Audio is just as important as visuals when watching TV, but a lot of manufacturers overlook sound quality when producing televisions. By buying one of the best soundbars, you will significantly enhance your audio experience while watching movies, sports and TV shows. Dialogue will sound clearer, sound effects more impactful and music much richer. The good news to all of this is that you can do some tweaking of the sound through the remote. There’s only so much you can do with satellite speakers and a subwoofer of that size, but it’s nice having the option to turn them up or tweak them how you like and you can turn off the DTS Virtual:X if you find it distracting. If you’re part of the Alexa smart home ecosystem and want an affordable soundbar to slot neatly into it, the Polk React is the best choice around. If you’ve got a bit more cash to play with and want superior audio quality, we recommend you take a look at the Sonos Beam 2. Close attention is paid to sound reproduction across the frequency spectrum, with a focus on the three cornerstones of soundbar performance: bass response, dialogue clarity and crispness of treble. If there are different EQ presets available, we’ll try these out with appropriate content and all tests are run at a variety of volume levels, including maximum volume to push the product to its limits.

Having a wide array of connection options is always a bonus as you will never know what you might want to connect to your soundbar in the future. The most convenient is HDMI: this is the connection favoured by most modern soundbars, even cheap ones. You will most often see an HDMI input (or maybe even two or three), which you connect your sources to (games console, Sky box etc) and an HDMI output, which passes the video signal to your TV. As ever, the more connections, the better, as it gives you more flexibility in the future. Soundbars are slim, often rectangular, speaker systems with drivers positioned side by side that are designed to slot underneath your TV or to be fitted neatly to the wall. With front-facing drivers, even basic, budget soundbars typically offer more direct and clear audio than a TV. As well as wired connections, many soundbars also support Bluetooth for wirelessly connecting phones and tablets and some also have Wi-Fi, allowing for higher-quality music streaming, potential integration in a multiroom wireless speaker network and support for digital voice assistants such as Alexa and Google Assistant.Sports mode is one of four EQ presets available, with movie, music and night modes also on offer. They all do a good job at enhancing your audio experience when watching the content they’re designed to cater to, while Polk’s Voice Adjust technology allows you to increase how prominent dialogue is in the audio and works very well. There are a few options to improve your TV sound that range from the budget to the expensive, but a soundbar is one of the simplest ways as they are typically compact and require minimal cabling. They often also have added benefits, such as wireless streaming over Bluetooth or WiFi. Still, when it comes to diminutive soundbars capable of room-filling sound, you won’t find a better option than the MagniFi Mini AX. Just make sure that it will fit underneath your TV, as although it’s extremely narrow, it’s a little taller than many other soundbars on the market.

It’s worth keeping in mind, also, that 5.1 is no longer the pinnacle of sound quality – that title belongs to spatial audio formats like Dolby Atmos. While 5.1 can give you a plane of sound, Dolby Atmos immerses you in a sound field with top-firing speakers that provide a height channel to the mix. Those bars are more expensive than what Vizio is offering here, obviously, but they’re worth investigating if you feel like you might be interested in having a larger sphere of sound.Situated in a large 18 by 20-foot room with double-height ceilings, the Vizio Elevate was easily able to fill the space with dinosaur roars and bellowing superheroes. (Vizio says it can deliver 107 dB of sound pressure.) Out of the box, I found the system too bass-heavy, rattling the floor in the nearby kitchen (the subwoofer is rated to go down to 30 Hz). The remote makes it possible to adjust most settings, though finding them all takes some study of the user's manual.

Dolby Atmos is a relatively new surround-sound standard that expands upon the 5.1- and 7.1-channel setups previously offered by soundbars and other surround-sound systems. The main thing that Atmos adds is audio height: where other systems aim to surround you with audio to the side and rear, horizontally, Atmos extends that to sounds that come from above you.Manufacturers have tried, with varying success, to enhance the audio coming from their televisions. But, if you want to improve TV audio, you need a separate speaker designed for that purpose.

The subwoofer has a 6” woofer and connects wirelessly to the sound bar, however, the two satellite speakers are wired, and must be connected to the subwoofer. Fortunately, most soundbars have speech enhancement feature settings that will typically raise the volume of the centre channel and crispen up the EQ to help improve dialogue audibility. Not every brand implements this with sophistication, and sometimes these modes can sound thin and harsh, but once again, it's always worth experimenting to find what works for you and your space. How we test soundbars How we test soundbars Although soundbars are typically designed with film and TV in mind, we also put them through their paces with music too, testing out a range of streaming options with a variety of genres, both classic and modern, enduring that we listen in the highest quality that the soundbar is capable of.In our initial review of the Ray, we felt that its bass handling, which resulted in an unusual low-frequency resonant buzz across various movies and music, hampered its overall performance. However, since an update in July 2022, that problem has now been widely alleviated, and as such, we have upped our initial verdict from three to four stars. The key thing to know about optical is that it's restricted in bandwidth compared to ARC/eARC. So if you have the choice between the two and opt for optical, you might not be making the most of the audio decoding built into your soundbar. The most advanced immersive formats optical can handle are compressed Dolby Digital or DTS 5.1 surround sound, so that means no Dolby Atmos or DTS:X.