Average sound, excellent integration with Panasonic TV

I was happy with my new Plasma TV (Panasonic VIERA TC-P46G25 46-Inch 1080p Plasma HDTV) but found the sound from the built-in speakers was not as good as I wanted. I didn't want to have to use the "big" home theater receiver just to watch TV, just something simple. I tried the VIZIO VSB200 Universal HD Sound Bar but it was not compatible with the TV.

This Panasonic sound bar has ok sound. Much better than the built-in, but it's no substitute for a full-powered home theater system. The best feature of this soundbar is it's ability to use the Panasonic Viera Link and HDMI/ARC features. When you use an HDMI cable to connect the two, the soundbar works perfectly with the TV...no need for another remote to control power or volume, and the TV shows the volume setting and changes on screen.

Recommended for newer Panasonic TV owners who are looking for a simple solution to improve built-in sound, just make sure you use HDMI to connect the two. When I purchased my Panasonic VIERA HDTV I wasn't expecting great sound. I would have settled for mediocre sound. Instead, I got terrible sound. I had replaced an older Magnavox HDTV, which had come with a sound bar. For the Magnavox, the sound bar was for those who did not have full fledged audio systems. That TV had hookups for RCA audio output, optical output, and even speaker output. That allowed me to add external speakers to replace the so-so ones in the included sound bar.

Panasonic wasn't so nice. My TV came with an optical output, and built in speakers. The built in speakers were so bad, that it was hard to make out voices, let alone have anything that approached decent sound quality. In all fairness, people who buy HDTVs should not expect great sound for something in the price range of the TV, but considering that they had wires going to the internal speakers, they could have had external terminals for the same wires. People who buy smaller TVs, such as for bedrooms, are less likely to buy full fledged sound systems as add ons.

Panasonic's solution was for me to buy this sound bar. It replaced the terrible sound of the built in speakers with mediocre sound. There's nothing really bad about the sound of this sound bar, but I can't say that it's really much of a step up from what comes built into better TVs. This is the type of sound that I'd normally be replacing with something better, rather than stepping up to. But the way my TV is designed, there's no intermediate option short of this sound bar. You either get a full fledged sound system with an optical input, get this sound bar, or live with the built in speakers.

This sound bar purportedly comes with a sub-woofer. By definition, sub-woofers deal with frequencies below 100Hz. Good quality standard speakers can reproduce sounds in those frequencies, but they will typically be attenuated and lack any feel. With this sound bar, the opposite is true--you don't get anything akin to a sub-woofer, but the speaker makes sounds in those frequency range discernible. Test tones at 80Hz are audible, but sound far quieter than those at 100Hz (above the sub-woofer frequency range.) Tones going down to 20Hz are audible, but certainly nothing that will reproduce the sounds on a Blu-ray disc with any degree of realism.

The sound bar is easy enough to hook up. It uses part of the HDMI cable to pass sound, so it can share an input with a Blu-ray disc player. If you are using a Panasonic TV or BD player that are anything like mine, you already need the latest standard HDMI cable to handle the 3d picture, so it's nice not needing to tie up an extra input on the TV.


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