Top Soundbars 2023

The Creative Stage V2 makes big promises on a small budget, and delivers. This soundbar/subwoofer combo is a fantastic pick for upgrading your home theater on the cheap.

Has Denon one-upped Sonos? This well-connected and powerful 4K-ready 3.0 soundbar can has wireless 5.1 home cinema and multi-room options if used with Denon’s HEOS speakers. Its subwoofer is more affordable than its rival's, but the HEOS Bar impresses all on its own, delivering muscular music and movie soundtracks. However, its angular styling and large footprint won't suit everyone.

The Polk MagniFi 2 sound system offers immersive audio to rival Dolby Atmos rivals at a lower price, but it is not compact. 

The Sennheiser Ambeo Soundbar is an excellent speaker for anything you want to listen to and creates an impressively wide sound field, though for $2,500 it can benefit from a dedicated subwoofer.

It’s seriously expensive, but immersive Dolby Atmos support and audiophile sound quality prove that the Ambeo Soundbar is one of a kind.

The Sonos Playbar may not be cheap, but feels worth every penny. There's enough rumble in the bass to give action movies an appropriate sense of drama, but the mid-range and high-frequency audio is also sweet and clean.

The Sonos Beam soundbar is very good for dialogue-heavy content like TV shows. With its discrete center channel, this 3.0 setup anchors voices to a pinpoint location in the soundstage. Its balanced mid-range ensures that dialogue reproduces clearly and accurately, and there's extra brightness in the treble to make higher-pitched voices sparkle. You can even use its dialogue enhancement feature to make voices more clear and crisp if you prefer.

a separate sound system to go with their TV, because most TV speakers aren’t very good. But in a sea of black boxes that look the same,

The Devialet Dione soundbar is good for mixed usage. It's a 5.1.2 soundbar with good sound quality, so you get the deep thump and rumble in the bass range, with stellar vocal clarity in the mids, so dialogue is present in the mix. There's Dolby Atmos support, too, and the bar offers an immersive listening experience, especially when you mount it to your wall. That said, there aren't many customization tools on hand, and you can't add on rears to improve its surround sound.

The Denon DHT-S316 will make your TV’s sound as good as its picture, but it’s not your only option at this price.