The Best Soundbar For Your Home
This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter, a buyer’s guide to the best technology. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter’s independently chosen editorial picks, it may earn affiliate commissions that support its work.
After conducting a thorough survey of Wirecutter readers and combining those insights with the results of our previous testing, we think the Sonos Playbar is the right soundbar for most people. The Playbar sounds fantastic, and it’s easier to set up and operate than any other soundbar we’ve tested. The Playbar does not offer the same amount of physical or wireless connectivity as other, higher-performance soundbars we’ve tested in the past, which limits its usefulness a bit if you have a large library of Blu-ray movies or use other sources. But if you use your entertainment system primarily for watching TV, enjoying video-streaming services, or playing digital music (and as best we can tell from our survey results, that’s most of our readers), its lack of inputs shouldn’t be a dealbreaker. And though it doesn’t have Bluetooth or AirPlay support, it is part of the easiest-to-use, best-sounding whole-home audio system we’ve tested.
If high-performance audio is your primary concern and you don’t want to be locked into the Sonos ecosystem, we still think our previous top pick, the Paradigm Soundscape, is the all-around best soundbar you can buy today. Another great (but pricey) option is the Yamaha YSP-4300, especially if you’re a die-hard movie viewer and you want the best virtual surround effects without the inconvenience of installing extra speakers.
If $700 to $1,800 is too rich for your blood, we also have a guide to budget soundbars. Stepping down to this level means giving up many of the benefits of our high-performance picks, especially in build quality and sound performance, but even our low-priced picks will give you an experience far better than the speakers built into your TV can offer.
Who should get a soundbar
A soundbar provides much better sound quality than the speakers in a TV, computer, or smartphone, without the complexity of a receiver and speakers. Separate components almost always provide more value for your dollar, but they also take up more space and require additional cables; their operation is more complicated, too. The best soundbars utilize additional drivers for each channel, have more-powerful amplifiers, and feature advanced designs.
How we picked
Selecting soundbars to bring in for evaluation required parsing through many reviews and talking to soundbar reviewers such as Brent Butterworth (an audio reviewer since 1989 for publications including Sound & Vision), Matthew Moskovciak (senior associate editor for home theater at CNET), and Darryl Wilkinson (editor-at-large for Sound & Vision). We also looked at the products introduced at the CES trade show to see what was new and deserving of evaluation even before reviews were available.
We eliminated all pedestal designs, which are typically fatter and designed to sit directly under your TV’s built-in stand. While a soundbar of this design can sound great, as the pedestal allows for larger woofers and better bass, the fatter, wider design requires that it lie flat on a table. If that format works for you, some good options are available, but we wanted our main pick to work for everyone who is willing to pay for good sound.
We also eliminated passive soundbars that require a separate receiver to power them. We also dropped almost anything without Bluetooth or AirPlay support, because you shouldn’t have to pay extra and use up more ports to play music from your phone or computer.
Ultimately, the most important overall factor is sound quality. Extra features and benefits are nice, but sound quality is nonnegotiable. After sound quality, features and usability are important.
How we tested
We assembled the soundbars in a home theater room that had acoustic treatments then mounted the soundbars on speaker stands or a table and listened to them with music, movies, and TV. We used an Oppo BDP-103D as the source component, as it can play back Blu-ray, SACD, CD, FLAC, and any other digital format you throw at it; the Oppo player also has analog, coaxial, optical, and HDMI outputs, so it can work with every soundbar no matter what input is required.
We did additional listening in a living room with the soundbar on top of a credenza, with a wall to the left and open space to the right. After those extensive listening sessions, we invited audio reviewer Stephen Hornbrook to evaluate the bars.
Our pick: Sonos Playbar
The Sonos Playbar is a great-sounding soundbar with lots of features that make it easy to use as the center of an entertainment system. It’s simple to set up and offers the best access to streaming content or your music library of any soundbar out there. With no Bluetooth or AirPlay support, and only a single optical input, it is rather limited in connectivity, but if you’re simply looking for a great-sounding, simple option that you can expand into a whole-home audio system, it’s hard to knock.
As you might expect for a soundbar at this price, the Playbar offers true three-channel audio, with a discrete center channel for voices and other on-screen sound effects. All in all, the sound quality of the Playbar is noticeably better than that of most rivals. It can’t hit the same low octaves that our upgrade pick, the Paradigm Soundscape, can, at least not without the assistance of a Sonos Sub (which itself costs as much as the Playbar), but it offers very good performance above those lowest octaves.
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