Back to Bose TV Speaker Surround Sound Wireless Bluetooth Soundbar for TV, Black

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5stars
(10 reviews)

Most helpful positive review

5.00 out of 5 stars review
Verified Purchaser
10/04/2020
New Bose TV Speaker is Excellent!
The New Bose TV Speaker improves on everything the Bose Solo 5 does. It is slightly wider and slightly lower in size and should fit in front of just about an TV. (An optional wall mount is available.) It has a built-in power supply so you only need to plug in a power cord - no power-brick to hide. Connectivity is excellent as it supports line-level,, optical and HDMI-ARC input. When connected to a HDMI-ARC jack it will automatically power itself on and off and you may adjust the volume using the remote that came with your TV even though it comes with a nice, small remote. Don't be put off that it does not come with a universal remote - you shouldn't need it as the speaker can be programmed to work with the remote you already own if you do not have a HDMI-ARC jack available. The sound quality is excellent and it provides quite good left-right sound separation and great speech quality thanks to its center mounted tweeter. It also has a speech mode setting for even greater clarity. I used the Bluetooth feature to stream music to it and while listening to the live recording of "Hotel California" you could easily pick out each of the acoustic guitars in the song. Pretty impressive for a TV speaker. The volume level exceeds that of the Solo 5 and it has quite a good sound stage as well so your movie or music sounds more like it is in the room as opposed to just coming out of a box. While the bass is pretty impressive for its size it does have the ability to be plugged into a Bose Subwoofer if you are looking for real room-shaking bass.
JimmyG

Most helpful negative review

2.00 out of 5 stars review
Verified Purchaser
10/03/2020
Disappointed
Got this to replace the speakers I have on my computer. I have a Bose theater system for my main TV and Bose Micro speakers for my patio so I am used to excellent quality audio from their speakers. I watch a lot of TV on my computer and listen to some music. Set up is very easy whether direct connect or bluetooth. Unfortunately I was completely underwhelmed by the audio quality. The sound almost sounded like mono instead of stereo and was muted. It doesn't have the same crisp, clear audio of my other Bose speakers. I'm not sure whether it would even be an improvement over the regular TV speakers. I did a Youtube video review that is called "Bose TV Soundbar vs Creative Technologies Inspire 2 1". It's my first one ever and not very professional but hopefully you get the idea.
kmitch1001
14 reviews
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  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/08/2020
    Great TV sound bar
    This is a small sound bar with a big speaker sound. The compact size 2.2in high, 23.4in wide, 4in deep, make this sound bar very flexible for positioning. Setup is simple right out of the box. It comes with the power cord, an optical cable and a remote control. You can also connect it with your own HDMI cable. It is Bluetooth capable so I can play music from my phone and again the sound is great. The next TV I buy will be Bluetooth capable which should allow me to place the speaker across the room. I connected my sound bar into the cable box via the optical cable which was much easier for me than connecting to the back of the TV. You can set the sound bar to come on when it detects the TV is on, or you can turn it on from the remote. I was able to connect mine to my universal cable remote. There is a bass control on the remote which also reduces treble as you increase bass. Bose offers a separate bass speaker that is connectable to this sound bar. There is also a dialogue mode on the remote that is supposed to elevate the sound of dialogue but I haven't experimented with it too much yet. So far I am very please with this speaker.
    SATDon
  • 4.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/07/2020
    Loud and Clear
    Adding this Bose TV speaker is the easiest way to improve overall TV audio. This relatively small soundbar does not have deep base or virtual surround sound but it can deliver booming audio and clear dialogue for a better TV watching experience. This Bose speaker is super simple to hook up - you can choose between optical (cable included) and HDMI-ARC inputs, or if you use a projector like me, the speaker can easily pair with an Apple TV or a Fire TV Stick via Bluetooth. Bluetooth is wireless so it is not as reliable as a cable connection but it worked fine. I did have to switch my streaming device to use the 5 GHz Wi-Fi band to avoid interference with the 2.4 GHz band that Bluetooth uses. Loud and clear are words that perfectly describe this speaker's performance. Even at maximum volume, there was no distortion. Hit the Dialogue button on the remote control and the center tweeter will give voices a boost to make conversations much easier to understand. Tip: the Dialogue mode button is located in the lower-right corner of the remote. When enabled, the source light on the speaker glows green. This Bose TV speaker sounded very good overall but without a subwoofer, bass is a bit lacking in my opinion and is just barely adequate at maximum level. Tip: on the remote control, press the Bass button - the lights on the speaker blink three times. Press the + or - button to adjust the amount of bass. Press the Bass button again to save your setting. This Bose TV speaker never claimed to provide a home theater experience so set your expectations accordingly and you won't be disappointed. This is simply a compact but very capable TV speaker replacement.
    TXDaddy
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/05/2020
    Great sound in a small speaker
    This is my first Bose product and I'm extremely impressed by the sound that this small speaker/soundbar puts out. We were looking for a soundbar to replace the sound from the subpar speakers that are built into our bedroom TV. We didn't want to have any other satellite speakers or a separate subwoofer cluttering up our bedroom, so this speaker is perfect. It took about 5 minutes to connect it to our TV. There isn't a lot to setting up the speakers, but the instructions are excellent. I didn't use the included optical cable because our TV has an HDMI ARC port and I already had an HDMI cable. The HDMI ARC option was recommended in the instruction booklet. The only other connection was from the speaker to the power outlet. Our TV automatically sensed the speaker and automatically turned off the sound to the TV speakers. It really could not have been any easier. By using the HDMI ARC connection, we only need to use the remote that came with the speaker to change the settings. Otherwise, our TV remote controls everything and the speaker automatically powers on and off when we use the TV remote. Once the speaker was connected, I tried it out with some content from one of the content streaming providers. My first impression was that there was adequate bass, but not overly impressive. After adjusting the bass using the included remote, I was amazed that a speaker of this size could put out so much bass. The sound is very rich and the separation between the various internal speakers is excellent. The sound from the speakers in the TV does not even come close to the Bose speaker. I turned on the speech enhancement mode and that was an additional improvement. The speech enhancement mode seems to stay on until you turn it off or you unplug the speaker. My next step was to connect my phone to the speaker via Bluetooth. Pairing my phone to the speaker was simple. Once again, the sound was excellent, but I found that I was also able to turn on speech enhancement on the Bluetooth setting and it also improved the music coming from the phone. If there are any concerns I have with the speaker, it might be that with music coming from my phone, the mid-range of the music on some songs seems just a tad muted but this was only on some of the music. This might be due to an equalizer setting on my phone, but I haven't had time to really play with it to know for sure. This is not a big issue at all. If you're looking to upgrade from your existing TV speakers or want to downsize from a larger soundbar without sacrificing sound, this is a great option
    Alfromil
  • 4.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/04/2020
    Nice Compact Design
    I have been using this Bose Speaker for a week now and have used it for regular TV shows, Movies and Music. Without the optional Bass speaker, You are getting a high definition audio speaker not much different than what today's higher quality TV'S already come with. If you have a standard TV then this Bose will improve the quality of your sound. There is a bass sound adjustment but not like a separate speaker would sound like. Regular TV shows are an improvement as well as Netflix. Music sounds good but not like a full surround sound system. You will get crisp sound but don't expect booming bass effects.
    Jim3000gt
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/04/2020
    Movies never sounded so good in my bedroom.
    I needed to install the Bose TV Speaker on the wall in my bedroom. I purchased the Bose mounting kit and it fit perfectly. If you need to wall mount the Bose TV Speaker get the kit. I have the HDMI ARC port on my TV so I connected the Bose TV Speaker with my own HDMI cable. I needed to change the settings in my TV to get the on and off and volume to work with my TV remote. The sound is awesome, watching movies we can hear the words and not get blasted when the music or shooting starts. We watched a whole movie last night without having to be constantly reaching for the remote. Note: this is a TV speaker and not surround sound. Watching movies in my bedroom have never been better, nice clear voices, rich deep music and even volume. Using the Bluetooth streaming was seamless and I can listen to all my music apps with great sound from my phone. All TV speakers installed on your TV should sound like this right out of the box.
    RayBans
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/04/2020
    New Bose TV Speaker is Excellent!
    The New Bose TV Speaker improves on everything the Bose Solo 5 does. It is slightly wider and slightly lower in size and should fit in front of just about an TV. (An optional wall mount is available.) It has a built-in power supply so you only need to plug in a power cord - no power-brick to hide. Connectivity is excellent as it supports line-level,, optical and HDMI-ARC input. When connected to a HDMI-ARC jack it will automatically power itself on and off and you may adjust the volume using the remote that came with your TV even though it comes with a nice, small remote. Don't be put off that it does not come with a universal remote - you shouldn't need it as the speaker can be programmed to work with the remote you already own if you do not have a HDMI-ARC jack available. The sound quality is excellent and it provides quite good left-right sound separation and great speech quality thanks to its center mounted tweeter. It also has a speech mode setting for even greater clarity. I used the Bluetooth feature to stream music to it and while listening to the live recording of "Hotel California" you could easily pick out each of the acoustic guitars in the song. Pretty impressive for a TV speaker. The volume level exceeds that of the Solo 5 and it has quite a good sound stage as well so your movie or music sounds more like it is in the room as opposed to just coming out of a box. While the bass is pretty impressive for its size it does have the ability to be plugged into a Bose Subwoofer if you are looking for real room-shaking bass.
    JimmyG
  • 2.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/03/2020
    Disappointed
    Got this to replace the speakers I have on my computer. I have a Bose theater system for my main TV and Bose Micro speakers for my patio so I am used to excellent quality audio from their speakers. I watch a lot of TV on my computer and listen to some music. Set up is very easy whether direct connect or bluetooth. Unfortunately I was completely underwhelmed by the audio quality. The sound almost sounded like mono instead of stereo and was muted. It doesn't have the same crisp, clear audio of my other Bose speakers. I'm not sure whether it would even be an improvement over the regular TV speakers. I did a Youtube video review that is called "Bose TV Soundbar vs Creative Technologies Inspire 2 1". It's my first one ever and not very professional but hopefully you get the idea.
    kmitch1001
  • 3.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/02/2020
    Definitley an improvement over TV sound, but ...
    Review for the Bose TV Speaker. I have no idea what the model number of this speaker is because it's not clearly designated anywhere. Sure, there are lots of numbers on the back of the speaker and on the outside of the box, but nothing says “model”. So, this is a Bose speaker with 3 speakers, two mid-range speakers and one tweeter. When I received the box I was very impressed by the quality of the packaging, so much so that I took a picture of it. The box and packaging make you think you have a very high-end, quality product. The box contained the speaker, a remote control, a power cable, a digital audio fiber optic cable and a very brief “start here” guide. Connecting the speaker with the fiber optic cable was simple and you immediately start hearing the TV sound through the speaker (sound bar). You can also connect the speaker using an HDMI ARC cable, but that's more of a hassle because you have to get into the TV menus. The remote controller already had a battery installed in it. It uses a coin-type (flat circular) battery, with an easy-to-open battery compartment. The top surface of the remote is finished in a velvety material and feels nice. The buttons on the remote control are not lit and don't have much contrast with the background, so in a dark room you may not see the button symbols clearly. There are buttons for volume, bass, dialog, Bluetooth, mute, and a TV button. The start guide doesn't explain each button or the meaning of the LEDs blinking on the front of the speaker. Instead it tells you to go to some Bose website. The indicated website wasn't much help because it seemed like a generic site for Bose speakers, with bits and pieces of information scattered on various pages. There was a PDF manual for download, but the information in that was also rather ambiguous. The remote control buttons: - The Bass button has no effect on the sound when turning the bass volume all the up or down. Digging through the PDF manual, there is no explicit information, but there is the implication that you would need a Bose “bass module” connected to this sound bar (via 3.5 mm audio connector) and then you'll have more bass through the remote button. Based on this theory I tried connecting a speaker I had to the bass port but no sound came out of it. Then I read in the troubleshooting section of the PDF manual that the bass module must be compatible. The cheapest compatible Bose bass module is $400. - The Dialog button on the remote also doesn't seem to have a significant effect in the sound. - The TV button on the remote was another mystery. The PDF manual seems to imply one of two situations: use the Bose remote to control the TV volume or vice versa. Unclear which. This button needs to be programmed to do whatever. I skipped this feature because I wanted to independently control TV and sound bar volumes. I couldn't find info in the manual to “un-program” this feature in case I didn't like it. - The Bluetooth button is for connecting to your cell phone. I assume that this feature is intended to play sounds (music) from your cell phone through the Bose speaker, but the PDF manual doesn't actually say that. It does say that you can connect up to 8 “devices”, but nothing about how you manage these. No mention of any Bose app. I once accidentally pressed the Bluetooth button and the speaker sound muted as it waited to pair with a cell phone. The speaker never came out of this mode and I had to pull the power off to reset it. At the back of the Bose sound bar there is a USB connection. Again, there is no information on that. I can imagine that it can be used to connect to a computer, but that would require a USB cable with two type A ends, which is a very rare cable to have around the house. On the front of the Bose sound bar are two LED lights. They blink in various colors and various sequences. I went through the PDF manual to see what the light codes mean and it was overwhelming – too many to understand and care about. Other side features include having the sound bar to turn on when your TV sound comes on and connecting this to a Roku device so that the Roku remote can control the volume of the sound bar. Finally, about sound quality: Given the horrible quality of rear-facing TV speakers anything else is an improvement. I tried the Bose speaker with two TVs and this Bose speaker does have better sound quality and it's more toward the low (bass) end compared to TV speakers. The other advantage is that the sound bar speakers are facing forward, where you're sitting. When connecting with the fiber optic cable, you can use both the Bose speaker and TV speakers concurrently. If you mute or lower the TV sound then you'd be using only the Bose speaker. I gave this Bose TV speaker 3 stars because its fundamental functionality seems to be a small part of the product feature set, so you're paying about $250 to buy many features you may never use. The fundamental functionality is to improve over the TV speaker sound and direct sound toward you. You can do that with a pair of old tower speakers. So, when considering purchasing this sound bar you need to consider whether you're going to connect 8 cells phones to it, or buy a $400 compatible bass module. The biggest weak point of this Bose speaker is the poor quality of documentation.
    MasterReviewer
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/02/2020
    Excellent vocal clarity and great overall sound
    The product arrived securely packaged and easy to open. It came with simple to understand and step by step instructions. Very short and very easy set up. Options for hookup are optical cable (included) or HDMI (not included but a dime a dozen these days). I opted to use HDMI. In order for it to carry sound you must use the HDMI ARC port on your TV. If you don't have one then I guess optical is the way to go but by using HDMI it allows the TV to control the speaker if you have CEC enabled. In my case all my TV viewing is done via an firestick which is hooked up to my tv via HDMI and it's remote also control my tv via CEC. So I plug in the TV speaker, connect the HDMI and presto it's working and my firestick remote fully controls the volume. Incidentally my tv remote controls the volume and firestick also. The speaker itself has a remote and it will be needed for enabling bluetooth and using the enhanced dialogue mode. The remote is small and probably easily lost but hardly use it because I prefer leaving it in enhanced dialogue mode. Now about the Bluetooth. I easily paired it with my living room echo dot. I can simply ask Alexa to connect to bluetooth and she will pair with the speaker. This might come in handy if I wanted to pump music through the speaker via Alexa. Finally as to the sound itself, the quality of Bose is present here but don't expect to blow your house down with booming sound. This is a TV speaker, its job is to improve dialogue and it does it's job well. No longer am I frequently reaching for the remote to raise the cookie cause I can't hear what they're saying only to lower it as soon as the music or commercial starts or because the explosions are too loud. This speaker really improves the vocals so it essentially helps level out the sound. Not only would I recommend this speaker, I may possibly get another for my bedroom.
    Phillybill
  • 5.00 out of 5 stars review
    Verified Purchaser
    10/01/2020
    Bose TV soundbar is the best
    This speaker is compact but powerful with total clarity. I have trouble understanding speech on regular soundbars but the Bose TV Soundbar is super clear and understandable. I am enjoying this being able to understand every word being said instead of 1 out 5 and trying to puece together a sentence. For me this soundbar is a godsend and something I never dreamed could happen after going through several other brands of soundbar. Thank you for this opportunity to review this product. I might add it is simple to hook and set up using the included optical cable or an HDMI. I highly recommend this Bose TV Soundbar.
    SJN