I wouldn't describe myself as a conspiracy theorist but when almost 3ars
of people report difficulty understanding dialogue in their favorite
TV shows and movies and the entertainment industry's response is
basically watch it in the theater or get your own Theater Red Flag I think you've
lost touch everyone uses subtitles now old man no I reject that it's the mixers
who are wrong and I've got the solution while sound bars may have a reputation
for being either outlandishly expensive or garbage or often some combination of
the two a goldilock Zone does appear to exist where you can get better dialogue
quality and a wider Sound Stage without breaking the bank and surprisingly the
most popular one on Amazon at the time of writing is from Bose Bose and
affordable aren't words I would normally put together so then why
the are you all buying this Soundbar ah
the better to hear this segue to our sponsor Deary the ridge the ridge
wallets are highquality compact minimalist wallets designed for
convenience and practicality follow the link below and use code Linus on
checkout to save 10% off your purchase and get free
shipping you might think that anyone spending ,000 on a TV would have some
kind of budget set aside for an audio system but speaking from experience it's
quite the opposite they're expecting that for that kind of money the built-in
speakers should be decent already unfortunately the industry Trend towards
thinner and thinner displays means there's simply not anywhere to put
speakers like where would these speakers go in this TV now at the very high end
there are Creative Solutions to this that involve vibrating the entire
surface of the display and whatnot but most people aren't buying those kinds of
solutions and the ones that are really
especially ought to be using external speakers and soap box so let's focus on
the mainstream then we're going to be pairing our top selling Soundbar the
Bose TV speaker with another bestseller
that we're going to get to in another video this 43in Amazon Fire
TV if I didn't know how good this movie is supposed to sound I might consider
this acceptable yeah it's fine I can barely hear his dad there
isn't even any background music right now I can barely make anything out the
sound quality is not great but that's
okay we can fix that surprisingly the box for the Bose
TV speaker contains only an optical cable to connect to your TV so we saw
some complaints from people who were upset that they couldn't use EC without
a trip to the local Walmart fortunately for us we have some HDMI cables lying
around and we would definitely recommend going this route since ER AR should
allow us to use our TV remote for Soundbar volume control and allow our
devices to automatically power up and power down together as for the rest of
the io we've got auxiliary in a service port a base Port we'll talk more about
this later and power now this unit doesn't have Wi-Fi meaning that you
can't connect to the Bose app but it does have Bluetooth if you want to use
it with a mobile device like your phone it's Bluetooth 4.2 though which means
limited range compared to more modern implementations I'm pretty sure there
supposed to be base here it's going to come in no but like there's supposed to
be like
subbase now here there's supposed to be base Bose yes base no
oh oh and that is not the mark of a good
speaker when the base finally manages to
hit the rest of the sound ducks are it kind of sounds like it's being
suppressed we also found that there was a lot of compression at high volume on
base heavy songs pretty good for music at low or medium volumes bad at high
volumes it's kind of like a giant Bluetooth
speaker it really struggles with the rumble of the
train it's way
better on the built-in speaker on this TV I couldn't tell she spoke a different
language there it was just all unintelligible to
me and I get it if you're looking to understand dialogue better I could see
people bringing this thing home and compared to their onboard thinking man
this is what I've been missing out on this thing's flipping amazing and if
you're still having trouble hearing the dialogue enhancer definitely works doing
even more to well enhance dialogue but
it does cost you in other areas particularly the little bit of Base that
there already was gets suppressed even further it's not a home theater in a box
but absolutely good enough for someone who just wants to hear what people are
freaking saying the solution to most of my problems seems to be a Bose base
module base module you mean a subwofer
ah no remember that base Port we saw
before well as it turns out Bose locks
down their Soundbars to prevent you from using a third-party powered sub I mean
I'm sure they have some kind of brand BS
ensuring a consistent experience justification for this but we need only
look as far as the price of Bose's proprietary base modules to find out
that this just comes down to milking you for more money once you're locked into
their ecosystem so you can eat a Bose at least it's stylish though like the all
new LTT tracksuit from LTT Store.com it's poly cotton Blended God it looks
good Bose has a pretty established look at this point black mesh with the Bose
logo on top if you've seen one you've kind of seen most of them the finish on
the plas plastic feels nice though the whole device is small and sleek and at
just over 2.2x 4X 23.4 in and 4.3 lbs
while mounting it should be a breeze though I suspect most people are just
going to set it down on their console like we did especially since the paid
mounting service costs almost as much as the Soundbar itself I'm not going to lie
uh this is about the least impressed that I have ever been by a why are you
all buying this thing product we're going to talk about some better options
in a bit here but first let's take a break from what I think and talk about
why you guys keep buying these with over 7,500 ratings on Amazon this Soundbar
averages 4.5 stars with a whopping 74%
of you giving it a full five stars in spite of my complaints y'all are pretty
happy with it let's start with the Positive then our five-star crowd loves
how easy it is to set up how well the dialogue enhancer Works especially for
seniors or those who are hard of hearing and they love how much of an upgrade it
is over their TV speakers moving on to the fourstar gang they mostly agreed
actually saying that it bumps up the perceived volume that having both Arc
and Optical connections is nice and that the sound quality is good however even
in the fourstar crowd almost every review comes with a caveat of some sort
there's an included optical cable but not HDMI it's easy to set up but the
sound is mediocre it's an improvement over my last Soundbar or my TV but it's
not as good as I was expecting considering that it's nearly $300 and it
comes from Bose a well-known company and as we keep moving down we find some
pretty reasonable complaints from in my humble opinion the people who probably
know home audio a little bit better than the wow it's better than nothing five
stars crowd for example we saw criticisms about the lack of EQ settings
other than dialogue criticisms about the poor performance at high volumes and the
lack of Bas we saw critiques of the lackluster remote that is all stuff that
we experienced and I think people were pretty fair about it what we didn't
experience though was overheating whatever our experience with our unit
though it's frankly alarming when this many reviews mention it being too hot to
touch smelling like burnt plastic and leaving marks on things some units even
broke seemingly prematurely with the customer suspecting heat to be the
culprit but then even if that wasn't a problem should you buy this thing well
if Bose was doing more than just making dialogue more intelligible I have no
problem with it I'd in fact love to see a version of this product that works
with third party accessories or that can be expanded in the future using it as a
center channel in a surround config or something like that but as it is it's a
deadend entry-level solution at a price that just doesn't make any sense I'm not
even trying to be one of those home theater setups are better than a
soundbar at any price Bros but for
$280 come on you could pick up almost
literally anything and get equally simple setup and dialogue enhancement I
mean Amazon knows this Vio 2.0 is a better basic option and it costs only
$69 nice not that I would necessarily even recommend the cheapest solution a
good Soundbar is still going to sound better than whatever your next TV and
your one after that is going to be and costs only a little bit more the LG S40
Q for example or the pulk Signa S2 are only about $130 and $160 respectively
and both of them come with a base module in the Box for that price so a
subwoofer exactly and if you were going to drink the Bose koolade anyway you
could spend the same amount and get something much
better and get something much better I mean we haven't gotten a chance to try
all these yet stay tuned cuz the lab's home theater testing room is going to be
coming online later this year but on paper the Sony HTS 400 Samsung hwb 550
and Vio vs series are all name brand products that are on sale right now and
match or beat our Bose's Soundbar while
also including a base
module subwoofer right you Bose the
reality is then if you buy the Bose TV speaker there's a good chance that 74%
or whatever it works out to that you are going to be happy with it but our job
isn't to tell you what might make you happy it's to help you spend your money
wisely and I just don't think the Bose TV speaker holds up especially if you
spent more than Fire TV money on your display we tried it for example on an
s95 B and while the dialogue enhancer
did improve over the stock speakers it
was not a massive Improvement and it came at the cost of everything but the
dialogue unusual conclusion today but do yourself a favor and don't follow the
crowd when it comes to Soundbars make sure to get something with a sub if you
want to feel your favorite content kind of like how you're going to feel this
segue to our sponsor thanks for watching we've got a whole series of these why
are you guys buying this stuff thing so maybe check them out if you like this
one or maybe check out the last time we did a soundbar the Vio sb2920
C6 it fared a lot better