Sony Mini Soundbar With Wireless Subwoofer, Black

It delivers in sound and the sub was a nice add on.I use this for my kitchen TV due to the lack of decent speakers since the new TV’s are so slim and I could’t stand the poor sound quality. It fits my 24″ Samsung TV since the soundbar is compact it fits in front of the set and complements it.

Honestly, this is the best! I shopped around for a loooooooong time looking for the best sound system for my small (1 bedroom apartment) and I found it! The sound quality is incredible. My boyfriend who urged me to buy a true 6 speaker and sub stereo system now admits that this setup was the best choice for a small space.

Also, I have a complicated setup and this system worked when others would not. Instead of a tv I have a project hooked up to apple tv and a bluetooth transmitter rigged on a ceiling mount and projecting to my living room wall. The sound bar sits on bookshelf below the projected screen. It’s really discreet and small (which is awesome), but it’s not actually white or even off-white for that matter. It’s definitely grey (which is not so awesome but do-able). The sub sits under my sofa and total out of site. When the projector/Bluetooth transmitter are on it will automatically pair to the sound bar. The sound bar also has an analogue setting and I can play vinyls from my turntable (using a phono preamp with a 3.5mm to 2RCA cable from turntable to sound bar). Obviously, playing music from my phone via bluetooth to the sound bar is a synch. My only gripe is that the sub is a little weaker than I like when streaming movies. While playing music it is never an issue, so it may just be an AppleTV setting I can adjust.

From streaming movies to music from my phone or turntable the sound quality is really, really great!

I give this four stars as for me it’s sort of a weird blend of five stars and three stars.

Five stars because it arrived faster than I expected (okay, not really relevant), works just as advertised, the sound is great to my ears (note that I’m no kind of audiophile, however), documentation is substantially more than one typically gets these days, packaging was careful so the unit arrived undamaged, and setup was easy with one exception. The Bluetooth works fine for me, both when paired with my phone and with a second generation echo dot.

The key thing that drops it to three stars for me is the lack of an HDMI input. I guess this is very unfair of me in a way, because if you do a little research, it’s very clear that it only has optical and ‘analog’ inputs. The analog input is of no interest to me, and I doubt that you’ll want to use it either unless forced to, so basically — optical is the only option.

I have two issues with the optical input, that — sadly — I was unaware of until I bought this unit and set it up.

First, with an HDMI input, attached to an HDMI ARC input to my TV (which I DO have available), I would be able to control the soundbar from my TV (via the HDMI-CEC standard). I’m using Amazon’s Fire Cube to control things, and while the cube seems to control devices well overall, for some reason it’s not doing such a good job with this sound bar. I will continue to tinker, but what really confuses me still is that controlling volume and mute through the Fire TV remote only seems to work in an IR (line of sight) manner, so that I have to sort of disjoint my shoulder from where I sit to raise my hand high enough to get it to turn the sound up or down or mute/unmute — which makes no sense to me given my understanding of how the cube works. Anyway, I think this would all work more easily and reliably with an (up-to-date) HDMI input on the soundbar, which again — this unit lacks.

Second, of the various digital sound standards available today, optical connections only support Dolby digital [EX] and DTS [ES]. Not, as I understand it, Dolby Digital Plus or Dolby TrueHD or DTS-HD or PCM. Even more confusing, it looks like you’ll get sound out if you specify one of the unsupported formats, but … ? I’m not educated on this stuff and don’t want to be, but it makes setup more complicated, trying to figure out which format to select, based on how your TV or other device might describe the option. I don’t KNOW if I can tell it to ‘auto-detect’. Does information flow both ways on an optical cable? I don’t WANT to be this much of an expert on this topic, I just want the danged thing to work easily and well. For that, too, I think that an up-to-date HDMI input is needed.

Finally, I got the ‘voice lag’ problem that some others have described. This is where you’re watching, say, your local news but the mouths don’t sync with the dialog exactly so that it feels like you’re watching a dubbed foreign film. This apparently doesn’t bother everyone, but it bugs me, so I tinkered a lot and based on I don’t remember which settings finally got it so the lag is now so small that I have to watch very closely to see that it’s still there. Good enough, but a real PITA in setting up.

Why don’t I just return this unit and get one with an HDMI input instead? Form factor. My new 43” TV sets low so that a sound bar much over 2” tall would block part of the screen. There ARE other soundbars that sit low like this one, but my wife and I both agreed that it would be nice if the soundbar sat BETWEEN the TV stand support legs/feet, so that it can be tucked right up against the base of the TV. On my 43” TV, the supports are placed such that I’ve got maybe 26” or perhaps 28” between them. Also, the slim design of the subwoofer (which btw for me seems to provide excellent bass) — it’s ideally shaped to fit standing upright in a space near to the TV on the floor. So I’ll live with the limited input choice due to the just-right-for-me form factor.

Finally, let me say that since the sound bar and the subwoofer are designed to be placed in different parts of the room, I think it would be wonderful if Sony were to have offered the option to mix and match the colors of the pieces. For me, it would have been ideal if I could have bought the black sound bar, accompanied by a white subwoofer, which then would have blended in a lot better with the adjacent white wall.

Excelente sonido y un diseño muy bonito. Otra experiencia al ver películas y un súper sonido para escuchar música.