THE COMPLETE GUIDE TO
… Soundbars
The ever bigger pictures we’re getting from our TVs deserve to be partnered with equally big sound – and nothing can deliver that better without destroying your decor than a soundbar. Here’s what any prospective buyer should be looking for
Words: John Archer Photography: Neil Godwin
Soundbars feel like they’re relatively new additions to the home entertainment landscape. An inevitable spin-off of our obsession with ever-thinner TV designs that just don’t have enough physical space to hold a half-decent sound system.
In reality, though, basic efforts to build passive left, right and centre speakers into single enclosures have been around for decades. Even if you formalise things and define a ‘true’ soundbar as a horizontally configured enclosure that contains fully powered speakers for multiple channels of sound, then the first example, the wonderfully prosaically named ADA106 from US brand Altec Lansing, went on sale 22 years ago.
In fact, the emergence of soundbars probably became inevitable as far back as the 1980s, when the arrival of the Dolby Surround and Dolby Pro-Logic sound formats ushered in a living room audio revolution as movie and TV fans suddenly found they could enjoy cinematic sound at home.
As both the market and the actual product size of this new home cinema revolution grew, so did demand for solutions that delivered the joys of separate audio devices without the usual attendant clutter of speakers, amps and AV receivers.
Ironically, it was ultimately the villain of the AV audio piece – the television – which arguably provided the ‘missing link’ that led to the creation of the soundbar. In the mid 1990s, some TV makers started to deploy psychoacoustic processing to create much bigger sound stages and even some vaguely surround sound audio effects from their (still in truth pretty puny) built-in speakers.
Naturally such approaches only achieved moderate success in sound quality terms. But they proved there was a consumer appetite for a compromise between sound quality and convenience that led Altec Lansing to the ADA106.
The ADA106 was a surprisingly serious bit of kit considering its ground-breaking status. It supported Dolby Pro-Logic and Dolby Digital AC-3 audio decoding, a quartet of three-inch drivers and two one-inch tweeters, and even shipped with an external subwoofer for bass. Nowadays, many models try to squeeze all their speakers, including bass drivers, into one-box solutions. All sorts of new speaker designs and psychoacoustic algorithms have been thrown at trying to get big sound from ever smaller boxes, too.