There's nothing like coming home after a tough day, cracking a brew, and cranking up your home theater system. Maybe it's Major League Baseball. Maybe it's analyzing Game of Thrones episodes. (But let's be real: not the Red Wedding. Not again.) Or maybe it's musing the intellectual profundity of the Michael Bay catalog. However you choose to decompress, there's one thing everyone wants: booming, sparkling audio that's easy to install and won't break your bank account.
And unless you have a surplus of both money and space, you probably want a sound bar.
But, as we've said before, investing in a sound bar is an act of concession. Sure, you eliminate messy cord-clutter and gain a large, attractive gadget that looks slick sitting in front of your Tyrano-vision sized TV. But this comes at a sonorous cost. No matter how advanced the tech gets, a sound bar can't quite match the audio performance of a 5.1 setup. But now Vizio offers something of a workaround with this home theater package.
The idea is simple: Vizio takes a three-channel sound bar plus a wireless subwoofer and adds a pair of wired rear channel speakers. These rear channels plug directly into the subwoofer, which you then ostensibly stash behind the couch. Voilà! The performance of a 5.1 system without a bunch of damn cords running everywhere.
Setting the unit up does not take long. The 42-inch sound bar links to the subwoofer via Bluetooth and comes preconnected so there's no need to futz around with a bunch of pairing kabuki. Color-coded wires help you connect the correct speakers to the proper ports. All told, it takes under 10 minutes to get things up and running.
And once it started running, I was initially impressed. To test out the system's cinematic chops, I queued up HBO Go and turned on some particularly raucous episodes of Game of Thrones. As the Battle of Blackwater raged, I heard all kinds of detail from the rear channels – swords clanging, men screaming as they were being burned to death. I half expected the Hound to burst into the living room and cut someone in half.
Sports, however, were equal parts hit and a miss. When tuning in to watch a Giants game, on-field action – the crack of a bat, the whump of a curveball winding its way into a catcher's mitt – was clear, almost like I was sitting in the dugout. But when the announcer came on, his voice sounded much less mellifluous than I expected. It wasn't much better than the TV's speakers.
Speaking of curveballs, I tossed a few of the audio variety at the system. Chief among them was Daft Punk's Random Access Memories. (If you haven't listened to this album yet, shame on you.) While the midrange separation was great – I could easily discern synthesizer from guitar riffs on tracks like "Giorgio by Moroder" – bass proved to be less than stellar even when cranked up to its max levels.
I went back and re-watched Game of Thrones episodes. Again, battle scenes sounded amazing. But when things got quiet – say a discreet conversation between Littlefinger and Varys – things got muffled. I tried more dialogue-heavy content like new episodes of Arrested Development and the opening scene of Manhattan, and it sounded flat and tiny. That's when it dawned on me: Vizio's system does big and loud very well. But soft and nuanced? Not so much.
The 42-inch-long 102dB soundbar is rather handsome with a matte finish that thankfully doesn't show much dust. The main speaker is a tad top-heavy, though. While unplugging the optical cable, I accidentally nudged the speaker too hard and it crashed to the floor. The sound wasn't affected, and I won't take off points for being a klutz.
What Vizio has done here is admirable. Yes, low-spoken dialogue sounds like it's being delivered by a disaffected teenager. But for south of four Benjamins, Vizio has created a system centered around a sound bar that actually provides real surround sound.
WIRED Real 5.1 surround sound in sound-bar form. The price is right, Bob. Setup so easy, a knuckle-dragging troglodyte could do it. Big, loud, crazy action scenes are the unit's raison d'être.
TIRED Speakers don't do soft dialogue justice. Bass hits with the power of a newborn kitten. About as top heavy as Dolly Parton.