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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   2150 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 30, 2025

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Does anyone have any recommendations for a soundbar? Not looking to break the bank or go crazy on features, but don't want to totally cheap out either, willing to go for anything in the <$200 range. Just something fairly simple, to make movies/music/games sound better (especially bass) than through my TV speakers.

After a very cursory search, the Sony S100F (which goes for only about $100) seems like basically what I'm looking for... but I'm curious if any of the tech-y people here have some personal recommendations. I'm not afraid to spend a little more money if the product is worth it.

https://www.costco.com/samsung-hw-b73cdza-5.1-channel-soundbar-with-dts-virtual%3ax-and-wireless-subwoofer.product.4000280108.html

I got this with my new Samsung tv

It’s great - makes a significant difference.

Would highly recommend

As the resident audio enthusiast, I can only think of a couple use cases for soundbars, neither of which would seem to apply here. The logic behind soundbars is that, with televisions getting ever thinner, they lack the internal real estate to produce decent sound. This may be true enough, but I've sampled numerous soundbars at my parents' house and various vacation rentals, and I haven't noticed much of an improvement (and I say this as someone who can normally detect subtle differences between speakers). For soundbars to give a sleek form factor, they suffer from similar limitations as televisions, namely limited driver size and depth of cabinet. You simply aren't going to get significant bass improvement from 2" full range drivers, and models with subwoofers have to set the crossover frequency higher than normal.

There is an improvement in sound, but if you're the kind of person who listens to music streamed from Spotify over a small Bluetooth speaker, it isn't going to be the kind of improvement that's noticeable, and even a cheap stereo system is going to perform much better. This is especially true for movies, where most of the sound consists of human voice frequencies that are easy to reproduce. If you watch action movies with a lot of explosions and the like, TV speakers will have trouble producing deep bass, as you alluded to, but a soundbar without a subwoofer isn't going to make much of a difference in that respect.

The first use case I can think of is if your TV produces sound that is noticeable bad rather than merely inadequate, e.g if it sounds tinny or there is a noticeable resonance. In that case, it may be worth getting a cheap soundbar, but I wouldn't splurge for one. The other use case is if you're the kind of person who actually can detect minor improvements, but is prevented from using a stereo due to the spousal acceptance factor. But that person isn't asking about it in a non-specialized forum. I personally have my TV hooked up to a separate amplifier I use for music and speakers that are over 4 feet tall and weigh 75 lbs. apiece, but I only use it if I'm watching a movie, and even then not all of the time.

If you're looking for improvement in the $200 price range, a cheap stereo system is going to blow all but the most expensive soundbars out of the water. The used market is your friend here, especially stuff from the '90s and '2000s that's too old to have any value but not old enough to be "vintage". Pretty much any receiver you can find from the Big 3 (Yamaha/Denon/Onkyo) is worth buying, and even stuff from lesser brands like Pioneer, Sony, Techincs, etc. is going to be fine. Don't worry too much about wattage since anything above 15 watts is more than adequate at normal volume, and that's what budget receivers were running in the '70s. The speakers are going to be more important to the sound, though the brands will be different—B&W, Boston Acoustics, Polk, Infinity, Cerwin Vega, PSB, ELAC, Paradigm, and Klipsch are examples of what to look for, though these brands all sell new speakers with stratospheric prices so don't be discouraged if the prices on some used models seem high; I believe all of them have made inexpensive bookshelf speakers at some point that can usually be had for cheap on the used market, and they sold more of these models than anything else so they aren't hard to find. Avoid Bose; they sell cheap speakers that are marketed as a premium brand, and they always command higher prices on the used market than they should. If you find anything you're interested in locally, feel free to DM me and I can probably tell you if you're getting a good deal.

Thanks for the detailed response -- to be honest, I hadn't even seriously considered the used market. And you are correct that my TV speakers are "merely inadequate" rather than "bad". I had been drawn to soundbars because of the convenient form factor (it would fit perfectly below the TV, where I'd have to do a little rearranging to fit two speakers + a subwoofer... admittedly not much though) and the idea that it would Just Work through the HDMI ARC port. I'll never use "modern" features like bluetooth connection (when I'm playing music over the TV speakers I just use spotify or youtube on my PS5) so there's no downside to an "older" setup anyway. Again, I really hadn't given more conventional stereo systems a chance -- I'll definitely look into it.

Is there any benefit to [soundbar + subwoofer] compared to [2x stereo speakers + subwoofer]? Or is it all looking cool/marketing hype? I was under the impression that in the lower-end price range I'd get more value from the soundbar, but I'm realizing I didn't have any actual rationale behind that, lol.

If you don't have dedicated audio outputs from your television (or other device), there are not-awful soundbars that are cheaper than a used 2.1 setup, and sometimes cheaper than just a used receiver for a 2.1 setup. If the comparison was something like a TCL S55H versus a standard receiver, a pair of 8" or 9" speakers, and a sub, you're... probably going to pay nearly twice as much for the not-soundbar setup, even used. For new, even powered speakers are hard to get in your price range without being garbage. If you really just want some bass, it's a hard argument to skip.

The other argument in favor of soundbars is size and convenience. About the only support you need is an available electrical socket and maybe a tiny shelf or table that you're probably setting your TV on anyway. Cabling-wise, the single HDMI (or toslink, or yada) is ... actually still more complex than you'd expect (do you want lossless Atmos? Because then you need eARC, and a compatible HDMI cable), but it's at least less of a spaghetti pile if you don't want to spend a weekend on cable management, even compared to a relatively simple 2.1 setup.

A Great soundbar config's still a little bit more expense than a used standard receiver+2.1 channel configuration (Wirecutter recs this, and they're about the only part of the Times I trust), but it's convenient enough that it's okay, and you can rarely get nicer soundbars with fancier configurations that can approximate a 4.1 configuration without paying too much more or having to route wires through drywall. For someone like me, who's neither an audiophile nor has particularly sensitive hearing, it can be a reasonable compromise. Or at least would, if I didn't use headphones religiously, or lived in an apartment.

For audio quality, yeah, I'll second Rov_Scam. Soundbars only really provide better bang for your buck when you're in the bargain basement, and for a lot of that space you're only going to get noticeable improvements if the television is absolute crap. Even at the higher end of your price range, the used 'standard' speaker market will win pretty quickly. Audio isn't quite like motor behavior -- there are replacements for displacement -- but the parts here are near-universally fungible, and the soundbars have extra constraints.

Will once again support this. The performance of my $200 bookshelves is lightyears beyond any soundbar I've heard

I second all of this. The correct advise on soundbars, in almost all contexts, is "don't"

Not an audiophile but have made a few speakers as a hobby project. Probably most important is it doesn't have stupid features you don't want and isn't a general pain in the ass to use. Re audio quality speakers benefit quite a lot from a good sized acoustic chamber to improve the efficiency of the exciter particularly for bass and a bit of weight to them so they don't resonate in the audible range.

If your tv speakers don't make a tinny noise (kinda like if you imagine the speaker playing through a long tin can) or peaking (the sound of someone yelling into a bad microphone) they are probably doing fine in the range of sound they can produce and you might just want a bargain subwoofer. There are some for about $100 on amazon which'll serve you just fine (although usually all-in-one subs are set up as passthroughs, so they are supposed to receive the primary audio output and pass one what they can't reproduce to another device which may be tricky to use with the build in audio).

I might be buying an audiovisual setup for a new living room soon. Can you get it good enough to make badly mixed modern movie dialogue understandable, or should I give up and accept the bane of subtitles?

I assume you've already checked you're not playing 5.1 audio through a 2 channel system, I struggled through a number of films around the time 5 channel rips got popular before I remembered to check and set my software to force 2 channel playback. I'm not sure if dedicated separates have that option.

On the other hand something like Tenet was irredeemable.

I haven't had success in modern cinema comprehensibility but I've only spent about $300 in parts and thus probably ~$1000 market value for new hardware

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