Best Price-Quality Sound Bars (2023): Which One To Buy And Eight Recommended Models From 100 Euros

Sound is the ugly duckling of televisions. And it is that except for the high range and the occasional exception, the evolution that has taken place in image quality has not found a replica to match in sound. After all, and despite the advances that have occurred, the increasingly compact chassis do not make it easy. Fortunately, sound bars mitigate this problem without large space requirements or considerable investments… if we know which one to choose. What are the sound bars with the best quality-price on the market?

Choosing a good soundbar

A compact design with its advantages and disadvantages

Compared to more ambitious proposals such as bases and projectors, which differ in design and the way sound is projected, sound bars are the most popular audio solutions due to their simplicity and compactness.

Thus, under their generally long and slim shape, they hide a variable number of speakers. Its placement is not very complicated either: next to the base of the television, slightly in front of it.

Of course, its compact design also plays against it, since unlike the bars, its interior is more limited to accommodate speakers with a larger diameter and/or capable of covering a greater range of the frequency spectrum.

To extend its bass frequency response, some models use an external subwoofer, an especially interesting addition for cinema .

What sound formats does it process?

Another factor to take into account is its ability to process surround sound formats, as well as compressed music with and without quality loss.

The simplest bars are capable of processing Dolby Digital audio, while the most advanced ones are compatible with more advanced surround sound formats such as Dolby TrueHD or Dolby Atmos, a feature that we will appreciate in our cinematic experience, perceiving a more spatial sound and delighting ourselves with greater sonic precision in soundtracks.

And if we are going to use them for music, it is worth betting on those that can process high-resolution formats such as FLAC or ALAC, the two most used to distribute high-resolution music on the Internet as they offer a very interesting and lossless compression rate. quality.

How many virtual channels

Hand in hand with the formats that the sound bar is capable of processing, we find the number of virtual channels that it is capable of recreating.

In sound bars, the usual thing will be to find 2.0 or 2.1 channels, although thanks to surround sound technologies it is possible to recreate more complex configurations such as 5.1 or 7.1.2, topologies that result in a more successful immersion in the sound content.

Connectivity

The least that we are going to find in a sound bar is an EIAJ/TosLink optical digital input and another analog line input, however, there are quite a few models that lack HDMI sockets and S/PDIF electrical digital inputs.

For convenience, it is increasingly common for them to implement wireless connectivity: some have Bluetooth, others only Wi-Fi and the most advanced have both.

Best price-quality sound bars: featured models

Hisense HS218