sound bars

Not happy with the audio coming from your laptop? No surprise there -- it's fairly miraculous that manufacturers manage to squeeze in speakers at all.

And yet many folks use their laptops as media centers in dens and bedrooms. So how can you get more aural enjoyment from your games, movies, and music?

Simple: add a sound bar. Even an inexpensive one should offer a huge improvement over the tiny, tinny speakers built into your system. If nothing else, it projects the sound forward instead of down, out, or up (depending on where the internal speakers are mounted).

Today … Read more

HDTVs have notoriously bad speakers. That's understandable, if only because there's just not a lot of room for cones and whatnot inside those skinny LCD and plasma panels. It's also disappointing: here you spend all this money for a beautiful screen, and your ears pay the price.

The best way to improve the audio situation is to invest in a surround-sound system or a good set of stereo speakers plus receiver -- but that gets expensive.

A more affordable option: a sound bar, which is a speaker/receiver combo that sits above or below the screen and … Read more

Many sound bars offer a shockingly small number of inputs, with often just a single digital and analog audio input on the back to handle your gear. That's hardly enough for a modern home theater packed with a DVR, game console, Blu-ray player, and streaming-media box.

Luckily, you can get around your sound bar's limited selection of inputs by using your TV as a switcher. You'll be able to connect as many devices as your TV supports, and it will even simplify the input selection process.

Here's how to do it:… Read more

Sound bars are an excellent compromise between shelling out for an expensive surround-sound system and settling for the tinny sound from your TV's built-in speakers, but that doesn't mean they're perfect. In fact, sound bars have quite a few real-world problems and limitations that are often glossed over, only to rear their heads after you've got one set up at home.

Here's what you should know before you make the jump to buying a sound bar.… Read more

It wasn't that long ago that Sony, Panasonic, Samsung, and Onkyo were locked in a fierce competition in the home theater in a box (HTIB) market. Every year I'd report about the latest advances in their systems in my CNET reviews. These days, fewer people want to deal with all of the wires and setup requirements of a five-speaker, subwoofer, receiver, and Blu-ray player based system. Skinny sound bars that sit under a TV are now more popular than HTIB systems. Most sound bars are 2.0- or 2.1-channel stereo systems, though some promise a "virtual&… Read more

When Boston Acoustics first came out with its TVee line of sound bars , its modest pricing and focus on simplicity were a welcome addition to a market filled with overpriced models.

A few generations later, the TVee Model 25 faces a much different set of competitors: tons of cheap sound bars that are good enough if you just want something that sounds better than your TV. That's essentially the rub with the TVee Model 25, which is an all-around decent sound bar with better-than-average sound quality (and some design flaws), but its $350 street price seems out of sync with the market.… Read more

Yamaha basically created the sound bar category and continues to sell its best-in-class Digital Sound Projector line, but it can be hard to recommend the company's sound bars when they generally cost in excess of $1,000.

The YAS-101 ($250 street price) is Yamaha's entry into the increasingly crowded budget sound bar field, and it's one of the few that manages to stand out.

That's largely because of Yamaha's decision to eschew a separate subwoofer, instead using a built-in subwoofer, which gives the speaker system a more streamlined look. The YAS-101 also has a very … Read more

During CES, I got a chance to hook up with Engage, the company behind Unity, a well-built home theater system.

Unity is the brainchild of Todd Beauchamp, an ex-Apple audio engineer (he worked closely on iPhone acoustics, for example) and Mike Fidler, an individual with a strong marketing and engineering background in Sony.

The sound system looks familiar because it has a design similar to the many sound bar and subwoofer combos out there, but stacked on top of each other. Unlike most sound bars, Unity's modular design has a depth to it that can support a 60-inch TV.

I quickly learned that the idea is a "system that can be set up in little as 15 minutes," Beauchamp said enthusiastically. You can tell that a lot of time and dedication went into the first version of the home theater and future versions could be compelling as the design evolves. … Read more

LAS VEGAS--Sound bars have gotten cheaper, and they sound better and have more connectivity than ever before. Now, apparently you can snap them in half, even if you never wanted to.

Panasonic and Samsung both had "splittable" sound bars here at CES 2012 and I felt like I saw more of them on the show floor. The idea is you can split the bar into two speakers, place them on a stand, and create a more traditional 2.1 speaker system.

It's a nifty-looking feature, but it doesn't solve a problem anybody has ever had with a sound bar. I get plenty of reader mail about sound bars, but nobody has ever asked about a sound bar that can transform into separate speakers, probably because when they bought a sound bar, they wanted a sound bar.… Read more