Simple and effective upgrade to small home theater.
This is a great upgrade for a small home setup if you're tired of regular television-grade sound. I don't have a large enough room to warrant much more than this, and I didn't really want to deal with setting up extra surround speakers with wiring or fiddling with wireless and possible lag, so after reading some positive reviews here, I decided to give it a shot. I recommend just using the JBL app to run through the first-time equalizer setup and then you can also toggle a couple of settings on/off. I didn't notice a great improvement from using the dialogue enhancing option that the app had on by default. It's off for us right now, that was the only thing I modified manually. The only thing that I knew would be a pain for me was that my older LG tv (it's from 2018 or so) has ARC but not eARC. I do not claim to know the difference between everything there, but I had to use trial and error to get what I needed. On the off chance it helps someone else: - The HDMI input on my TV that supported ARC was one of only three HDMI inputs. - I have a PS5 for movie disc playback, multiple Switch docks that were previously working fine on an HDMI input splitter, and a Chromecast for regular TV stuff. - The Chromecast I left in HDMI 1 to avoid uproar in the household. - The sound bar had to go into HDMI 2, my ARC port. At this point, the Chromecast audio worked just great - no issues at all. Pretty much out-of-the-box perfection after doing the JBL app equalizing step. If you want something idiot-proof for regular streaming, you're going to be fine. - The PS5 games worked just fine when plugged into the sound bar HDMI in. HOWEVER, 4K/blu ray playback had noticeable lag between mouths moving and words being heard. I discovered whole worlds of settings screens in the PS5 and TV menus to try to alleviate this, but ultimately I surrendered to plugging the PS5 into HDMI 3, straight into the TV, and games AND discs were both able to play perfectly fine, no lag. From my limited understanding, this might not have been the case if I used eARC on a newer TV. - The Switch itself works great just plugged into the soundbar HDMI in. However, my previously-just-fine HDMI splitter did not work at all - the TV kept cycling as if the HDMI 2 input had nothing on it at all. So, my compromise was to use only one dock for TV input, which is acceptable. Just be warned that the soundbar input HDMI port may not behave exactly like what you had before. I'll likely have to redo some of this when I eventually upgrade the TV, but it was a pretty seamless upgrade for us other than disc playback. Since going straight into the TV we've watched dozens of movies and generally do not go above 20 if we want to have our eardrums intact. But I can hear the dialogue, music, and ambience so well, I'm suddenly critiquing movies on sound that I never noticed before. When we used an older DVD, it was a little less clear - kind of as I expected, after all it is a lower quality format - but still infinitely better than regular speakers. The bass is really satisfying and regular music has sounded good too, though it was just a YouTube stream so i am not getting fancy here. Read more
