What is a soundbar? Easily explained
With the boom in large flat-screen TVs, sound bars have also become popular in households. In this practical tip we explain what a soundbar is.
What is a soundbar?
Everyone is talking about sound bars. Above all, they are practical to install and have special sound properties:
- In contrast to the oxygen bars, which had a short heyday in the late 1990s, a soundbar is not a location. "Bar" means "bar" and means a dense, linear arrangement of speakers.
- Sound bars are preferably installed under large flat screen televisions. Among other things, because flat-screen TVs usually contain poor speakers.
- Sound bars are either connected directly to the television or to an amplifier.
- The advantage over the classic speakers next to the TV is that hardly any space is lost for the sound bar. If you mount your TV on the wall at eye level, there is often a lot of unused space underneath.
- Another advantage is the interaction: A small loudspeaker can hardly radiate low frequencies. Many small speakers in one housing radiate the bass much better.
- So a soundbar probably sounds richer than two small stereo speakers. However, they can usually not keep up with medium to high-quality broadband speakers.
- For many producers of music and film sound, sound bars are a horror. In the recording studio, loudspeakers are still preferably set up using the stereo triangle or a standardized 5.1 arrangement and the sound is optimized for this setup. A soundbar negates this work.
- Another problem is the limited stereo base: the stereo triangle allows phantom sources to be placed in any direction within a 60 ° window. Sound bars often only cover 20 °.
- Sonic Emotion offers a very special sound bar. It works on the principle of wave field synthesis and can thus expand the panorama a bit again.
- We rated the best sound bars in terms of sound for you in the expert test.
In contrast to home cinema, the trend in large cinemas is towards speaker systems for immersive processes such as Auro-3D and Dolby Atmos.