Superb Soundbars

Compact, easy to set up soundbars with tricks like Atmos, Alexa, multi-room music and more, from £300 to £600

- Duncan Bell

Soundbars are one of the tech success stories of the past decade. They add big, thick sound to your TV, which is too slim for fripperies such as decent speakers. They offer plug-and-play convenience. A lot of them support surround sound, whether by cunning psycho-acoustics, additional speakers in the box or, indeed, additional speakers you can add at a later date, simply by giving the manufacturer some more money.

You can pick up soundbars for comfortably under £100, or less comfortably over £1,000, but here we are looking at ’bars in the popular £300 to £600 region. The Sonos, Sony and Vizio soundbars here all sound excellent in their own ways, and all have different unique features to lure you into the, frankly oversubscribed, mid-priced soundbar market.

The original idea of soundbars was that they were low profile and easy to install – you just used a manoeuvre that we engineers call ‘plonking it in front of your telly’. Some models today, however, are so huge that they will block the IR receiver on your TV unless you put it up on bricks, and so complicated that you might as well have bought an AV receiver, nine speakers and a sub (in a 7.1.2 array, naturally). Not so these slimline beauties. We trialled a number of products before alighting on this shortlist of three, and any that took more than 10 minutes, we simply tossed off the balcony. Life’s just too short, you see…

WHAT’S ON TEST…

1 Sony HT-X8500

The most traditional soundbar here, this Sony has fewer bonus features than the Sonos or Vizio. It bids to make up for that with more connectivity than the Beam and support for Atmos and DTS-X 3D surround sound without the need for any additional speakers. £329, sony.co.uk

SPECS