Bose Smart Soundbar review: This soundbar has a few unique tricks

The new Bose Smart Soundbar is an update to the now obsolete Bose Smart Soundbar 600. While the name has changed, the design is largely the same. In terms of price, it’s situated between the affordable Bose TV Speaker and the luxurious Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar. Does it find the perfect Goldilocks zone of soundbars between price and quality? That’s what we set to find out in our Bose Smart Soundbar review.

Editor’s note: this is the first version of the article. Updates will follow as the market changes.

What I like about the Bose Smart Soundbar

I’m a big fan of the design of the Bose Smart Soundbar. At only 27 inches wide, and with a minimalist black design, it doesn’t take center stage in a living room. More importantly, with a height of just over 2 inches and a depth of just over 4 inches, it easily slots onto a mantle under a TV. You could even slot it under a monitor if you really want to pimp out your desk setup. It’s very easy to connect the Bose Soundbar to whatever gear you have, thanks to its support for HDMI eARC, Optical input, Bluetooth, Chromecast, and AirPlay. I find it quick and easy to switch from watching TV to playing music over AirPlay on my phone.

Despite its small size, I find the Bose Smart Soundbar sounds impressively loud. In our large office space, there was no need ever to approach maximum volume. In an average-sized living room, you’ll probably never go beyond 50% volume. That extra headroom also means you don’t have to worry about distortion and other unwanted artifacts that typically occur when you push a speaker too hard.

Speaking of sound quality, the Bose Smart Soundbar sounds really good. It has five total drivers, including upward-firing drivers for Dolby Atmos spatial audio. That said, for an immersive experience, you’re still going to want a true surround-sound speaker system. You’ll also want to consider adding a subwoofer if you want to feel the deep rumbling bass in your favorite Christopher Nolan film. Beyond lacking the type of sub-bass you can feel in your chest, the Bose Smart Soundbar has a pretty good bass extension, especially for its size.

For the best experience, you need to download the Bose app and connect it to the soundbar. This is how you’ll access the plethora of features that come included with the Bose Smart Soundbar. Digging into the audio settings you’ll find an AI Dialog mode, which helps voices stand out without killing the entire background track. This mode means you might finally understand what the characters are saying in the movie Tenet, but make sure you don’t leave AI Dialog mode enabled when listening to music, or you’ll get some wonky results. In this section of the app you can also enable a Wall EQ setting if your soundbar is mounted to a wall, or tweak the bass and treble yourself.

Just like most modern tech, the Bose Smart Soundbar works best when paired with an ecosystem of products from the same manufacturer. The SimpleSync feature allows you to connect Bose headphones to your soundbar. The real magic happens when you pair the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds to the Bose Smart Soundbar. This unlocks a feature called Personal Surround, which uses the clip-on earbuds as rear channels to simulate a surround sound setup. I tried this while watching a few shows, and the effect was really cool. Specific folly effects sounded as though they were coming from behind me, while the dialog stayed central from the soundbar. Environmental effects, such as rain, sound like it’s coming from all around you. If you happen to already have the Ultra Open Earbuds, you’ll have a lot of fun with the Bose Smart Soundbar. If you want to buy both products together, you can buy the bundle from Bose for $628 at the time of writing.

What I don’t like about the Bose Smart Soundbar

While the Bose Smart Soundbar is packed full of features, I do have a few minor gripes with it. For one, the included power cable and HDMI cable are both very short at only a few feet long. Trying to position the soundbar under the TV in a way that it could reach both the power outlet and the HDMI input on my TV was a challenge, though of course you could alleviate this issue with an extension cord.

If you don’t like spatial sound, you’ll be disappointed to know there’s no way to disable it on the Bose Smart Soundbar. The Bose TrueSpace technology is always enabled, which upscale stereo and 5.1 content to spatial audio. There’s also no room calibration included with the Bose Smart Soundbar. For that feature, you need to upgrade to the more expensive Bose Smart Ultra Soundbar, which comes with ADAPTiQ audio room calibration.

Should you buy the Bose Smart Soundbar?

The Bose Smart Soundbar is a great option for a wide variety of different people. The first is the casual listener who just wants something to put under their TV or monitor. Those people will appreciate how simple it is to setup the Bose Smart Soundbar, and its wide variety of wired and wireless connectivity options. The second audience is those with Bose headphones, specifically those with the Bose Ultra Open Earbuds who can take advantage of the Personal Surround feature. The third demographic are those building a serious home theatre setup, who can pair the soundbar with the companion Bose Bass Module 500 and surround speakers for a true surround sound setup. At the time of writing, that full surround sound package from Bose will cost you $1,197.

If you want to look outside of the Bose ecosystem, the Sonos Arc ($859 at Amazon) is worth checking out. We’re a big fan of its sound quality with Dolby Atmos support and its Trueplay room correction. That said, it’s much larger than the Bose Smart Soundbar and lacks Bluetooth. A competitor in size and shape is the Sonos Beam (Gen 2). The Beam (Gen 2) has similar features such as Speech Enhancement to hear dialogue, but it also does not have Bluetooth support.

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