69 x 651 x 100mm), flawlessly constructed and finished, makes a very accomplished sound where both movies and music are concerned, and is part of the best/most usable/easiest ecosystem in all of Electronicsland (see Sonos Arc, above).
Sonos soundbar showdown: Sonos Beam 2 vs Sonos Arc
It’s got most of the sonic performance and all of the pride of ownership to justify the asking price – and in Amazon Alexa and Google Assistant, it’s got that smart-control aspect to its specification which can be a deal-breaker for some customers.
So while the Dolby Atmos aspect of the Sonos sound is subtle (if you’re being charitable) or underwhelming (if you’re not), and the lack of HDMI passthrough is simple willfulness, in every other respect the Beam 2 pretty much exemplary.
Dialogue is crisply distinct, the subwoofer-less low frequencies are bold and punchy, there’s a stack of bite and attack at the top end.
The ‘height’ aspect aside, the Beam’s soundstage is big and believable, and it breathes more than deeply enough to offer proper dynamic headroom. It’s even got admirable elements to its reproduction of music, particularly where rhythmic expression and tonal variation are concerned.
Philips Fidelio B97

$999
There are some quite large numbers attached to the Philips Fidelio B97 soundbar, and that’s before we get to the price.
Mind you, to describe the Philips as simply a ‘soundbar’ is to undersell it somewhat – really it’s more of a modular home cinema surround-sound system.
So yes, some of the numbers. The B97 is configured as a 7.1.2 Dolby Atmos package – and thanks to speaker drivers facing upwards at an angle from the main body of the soundbar itself, it is able to bounce sound off your ceiling and create a convincing sensation of sonic height. It’s packing 450 watts of power – a full 240 of which are given to the wireless subwoofer.
Both ends of the shiny, beautifully built and finished soundbar detach and can be used as wireless rear speakers for a true surround-sound experience – with the rear speaker modules attached to the soundbar, it’s a significant 130cm long.
So you’ll need a big TV to put it under if it’s not going to look a bit daft.
There are numerous connectivity options, including a couple of HDMI sockets with eARC and 4K passthrough, Chromecast, DTS Play-Fi, Apple AirPlay 2 and Spotify Connect.
So getting digital audio information on board is no struggle. And as well as physical controls, a remote handset and app, it’s possible to control the Philips using Alexa or Google Home.
And no matter whether or not you’re using the modules as part of the soundbar or as rear speakers, the B97 is a big, assertive and quite immersive listen. Its tonal balance is good (which, when you consider that powerful subwoofer is fitted with an 8-inch driver, is by no means a given), its soundstage is expansive (in all directions) and there’s a mild-but-definite sensation of height to its sound when it’s dealing with an Atmos soundtrack.
Effects positioning is believable, detail levels are high. So if you have a big enough TV (and deep enough pockets), the Fidelio B97 takes some beating.
Polk React

$249
At this sort of money you can’t expect miracles – and it’s to its credit that Polk’s React soundbar doesn’t attempt to deliver them.
Instead, it serves up robust and entertaining stereo sound from a manageably sized soundbar, adds a dash of Amazon Alexa smart-speaker functionality (and is Alexa MRM compatible), and offers an upgrade path to full-on surround-sound should you so desire.
So we’re tempted to ask “what more do you want? Jam on it?”.
Guide: Alexa Multi-Room Music explainer
In the long-established Polk manner, the React (which is a usefully tidy 56 x 864 x 121mm) is functional more than luxurious in the way it’s made, and effervescent rather than subtle in the way it sounds.
Which is in no way a bad thing, you understand – where your TV almost certainly sounds thin and tentative by itself, with the Polk React attached via its single HDMI socket your sound is suddenly forthright, burly and exciting.
It’s not the last word in detail retrieval or nuance, not at all, but by heavens it’s lively. Its presentation is wide, quite well defined and uncompromisingly dynamic.
As well as HDMI, you’ve Bluetooth wireless connectivity. As well as Alexa, you’ve a small-but-thorough remote control handset with which to issue instructions.
No Atmos doesn’t mean the Polk React won’t be a perfectly capable TV soundbar, with Dolby Digital and DTS 5.1 supported and, if you want something more ‘real’ then you can add Polk Audio SR2 wireless rear surround speakers and/or the React Sub wireless subwoofer to the mix for a genuine 5.1 system.
Roku Streambar

$129.99
Not so much a soundbar as a soundbrick, the Roku Streambar is perhaps the smartest product in this entire line-up.
A tiny (61 x 356 x 107mm) ‘TV audio’ system rather than anything as ambitious as ‘cinematic’, it’s an extremely thoughtful and aggressively priced product.
As well as giving your feeble TV sound a very welcome boost, the Streambar can bring some smart functionality to an unsmart TV or (more likely) fill in some of the gaps in your smart TV’s selection of apps.
Got a TV you like that doesn’t have Disney+, or Hulu, or Apple TV? Attach the Roku via its HDMI cable and suddenly your app count is up to snuff and your audio enjoyment is considerably enhanced too.
Effectively it acts as a streaming stick.
There’s Wi-Fi, AirPlay 2 and Bluetooth for wireless connectivity and there’s Google Assistant, HomeKit and Amazon Alexa for painless and responsive control.
As long as you keep both the price and the physical dimensions of the Streambar uppermost in your mind, its audio performance is very acceptable indeed.
It’s a reasonably smooth and distinct listen, hustles voices in the midrange to the front of its compact, coherent little soundstage, and projects well. There’s not much in the way of dynamic expression here, and as a music speaker it’s rather blunt and two-dimensional… but everything is relative, right?
How much smartness, and how much audio fidelity, can you realistically expect for your that price tag? Exactly.