- I wouldn't describe myself as a conspiracy theorist,
but when almost three-quarters of people
report difficulty understanding dialogue
in their favorite TV shows and movies,
and the entertainment industry's response is basically,
"Watch it in the theater or get your own theater."
Red flag.
- I think you've lost touch.
Everyone uses subtitles now, old man.
- No, I reject that.
It's the mixers who are wrong, and I've got the solution.
While sound bars may have a reputation
for being either outlandishly expensive
or garbage or often some combination of the two,
a goldilocks zone does appear to exist
where you can get better dialogue quality
and a wider sound stage without breaking the bank.
And surprisingly, the most popular one on Amazon
at the time of writing is from Bose.
Bose and affordable aren't words
I would normally put together.
So, then why the (pop dance music)
are you all buying this soundbar?
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(upbeat electronic dance music)
- You might think that anyone spending a thousand dollars
on a TV would have some kind of budget
set aside for an audio system
but speaking from experience, it's quite the opposite.
They're expecting that for that kind of money
the built-in speakers should be decent already.
Unfortunately, the industry trend towards
thinner and thinner displays means
there's simply not anywhere to put speakers.
Like where would these speakers go in this TV?
Now, at the very high end, there are creative solutions
to this that involve vibrating the entire surface
of the display and whatnot,
but most people aren't buying those kinds of solutions
and the ones that are really especially ought
to be using external speakers and soapbox.
So, let's focus on the mainstream then,
we're gonna be pairing our top selling sound bar,
the Bose TV speaker,
with another best seller that we're gonna get to
in another video, this 43 inch Amazon Fire TV.
(wheels screeching)
If I didn't know how good this movie is supposed to sound
I might consider this - You'd think it sounds okay
- Acceptable. Yeah.
- It's fine.
I can barely hear his dad.
- There isn't even any background music right now.
I can barely make anything out.
- Yeah.
- The sound quality is not great, but that's okay.
We can fix that.
Surprisingly, the box for the Bose TV speaker
contains only an optical cable to connect to your TV.
So, we saw some complaints from people who were upset
that they couldn't use E Arc without a trip
to the local Walmart.
Fortunately for us, we have some HDMI cables lying around
and we would definitely recommend going this route
since E Arc should allow us to use our TV remote
for soundbar volume control
and allow our devices to automatically
power up and power down together.
As for the rest of the IO,
we've got auxiliary in, a service port, a base port,
we'll talk more about this later, and power.
Now, this unit doesn't have wifi,
meaning that you can't connect to the Bose app,
but it does have Bluetooth if you want to use it
with a mobile device like your phone.
It's Bluetooth 4.2 though, which means limited range
compared to more modern implementations.
I'm pretty sure there's supposed to be bass here.
- [David] It's gonna come in.
- No, but like there's supposed to be like subbass.
Now here they're supposed to be bass.
Bose, yes. Bass, no
- [David] Oh.
(pop dance music)
- Oh, and that is not the mark of a good speaker.
When the bass finally manages to hit
the rest of the sound ducks
or kind of sounds like it's being suppressed.
We also found that there was a lot of compression
at high volume on bass heavy songs.
Pretty good for music at low or medium volumes,
bad at high volumes.
It's kind of like a giant Bluetooth speaker.
(train horn blows)
It really struggles with the rumble of the train.
It's way better.
On the built-in speaker on this TV,
I couldn't tell she spoke a different language there.
(David laughs)
It was just all unintelligible to me,
and I get it, if you're looking
to understand dialogue better
I could see people bringing this thing home
and compared to their onboard thinking,
man, this is what I've been missing out on,
this thing's flipping amazing.
And if you're still having trouble hearing,
the dialogue enhancer definitely works
doing even more to, well, enhanced dialogue.
But it does cost you in other areas,
particularly the little bit of bass that there already was
gets suppressed even further.
It's not a home theater in a box,
but absolutely good enough for someone
who just wants to hear what people are freaking saying.
The solution to most of my problems
seems to be a Bose Bass Module.
- Bass Module? You mean a subwoofer?
- Ah, no.
Remember that bass port we saw before?
Well as it turns out, Bose locks down their soundbars
to prevent you from using a third party powered sub.
I mean, I'm sure they have some kind of brand BS
ensuring a consistent experience justification for this,
but we need only look as far as the price
of Bose's proprietary base modules
to find out that this just comes down to
milking you for more money
once you're locked into their ecosystem.
So, you can eat a Bose.
At least it's stylish though.
Like the all new ltt tracksuit from lttstore.com.
It's Polycotton blended. God, it looks good.
Bose has a pretty established look at this point.
Black, mesh, with the Bose logo on top.
If you've seen one, you've kind of seen most of them.
The finish on the plastic feels nice though.
The whole device is small and sleek
and at just over two point two by four by 23.4 inches
and four point three pounds,
while mounting it should be a breeze.
Though I suspect most people are just gonna set it down
on their console like we did,
especially since the paid mounting service
costs almost as much as the soundbar itself.
I'm not gonna lie, this is about the least impressed
that I have ever been by a
why are you all buying this thing product?
We're gonna talk about some better options in a bit here.
But first, let's take a break from what I think
and talk about why you guys keep buying these.
With over 7,500 ratings on Amazon
this soundbar averages 4.5 stars
with a whopping 74% of you giving it a full five stars.
In spite of my complaints, y'all are pretty happy with it.
Let's start with the positive then.
Our five star crowd loves how easy it is to set up,
how well the dialogue enhancer works,
especially for seniors or those who are hard of hearing,
and they love how much of an upgrade it is
over their TV speakers.
Moving on to the four star gang,
they mostly agreed, actually,
saying that it bumps up the perceived volume,
that having both arc and optical connections is nice,
and that the sound quality is good.
However, even in the four star crowd
almost every review comes with a caveat of some sort.
There's an included optical cable, but not HDMI,
it's easy to set up, but the sound is mediocre.
It's an improvement over my last soundbar or my TV
but it's not as good as I was expecting
considering that it's nearly $300
and it comes from Bose, a well-known company.
And as we keep moving down
we find some pretty reasonable complaints from,
in my humble opinion,
the people who probably know home audio
a little bit better than the
wow, it's better than nothing, five stars, crowd.
For example, we saw criticisms
about the lack of EQ settings other than dialogue,
criticisms about the poor performance
at high volumes and the lack of bass.
We saw critiques of the lackluster remote.
That is all stuff that we experienced
and I think people were pretty fair about it.
What we didn't experience though was overheating.
Whatever our experience with our unit, though,
it's frankly alarming when this many reviews
mention it being too hot to touch,
smelling like burnt plastic and leaving marks on things.
Some units even broke seemingly prematurely
with the customer suspecting heat to be the culprit.
But then even if that wasn't a problem
should you buy this thing?
Well, if Bose was doing more
than just making dialogue more intelligible
I'd have no problem with it.
I'd in fact love to see a version of this product
that works with third party accessories
or that can be expanded in the future
using it as a center channel
and a surround config or something like that.
But as it is, it's a dead end entry level solution
at a price that just doesn't make any sense.
I'm not even trying to be one of those
home theater setups are better than a soundbar
at any price bros.
But for $280,
come on,
you could pick up almost literally anything
and get equally simple setup and dialogue enhancement.
I mean, Amazon knows this Vizio 2.0
is a better basic option and it costs only $69. Nice.
Not that I would necessarily even recommend
the cheapest solution.
A good sound bar is still going to sound better
than whatever your next TV
and your one after that is gonna be
and costs only a little bit more.
The LG S40Q for example, or the Polk Signa S2
are only about $130 and $160 respectively,
and both of them come with a base module
in the box for that price.
- So, subwoofer.
- Exactly. And if you were gonna drink
the Bose Kool-Aid anyway, you could spend the same amount
and get something much better.
(camera bleep)
And get something much better.
I mean, we haven't gotten a chance to try all these yet.
Stay tuned because the Labs home theater testing room
is gonna be coming online later this year.
But on paper, the Sony HT-S400, Samsung HW-B550,
and Vizio V-Series are all name brand products
that are on sale right now
and match or beat our Bose soundbar
while also including a base module.
(camera bleep)
- Subwoofer
- Right. Bose
The reality is then if you buy the Bose TV speaker
there's a good chance, about 74%,
or whatever it works out to,
that you are going to be happy with it.
But our job isn't to tell you what might make you happy.
It's to help you spend your money wisely.
And I just don't think the Bose TV speaker holds up
especially if you spent more than fire TV money
on your display.
We tried it, for example, on an S95B,
and while the dialogue enhancer did improve
over the stock speakers,
it was not a massive improvement
and it came at the cost of everything but the dialogue.
Unusual conclusion today, but do yourself a favor
and don't follow the crowd when it comes to sound bars.
Make sure to get something with a sub
if you want to feel your favorite content.
Kind of like how you're gonna feel
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- Thanks for watching.
We've got a whole series of these.
Why are you guys buying this stuff thing?
So, maybe check them out if you like this one
or maybe check out the last time we did a soundbar.
The Vizio SB2920 C6. It fared a lot better.