The Bose Smart Soundbar 900 (see image) takes a giant leap at the top because of its versatile features and phenomenal soundstage, allowing for a 360° cinematic experience.
In summary, below are my top picks for the best soundbar without subwoofers:
- Among my three picks, the Bose Smart Soundbar 900 takes a giant leap at the top because of its versatile features and phenomenal soundstage, allowing for a 360° cinematic experience.
- My second favorite is the Sonos Beam Gen 2 because of its unmatched portability and excellent voice enhancement control. It also has a bass and treble adjustment feature to give you more control over your audio.
- Finally, the Yamaha YAS-108 produces well-defined voices and mid-ranges but poorer bass and treble. It also has a darker sound profile than its Bose and Sonos soundbar rivals.
Now, let's take a look at my top 3 best soundbars without subwoofers and their defining features.
Sound Quality
Let me tell you something right off the bat.
The sound quality performance you'll end up getting from a speaker will always depend on your room acoustics - particularly room dimensions and speaker positions.
The impact of the combination of these two is actually so strong that in most cases, it doesn't even make sense to utter a single word on sound quality without speaking of them.
This is also why it's not unusual to see completely different reviews of the same speaker.
In one case the speaker might be placed in a sweet spot inside the room and hence the user might be satisfied. In other cases the same speaker might be ill placed and hence user might even have returned it.
The point most people miss here is that it mostly isn't even about the engineering behind the speaker itself. It's about where you place the speaker inside which room.
So, in order to solve this problem, I've partnered with Acoustics and Audio Engineering PhD Andrea Cicero from AC Acustica and created Soundton - a simple, 2D, browser accessible online speaker placement calculator.
With Soundton, now there's a way to figure the sound quality of most speakers before you buy them.
Read more about its working principles at soundton.com/documentation/.
The end colormap provides you the locations with the best (green) and worst (red) acoustics.