Hey, I'm JR and these are our picks for the best sound bars of 2020. And we are
here because of one of the articles you wrote, it is the inspiration for this
video, it's all about sound bars. We're gonna go through those sound bars
because we had a chance to listen to all of them,
and we're gonna talk about the sort of the pros and cons what makes them great.
Which sound bars did you write about? I went with the Yamaha YAS-209, because it's a great all-around budget
pick, the JBL Bar 5.1 is a great bar for if you want to do wireless surround, the
Sonos PLAYBAR is awesome for music and great if you want it as part of a
wireless multi-room system, the Bose Soundbar 700 is awesome for like, bigger
rooms, open floor plans, like mine I got to try it out at home and it was awesome,
and then the Sennheiser AMBEO is just the best of the bunch, it's an awesome
sound bar. It sounds great. We'll save that last. Let's start by talking
about that Yamaha YAS-209, like you said a good budget pick. It's a good
sound bar that we felt after listening to it for both movies and music, it's
really gonna be good enough for most people. Right? If you're looking for
a solution for making your TV sound bigger, more full, because those little
speakers on your TV just aren't cutting it, this is a perfect solution. It sounds
big, it sounds full, it makes dialogue better, it's got multiple modes for
different things that you're listening to. It may not go as loud as some of the
other sound bars, and it may not try...it's not even really trying to do like
surround sound, but it does make your TV sound big and bold which is what most of
people want from a good sound bar. Like you said, it's really popular with
customers for dialogue. It has that Clear Voice feature that's really awesome, it's
going to make voices pop so that dialogue is more intelligible. Yeah, it's
not trying to be a complete surround sound solution like you're gonna get
from a receiver and a roomful of speakers, but it does have DTS Virtual X,
which is a really cool way to do sort of virtual surround without filling your
room with a bunch of speakers. DTS:X is kind of like Dolby Atmos where it tries
to get some sound up here, right, and so it does a pretty pretty good job of that.
It does, and it does it for a really great price.
Absolutely. If you're looking for a sound bar that actually does do surround sound
speakers behind you and a sound bar in front of you, that's your next pick,
that's the JBL Bar 5.1. Why did you go with that? I went with that because it
has a really cool feature, the surround speakers are completely wireless. They
charge by being attached to the sound bar, so you don't have to worry about
plugging them in or anything like that. You can just charge them up and on a
full charge, get about 10 hours of binge watching time. Now this
system does come with a calibration microphone so that you can get all the
speakers where you're gonna want them, plug the mic into the sound bar, and let
it run its little thing where I play sound on all the speakers, it sort of
acoustically measures your room so that it can actually give you pretty accurate
surround sound. We also found you spend a little bit
more, you get a little bit more. It's louder, it's fuller, it's richer. We were
really impressed with just how big of a room this really could fill with sound.
Yeah. And those rear surround speakers do a
lot, like they're not just back there making tiny little background noises,
they make themselves known so you really do feel immersed in the sound. Even for
music. We like them even for music as well. One thing that I like is
that the remote control offers you individual volume control on the both
the sub and the rear surround speakers. Yeah, very customizable and again
there's modes and stuff like that as well for the different things you might
be watching or listening to, and that sub was actually quite impressive, a very big
sound. Lots of boom, lots of oomph, you could
fill a pretty big room with bass with that sub, and of all these sound bars
this one and that Yamaha are the only two that actually include the sub. Also
just a note of clarification, there's a couple different JBL sound bars. This one
was the JBL Bar 5.1, it comes with wireless rear surrounds. JBL also has a
brand new sound bar called the Bar 5.1 Surround, which has more speakers in the
sound bar itself that actually are designed to give you a rear surround
sound without using physically separate rear surround speakers. The next bar we
listened to was the Sonos PLAYBAR. Now this was the first sound bar that Sonos has
come out with, they've got several that have come out since then, the PLAYBASE,
and the BEAM, so they really know a thing or two about
soundbars, but this first one, it's always been impressive to me. Why did you pick
it for your article? It's a great part of a wireless multi-room system, and if you
want to have your soundbar be part of that it's awesome. It sounds great
for music, it also does a good job with movies, and you have the option to add a
sub and it also has the option to add Sonos speakers for rear surround speakers.
Yeah, like you said if you have Sonos and you need a sound bar get Sonos.
A Sonos wireless multi-room music system is pretty awesome, and if you happen
to also need a good solution for your TV sound, why not add another zone of Sonos
right there, and with Sonos you can make it a full 5.1 system
with all Sonos stuff, very impressive sound when you do that. I've always loved
the Sonos stuff, that 5.1 system is pretty great, another added benefit when
you run the optical cable from your TV down to your PLAYBAR, the sound from
your TV can now be sent out through the rest of your Sonos system. So if you want
to hear the game over in the kitchen on your Play One, you can do that. So that's
some benefits that Sonos gives you that you don't get with most
sound bars. Next up, the Bose Soundbar 700. Now this one, like the Sonos, you can
also add a Bose subwoofer, you can add Bose surrounds, really impressed by this
sound bar. Yeah, I think it surprised everyone how much they liked it and just
how much volume it put out with just the sound bar alone. Yeah, and
we're listening to this in a very large room, and if you have a large room this
might be a reason for you to get the Bose Sound Bar 700, because they can do a
pretty good job of filling a very large room with sound, especially when you add
that sub and those rear surrounds. It's true, I got to try this one out at home
actually and I have a really open floor plan and it just cut right through those
open spaces and sounded really awesome. So the Bose is pretty comparable to
the Sonos price-wise, but there's definitely some differences. You can add
those extra speakers, you're gonna end up spending around the same amount of money
as with the Sonos, but the Sonos sort of has the lead when it comes to a wireless
multi-room audio system that also does great sound for your TV. The Bose sort of
takes the lead when it comes to big awesome sound, it was a little louder, a
little... we enjoyed it more in our big listening rooms.
I actually couldn't believe how loud it got, it was super impressive. We have
saved the best for last. We did this when we were listening, too, because we wanted
to be fair to all the other sound bars, because once you hook up and listen to
the Sennheiser AMBEO sound bar, there's no other sound bar for you. Now it's
pricey, it's expensive, but when you factor in how much it would cost to set
up a home theater receiver, seven speakers, 11 speakers, a subwoofer,
all of that, you don't need any of that with the Sennheiser AMBEO. It takes the
place of all of your surround speakers, and it sounds amazing. Yeah. You can
calibrate it for your room so that it just dials in the perfect sound for your
space, it even comes with a beautiful mic on a mic stand that is going to last for
forever, not like a small cheap mic on a piece of cardboard, it's a real
Sennheiser microphone that does a great job of listening to your room,
calibrating it, and giving you not only good surround sound but Dolby Atmos and
DTS:X. It's got 13 speakers built into it, including speakers aimed up at your
ceiling to bounce sound back at you. It's really some of the best surround sound,
the best Dolby Atmos with the overhead sound that I've heard from any surround
sound system. It has a pretty good full bass sound to it, but if you want more
you can add any subwoofer you want to the subwoofer output on the back. Takes
the place of your receiver. I'm thinking if you've got a room where you can't
really run wires, you don't want speakers all over the
place, a small apartment, I mean any kind of room like that where you're just
putting speakers everywhere just doesn't make sense for whatever reason, this
solves all that. And when you factor in the cost difference, it's about the same
amount of money for very similar performances. So please, go ahead and hit
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