Yamaha - 2.1-Channel Indoor Compact Bluetooth Sound Bar with Wireless Subwoofer - Black

Absolutely love this sound bar and sub woofer!! For how small the soundbar is, it has amazing sound and the subwoofer makes it feel like I’m in a movie theatre. Would highly recommend!

I bought this to use my small workout room. It is loud, but I thought it would be louder, loud enough, that I wouldn’t hear myself singing. Ha! But it could be operator error?? I have the sub on top of dresser and the bar in another area. Everything works as it should.

To begin, the item was well packaged. Plenty of styrofoam to protect everything. Everything was well wrapped and packaged and neatly laid out. Set up was a breeze. Power cable, connect to television, set the input, and boom! For flat panel televisions, these are almost a must-have. Instantly a huge difference. I tried many different forms of media and the sound bar made a big difference. Watching news, voices are clear and bold. No delay at all. Voices were perfectly timed. I then tuned into sports and the game sounded great. The crowd was roaring and you could feel the bass come through. Made a huge difference. Then tuned into a movie. Dialogue came through loud and clear. Conversations were crisp and precise. An excellent reproduction of sound. When it came to action scenes, the sound bar came through with an excellent mix of mids, bass, and treble. None of them overpowered the others. Car chase scenes were dynamic and explosive. For a 2.1 sound bar, this does a great job. At its price point, it’s the best 2.1 system I have heard. The easy access menus and remote control make it a clear winner. Without breaking the bank, this is a great compact system. Highly recommended!

This 2.1 Sound Bar with Sub-woofer sounds great for its compact size. The Soundbar is 2.9lbs, and 23-5/8” x 2-1/2” x 3-3/4”. The wireless Subwoofer is 12.9lbs and 13-1/4” x 6-1/4” x 14-3/8. Being lightweight and having mounting holes makes it easy to mount under a TV, monitor, or on a wall. The Subwoofer is not big and with no wires is easy to place under a desk or behind a cabinet. The unit comes with two power cables, a remote, spacers, a mounting template, pads for the subwoofer, and a Toslink cable. The soundbar and subwoofer come pre-mated and connect automatically. The soundbar has the connections, HDMI, 2x Toslink, and 3.5mm. The USB connection is for updates only. I slung my soundbar under my PC monitor and the subwoofer under my desk. For PC connections, you will have to use a Toslink cable. The HDMI interface only works for sound with an Audio Return Channel (ARC) connection. Connecting the soundbar directly to a video card or a non ARC TV HDMI connection will not provide any sound. You can control the on/off and HDMI control functions through the HDMI cable without ARC, but that’s it. You will need to a Toslink or 3.5mm cable without ARC. Toslink is limited to 5.1, but with a 2.1 setup such as this, it’s not a problem. Dolby Digital and PCM are supported thought HDIM or Toslink. I connected my PC to the soundbar via Toslink. If you want to use this with multiple items, you will need to connect them to a TV with the soundbar on the ARC HDMI slot, and have all other units go through the TV. Most PC monitors do not have ARC. Once hooked up the sound is quite good. Far better than small PC, TV, or monitor speakers. Unlike many small soundbars, with the subwoofer the range is greatly increased. The subwoofer is not overpowering and matches the soundbar nicely. The remote control is a simple layout and allows access to all the functions and inputs. On the soundbar itself, lights indicate the status and settings. You get 4 preset modes, Stereo, Standard, 3D movie, and Game. You also have options for clear voice, and bass extension. All provide slight tweaks to the listening experience. The soundbar, even turned up high never got distorted. The remote has two volume controls, one for overall and one for the subwoofer. If you don’t want to use a cable you can connect to the soundbar with Bluetooth (BT). Using BT, the unit will stay in a low power mode waiting for the BT signal and turn on as needed. BT sounded good and connecting was a standard pairing procedure. You can dim the lights and mute from the remote too. As I was using the soundbar on a PC, I selected game for the sound preference. Games sound great and with the bass have some punch to them. Music sounds good whether through Toslink or BT connections. The soundbar has a good range and the bass adds the low range nicely. The info button the remote will tell you the type of audio signal the unit is receiving by the lights that illuminate on the soundbar. You can also access the soundbar through the Yamaha SB remote on a tablet or smartphone. This works through BT and allows access to all soundbar features. If BT is on this can also be an easy way to control everything. The soundbar is compact, lightweight sound good, and easy to mount or place due to its compact size. With the subwoofer the range of sound is expanding providing a better listening experience. The caveat is you can’t simply plug into the unit with HDMI. The unit can be connected to two different units through BT. You have to have ARC, there is only one HDMI connection. Even with HDMI splitters, most split out the sound to Toslink, but I found none that would pass an ARC signal onto a split HDMI port if the source didn’t have ARC. But, you can always go wireless with BT if you are trying to cut down on cables. PCs, TVs, and many A/V units have Toslink ports and with the provided cable you connect easily. The soundbar frees up space and does its job well.

Yamaha soundbar SR-C30ABL (package) SR-CUC30A (soundbar) SR-WSWC30A(subwoofer) TLDR: Great for the size and price Background I got this for use in a room over a garage. It will be connected to a 55” TV. It is where I watch a lot of movies and play video games with a connected gaming desktop PC. It is not a particularly large space and has sloped ceilings for the majority of the area. Since it isn’t the primary system in the house, I was just looking for something small and affordable that might improve the sound in the space and give it a little more depth. Setup Opening the interestingly shaped box reveals a fairly small soundbar, and a subwoofer. Also included are a remote, a power brick, and a couple of power cords, as well as an optical audio cable. No HDMI cable for ARC is included, although there is a port for it. It also includes hardware for mounting the soundbar if you want to. Connection was fairly straight forward. Step one, Plug in the power supplies Step two, Pull the battery tab on the remote Step three, There are little plastic covers on each end of the optical cable. Remove those. Step four plug in the optical cable between the soundbar and the TV Step five, and I missed this step, press the optical button on the remote to select the optical input Step six, Watch and enjoy Appearance, the front looks ok with a nice black fabric. The back is just kind of cheap looking plastic, but you don’t really see it anyway. The woofer is nice looking as well, and it is built so it can be used in either a vertical or a horizontal orientation. This gives you options in where you place it. Also, much appreciated is the fact it is wireless, so you don’t need to figure out how to run wire to it, which also opens up a lot of placement options. Basically you can put it anywhere you want as long as you can plug it in. Controls While it has LEDS on the front, it isn’t super obvious at first what they are representing. When you adjust the volume, they all kind of just flash. A blue LED represents being in bluetooth mode I guess. There are five LEDs, so it would make sense to just light up however many are proportional to your current volume as you hit the volume button, which it does do, but only after you stop pressing the volume button. Performance Once I had it connected, which basically just involved plugging in the included optical cable between my TV and the soundbar, and connecting power and took all of 5 minutes, I decided to try a test movie that I thought would have some good sound effects. I chose Edge of Tomorrow First Impression - What? Really?! I will be honest, I was not expecting much when I got this because it was quite affordable but it also looks kind of diminutive when you take it out of the box, especially the soundbar. I was kind of like, is this it? However, the sound is rich and deep and just really great all around. The subwoofer adds a lot to the party. It has a separate volume button on the remote for the subwoofer which you can set to 4 levels, so it is easy to turn the volume for it up and down to see the impact, and it is surprising how much impact it adds. The subwoofer adds a lot. There are a variety of modes you can use. Standard mode for just watching regular TV. 3D mode for movies to give them an extra punch. Stereo mode for streaming music, and Game mode when playing games. The difference between each mode was noticeable. Basically they are kind of like preset Equalizer settings. You can also switch the speaker between a clear voice and bass mode to help hear voices when watching something with dialog. Bluetooth/streaming I also connected my phone to it and listened to music through it. This worked great too. It has different modes, so I connected my phone via bluetooth and selected stereo mode, and it sounded really good. It was a little confusing connecting to bluetooth at first. It wasn’t until I realized, maybe I have to switch the soundbar to bluetooth to see it. When I did that, a device, Yamaha SR-C30A appeared and I paired with that and could play. That didn’t appear until I hit the bluetooth button on the remote though and I didn’t really know I needed to do that. Reconnecting for later sessions just entails pressing the bluetooth button to switch the sound bar into bluetooth mode and then the phone just connects to it automatically. Soundbar Remote App I also installed the Yamaha Soundbar Remote app on my Android device. It basically mimics all the controls on the actual remote. All of the controls are available in the app, but it does not appear to add any additional functionality that is not already available on the remote. If you want to avoid always searching for the remote, or if you lose the remote completely, it is good to know the app is there if you need it. Conclusion For the price, I think this is a good value. I was really surprised, especially in movie mode, how much of a difference it made. Also, toggling the woofer on and off really showed very clearly what an impact it made over just having the soundbar alone. It is like night and day. I think the best way I can express how impressed I am with it is this. I am actually going to buy another one. My son had indicated he was interested in a soundbar last Christmas. He currently rents a room in a shared apartment with roommates, so he is also fairly limited on space. He still hasn’t really settled, so anything he gets is probably going to have to be moved a few times until he reaches that point. So anything he gets at this point needs to be fairly small and easily transportable. He will probably mostly use it for gaming. He doesn’t have a stereo either and with this he can just stream to this from his phone or his laptop. After using this, I see no reason to even look at anything else. It seems like a perfect fit for him. I could also see this being a great solution for something like a dorm room too. It is small enough that it doesn’t take up much room if you have to take all your stuff to and from school each year. Also, if you are using a small projector, which my kids did/do in college to avoid having to transport a TV back and forth, this could provide the sound that those just can’t provide. I could see this coupled with a small portable projector streaming from a firestick or a laptop providing a pretty impressive dorm movie night. The whole system is compact and wouldn’t be difficult to move between years, or between apartments. Don’t let its small size fool you. Big things come in small packages. It is affordable enough and the quality is good enough that it is not a hard choice to make, which is why I am keeping mine and will buy another. I would highly recommend it. I think it is great for what it is for. I do have a nicer soundbar elsewhere in my home and admittedly it has features this doesn't have, but it was also vastly more expensive. Dollar for dollar, this really impresses with what it offers.