Customer Ratings & Reviews

Back and forth between the 2 or the 3. Ponied up for the 3 due to sale. The 3 has a larger sub and is more versatile. I love it! The family loves it. The kids are blasting movies. Overall I went this direction rather than setting up an entire surround system with wires. The JBL system set up with the Samsung TV automatically. Too easy. I'm going to have to get another one for the other room. Easy and sturdy wall mount. No complaints.

We use this for sound for our 65 inch Samsung TV. The sound is excellent, especially for the price we paid.

Easy to set up. Definitely an upgrade to the TV speakers. Deep base, Crystal clear highs.

Looks good, works easy, sounds good. I have a Sony tv so it automatically configured itself.

the system works well in my home. the bass is not to overpowering and sound is crystal clear.

If you love bass this is the sound bar for you. The sound is also nice and clear. Very happy with this purchase.

After trying out the Samsung 2.1 (hw-m450) for a couple of days, I wasn’t impressed due to its hollow sound, lack of bass, and no muddled midrange, I quickly decided to return it to swap up to the 3.1 due to the addition of the center channel. After trying it out in the store, I was still not impressed. I have 4 Samsung TVs in my House and love them, and though the Samsung soundbars look sleek and integrate well via the HDMI ARC (allows auto on/off, volume and full soundbar equalizer control via Samsung TV), I couldn’t bring myself to give them more money for a subpar audio experience. So I did some testing... I made sure to leave the wife and child at home, because I knew I’d be spending hours at the store listening to every option they had. So I began testing. Knowing full and well that there are better sounding options available, I needed to keep a smaller form factor due to the mounting location above the fireplace, but under the TV. As a control, I started out in the Magnolia room to listen to the higher end bars with a few different source Blue Ray scenes. I grabbed one of the sales people, who helped setup the Martin Logan Vision Soundbar with builtin subwoofer. This thing sounded great, very crisp and clear sound, the bass was actually quite impressive itself, but there were two main areas that this didn’t hit for me. One, the form factor - it was too deep, too tall, and frankly, kind of ugly for what I was looking for. It probably wouldn’t bother me if I was going to put it in a full theatre room, but that being the case, I’d have a full surround setup, and not just a soundbar. The other area that fell short was the configuration menu was difficult to understand, and some of the settings seemed a bit strange. Not critical once it’s setup, but if you’re one to adjust settings based on source material, you probably wouldn’t like the Martin Logan. Still, the sound was pretty stellar for a 5.1 channel all in one bar with building subs and 7 discreet amplifiers. Next I tried the Definitive Technologies microbar, which was much sleeker, but the sound was severely lacking. Bass response was ok, but the bar itself lived in the high end, with virtually no midrange. After reading some reviews on it, it seems like most people that own the DT have technical issues with the wireless connectivity, so because of those two issues, decided to not bother adjusting the audio for further testing. Of course there’s the Sonos. I have a couple of Play 3s already that sound good, but by my standards, not incredible. They’re solid speakers, but not worth it for the price. I have a hard time wanting to give Sonos my money, but nevertheless went to the floor to take a listen to the Play Soundbar and sub. The sound quality isn’t course decent, they perform solidly over the entire spectrum, but I would say the value just isn’t there for the Sonos. For more than $1200 out the door, it just doesn’t make sense for my purposes. I’ve had several full theater setups over the years, and still have one (Yamaha/Cambridge Model Six - LOVE those) in my basement, but just need something simple for our main floor. The Sonos isn’t it. On to the Bose, which rivals the Sonos pretty well. When I used to work at Best Buy back in the 90s, I used to sell Bose, and was never really a fan of the company, but still loved their model 701, 901 and even had a pair of their 501s that I really liked and kept in great condition before selling them off several years later. Pleasantly surprised by the sound quality of their soundbar and separate sub, I still couldn’t justify $1200 out the door. And to tell you the truth, as in true Bose fashion, their midrange was lacking behind their SUPER bright high end. At least their consistent, as this was a problem with the majority of their Acoustimass setups for decades. Over to the Klipsch... Now, the ones on display were only 2.1 setups, but they had the best balanced sound than any of the soundbar setups I’ve heard up til that point. Of course, there is always tuning you can do, but both of the Klipsch models were notable. I guess considering theyre reference series bars, they should sound great. The only problem was the lack of center channel - oh, and the fact that they’re god awful to look at. Over to the Polk. Now, I will say that I had one of the original Polk SurroundBars that I picked up years ago, paired with a 10” Polk powered sub in a similar room in my old condo, and loved it for what it was. So I was surprised that the Polk offerings - at least the displays were kind of lacking... to be honest, they sounded pretty bad, even for 2.1, so I quickly moved on. Over to the Samsung bars again just for the sake of sanity checking everything I had just heard, and after having tested so many, found the Samsung sounded just as bad as I had remembered. Even the hw-m550 with the center channel, though it was supposed to have better imaging, still sounded hollow. That when I noticed the fairly new JBl that wasn’t properly hooked up, so I had to work with the sales associate to find a remote to connect the subwoofer. That took about 10-15 minutes, but once we did, we both listened and found it to be fairly surprising. The highs were crisp, the mids were only slightly lacking, but the bass was super clear and really filled out the setup. We did some tweaking and made some basic adjustments, but overall, this soundbar sounded like a real contender. The sale price at the time was $449, but I just so happened to find one that was open box. The look of the bar, the fact that this can be controlled from my Samsung TV via the HDMI ARC, the deep, clear bass, the crisp highs, the adequate mids, along with the fact that the imaging for the center channel were all present, made this the pick of the day. Top it off with a virtually new open box buy, I got this thing for a steal. Later, I came to find out that the reason this one was returned is because it was stuck in demo mode and refused to play anything other than through optical 1. Basically all that was needed was to reset the bar by holding the volume and source buttons on the bar for 5 seconds, and I was in business! After setting up the bar and mounting to the wall, I found the “appropriate” sound mode (movie or sport), adjusted the sub volume slightly using the remote, and let the thing eat. If I had to do it all over again, I would have saved myself some time and listened to the JBL first. In terms of quality, the build is solid, the look is sleek, and the bass is incredible, tight, low and clean, even for a ported enclosure. Glad to see Hartman International still cranking out some quality products.

Love this product, great sound quality. The bass is deep and the sound is crystal clear.

My new living room was not large enough for my stereo and tower speakers. I looked long and hard for a suitable replacement and the best buy salesman recommended this JBL soundbar. The is the only soundbar I listed too that matched the sound quality and sound levels of my stereo system. I highly recommend it. It works well for movies, gaming, and music. Also this a bluetooth speaker, so I play music off of my phone frequently with it.

I was seriously impressed with the bass the 10" sub was putting out in this system. It rivaled some other subs I've had in the past. Unfortunately, it appears that the price point may have been the limiting factor to this system being a keeper. It is extremely good in sub-bass frequencies, perfectly acceptable in treble frequencies, but almost non-existent in mid range frequencies. It would have been nice for them to raise the crossover frequency on the sub to make up for the complete lack of mids. I don't think it would have helped at all but they don't even give you any controls for treble and bass so that you could at least try to tweak the sound to your liking. You only get a control for the amount of bass from the subwoofer. If there was sub-bass in the scene, you kind of didn't notice the lack of mids, but on general TV shows (especially kids shows), it sounded not much better than a tin can. Even at a Christmas discount, it wasn't worth listening to, much less worth the money spent. I did not check the more expensive 5.1 model to see if maybe they added better control at that price point. Maybe that one is better. I really wish there was a way to bridge the gap on what's missing. In my opinion, it would have been the soundbar to beat if so. I ended up returning it and continuing my research.

Absolutely impressed with the clear sound and deep bass. Goes extremely well with my TV.

the sound is clear has a lot of bass. Got in on open box so I saved a little bit of money on it

This guy produces great sound with rumbling base. No issues on setup or wireless sub connectivity.

Dynamic lows and thumping bass. Best mode seems to be surround sound. Great little system for the price

This product has easily met all my expectations. Easy to use and set up. Sounds great!

Amazing sound bar!! Shakes the house when I want it to, easy to use, easier to set up.

The soundbar produces good sound, has Bluetooth and is easy to setup.

For the price, this is an excellent sound system. If you are looking for a sound bar for movies and music this is what you want. Fantastic bass

This is my first sound bar and had always been worried about the sound coming out of those tiny speakers. However, this exceeded my expectations by far. It still has a surround sound feel without all the speakers and wires everywhere. The bass is amazing you feel it even from 20 feet away. This has made the biggest improvement to my home theater area. Definitely would recommend this to anyone.

Get product. Easy setup. Sound quality is what you would expect from JBL. PERFECT.