Yup, that’s a soundbar. | Photo by Alex Cranz / The Verge
Soundbars are tricky. They need to be big enough that they sound better than the dinky speakers on your TV, but they need to be cheap enough that you don’t balk at upgrading your sound after just spending a lot of money on a TV. I didn’t get to spend enough time with Amazon’s $119.99 Fire TV Soundbar, but I can confirm it sounds bigger than it looks.
What I didn’t hear was a lot of detail. Voices rumble with appropriate amounts of bass — but in the very audio-unfriendly environment we listened to the soundbar in, dialogue was a little harder to track.
Only people spending $120 on a soundbar don’t necessarily want pristine detail. They want it to be loud and to have all the bass that TV speakers typically lack. With the garbled state of…