The Best Soundbars

The Arc Ultra sounds bigger than it has any right to. Sonos rates it as a 9.1.4 system, with up-firing drivers at each end and a Sound Motion woofer squeezed into the same slim cabinet. What Hi-Fi? measured bass extending roughly 1.5 times deeper than the original Arc, with no subwoofer attached. In a normal living room, that's the difference between hearing a door slam and feeling it in the floor.

Dialogue is the other reason to pick it. Speech Enhancement keys in on voices, and it has levels rather than a single on-off switch, which is useful when a whispered scene follows a car chase. If you've been leaving subtitles on for prestige dramas, this is the fix. Owners coming from the older Arc consistently describe voices as clearer, not just louder.

The app is what you'll actually use every day. Setup is one HDMI eARC cable with step-by-step guidance, and after that you get AirPlay, Spotify Connect, room tuning, and EQ from your phone. You can add a Sonos sub and rear speakers later and keep the same bar. That upgrade path matters if you expect to move this into a bigger room eventually.

It fits under most TVs, too. The bar is about 3.1 inches tall and just over 46 inches wide, so it suits a 55-inch set or larger without creeping over the bottom bezel. It's wide, though, so measure your credenza first. On a 43-inch TV it looks like it's wearing someone else's jacket.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

There's no HDMI passthrough. The single port is eARC only, so your console and streaming box plug into the TV, not the bar. That's fine for most setups, but it's a problem if your TV is already short on inputs. Sonos also leans hard on its app — if you want physical buttons and a bundled remote, this isn't that bar.

You're also buying into an ecosystem, and the sub and rear speakers are separate purchases that add up fast. A recurring theme in owner feedback is HDMI handshake trouble with the bundled cable; swapping in a better one usually sorts it. Minor, but irritating on a bar this expensive.

Most bars at this level fake their height channels, skip the subwoofer, or both. The Signa S4 does neither. You get a seven-driver array with a dedicated center channel, separate up-firing elevation drivers, and a 5.9-inch wireless sub in the box. Tom's Guide points out that it's one of the only budget bars to include a wireless sub and full Dolby Atmos as standard.

Dialogue is its quiet strength. Polk's VoiceAdjust raises voices without dragging the whole mix up with them, and that's the setting you'll actually reach for — late-night viewing, thick accents, anyone in the house who keeps asking what that character just said. Consumer Reports finds dialogue clarity and bass are the two things most tied to owner satisfaction, and this bar handles both.

It's easy to hide, which matters more than people expect. At about 2 inches tall it won't block your screen's bottom edge or your TV's IR sensor, and Polk says setup takes under five minutes from box to sound. If you're upgrading a rental's TV audio and can't run wires anywhere, this is about as painless as it gets.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Push it hard and you'll hear where the money went. PCMag notes that budget bars generally run out of clean headroom around 85 to 90 decibels, and this one sits in that company — big action scenes in a large open room start to sound compressed. The Atmos effect is real but subtle. You'll notice height in a rainstorm, not a helicopter circling your head.

It's also plain. No room calibration, no Wi-Fi, no multiroom streaming — Bluetooth and HDMI are the whole story. If you want to play music through the house or tune the sound in an app, spend up.

Rear speakers change everything, and this is the only pick that includes them. Height effects are nice, but real speakers behind your couch are what make a chase scene wrap around you. Samsung includes up-firing and side-firing drivers in the bar, a sub, and two rear boxes that also fire at the ceiling. SoundGuys measured its response within about 3 decibels across most of the audible range, among the flattest in its class.

Bass is the other headline. RTINGS measured the bar reaching roughly 40Hz on its own, and below 30Hz once the wireless sub is running. That's low enough for the pressure you feel in your chest during a launch sequence, and low enough to annoy a downstairs neighbor. There's a night mode for the second problem.

If you already own a Samsung TV, it goes further. Q-Symphony plays the TV's speakers alongside the bar instead of muting them, and SpaceFit calibration uses the bar's own microphone to adjust for your walls and furniture. Neither is essential. Both are the kind of thing you notice more after a week than in the first hour.

Plan your outlets before it shows up. You're placing four powered pieces, and the rears need power near the back of the room. In an apartment with one outlet behind the couch, that means an extension cord and some cable management. In a dedicated media room, it's a non-issue.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

It's a lot of hardware for a small space. In a bedroom, 11.1.4 is overkill, and the subwoofer can overload the room no matter how you set the crossover. The bar is also over four feet wide, so it wants a 65-inch TV or larger to look right underneath.

This particular listing is a third-party bundle that adds a protection plan and, oddly, a bottle of screen cleaner. Harmless, but read what's included before you order — with bundles, the contents matter as much as the model number.

This bundle includes Samsung's full one-year manufacturer's warranty plus an added year of third-party protection coverage.

Wirecutter's panel rated the Smart Ultra highest among the bars it compared for dialogue intelligibility, crediting its dedicated center-channel tuning. Owner feedback lines up with that: news, procedurals, and British dramas come through without anyone hunting for the remote. The dialogue mode isn't a blunt treble boost, either. It rebalances voices against the surround content, so the rest of the mix doesn't go thin and tinny.

It's the easiest bar here to fit under a TV. Bose lists it at about 2.3 inches tall, and Engadget calls that among the shortest of any premium bar — which matters if your TV sits low on its stand or hides its IR sensor in the bottom bezel. Six transducers, including two up-firing dipoles, do the spatial work. No sub, no rears, nothing extra to place.

You also get Alexa and Google voice control built in, plus both optical and HDMI eARC cables in the box. That optical cable is genuinely useful if you're pairing this with an older TV that has no eARC port. You'll give up lossless Atmos on that connection, but you'll still get sound that buries the TV's own speakers.

Flaws but not dealbreakers

Bose does spatial audio its own way. TrueSpace upmixes stereo and 5.1 content into something wider, and listeners split on it — some love the effect, others find it processed and leave it off. That's taste more than a defect, but it's why we'd point a serious movie fan toward the Samsung instead.

Bass is the real limit. Without an external sub it can't reach the low end the Samsung or even the Polk manage, and Bose's sub modules are a separate purchase. Owner feedback is also more mixed than for the Sonos, mostly around app fussiness and occasional HDMI dropouts.