JBL Bar 300MK2-5.0 Channel All-in-one soundbar with Dolby Atmos®, MultiBeam™ 3.0 & PureVoice 2.0, Easy Sound Calibration, JBL ONE App and Works with Voice Assistant-Enabled Speakers (Black)

Outstanding!!!
The best bang for the buck soundbar in this price range. Idiot proof setup, and fantastic sound with dialogue being the biggest improvement. An excellent choice if you want to keep things simple and get a significant upgrade in sound.

Wonderful to enhance dialog
This sound bar is fantastic. I’m have some hearing loss and the quality of dialog is really terrific. Highly recommend.

Great sound for a tiny package but no external subwoofer.
In summary up front, this small sound bar was exceptionally well designed except for the lack of a subwoofer output. There is no excuse for this and no reason other than to force the consumer to upgrade to the more expensive one, no reason why they could not have added a subwoofer output hence only four stars instead of five.Audio reviews are very subjective and often written by those who may not be qualified to review audio products objectively. I am an electrical engineer and I’ve been in audio connoisseur for decades. There’s a lot of marketing hype around this product just like every other audio product out there.Let’s start by talking about the construction. There are a few buttons on top which give you a minimal functionality and there are a few more buttons on the remote but there are even more options to customize this using the app and connecting to it via Bluetooth.This claims to be 5.0 surround sound which is a bit of a stretch. I opened up this product and saw that there were two types of drivers, the full range speakers and then some small tweeters. The side surround speakers were only made up of edge side firing tweeters. The effect of being immersive is very limited but it is better than just two stereo speakers. For how small it is it actually sounds fantastic. There are more tweeters for the left and right along a total of five full range speakers, two for the left, two for the right and one for the center. Interestingly enough when listening to just stereo music the center channel is used but just for low frequency to help add to the bass. The bass is actually quite impressive and all five of those drivers creates enough air movement to make use of the two curved ports in the back that are tuned to about 50 Hertz. So yes even though this doesn’t get deep and I really think that they should have included a subwoofer output to hit those deeper notes, it sounds pretty full without a subwoofer just as long as you don’t care about the really deep stuff below 50 hertz.DIGITAL SIGNAL PROCESSINGWhat really makes products like this shine is the digital signal processing or DSP. This product claims to be able to do Dolby Atmos which can be a little misleading since Dolby Atmos can include up to dozens of channels or as few as one or two. So this will decode a Dolby Atmos signal and correctly do left center right and left and right surround although the surround is very limited in its effect. Let’s talk about the different DSP features.MultiBeam 3.0I don’t think there’s anything at all special about this. There are five drivers that make up left center and right and I do not believe that there is any kind of phase delaying beamforming. So often with audio products they just make up terms to describe very ordinary functionality.PureVoice 2.0This was actually quite useful. For speakers that are so small with limited power, and don’t believe they’re 450 W max that’s such a useless metric and untrue, this DSP feature essentially felt like a band limited compressor centered around vocal frequencies of between 500 Hertz and 5 kHz. This helps to make sure that the center dialog is loud enough to be clear without the surrounds being too overpowering. They do a very good job and the audio and speech intelligibility worked great. I did hook us up to my surround sound in place of my giant 13 channel Dolby Atmos surround sound and was quite impressed with its capabilities even though it doesn’t come close to sounding as good as discreet speakers.All of the HDMI features like ERC worked just fine.POWERSo many audio products use completely fabricated or theoretical numbers and they disguise it by using the term max power. The only thing that matters is RMS power which is hidden. When I opened up this device I measured the power supply rails to be about 20 to 24 volts which will get you about 30-50 watts depending on the speaker impedance. Now having said that, this was a reasonably powerful sound bar and it was able to get decently loud and I think for most customers who don’t care about audio then this would be sufficient but it definitely is not anywhere close to 450 Watts.So who is this product for?For the amount of money you’re spending I think if your goal is the best sound quality that I would go with something bigger with discreet speakers and an externally powered subwoofer.If your goal however is to get the smallest package with the best possible sound and that was your ultimate goal and you were okay paying about twice as much as other brands then this is for you. I don’t know of any other soundbar and that price range that sounds this good.

Great Sound – Atmos while included is unusable.
I am giving this a 3 star review due to the speaker itself sounds great. Clear Voice and STRONG bass without a subwoofer. Why not a 5 star, well that would be due to the fact that after testing multiple mediums features were not working.Setup: Sound Bar hooked into e-arc on TV and Google 4k Chromecast plugged into the input on Sound Bar – Chrome cast setup to play only Atmos (never went into Atmos though….) Chromecast setup to play All Dolby options (Only Surround worked). Smart TV set to Bitstream Audio (Once again only Dolby Surround no Atmos).While having a TV with e-arc that supported dobly atmos none of the streaming services while supporting atmos would play through the speaker. I changed Netflix over to atmos audio and it would error out and not play. The only Surround Sound feature that did work was Dolby Surround 5.1, but it did not sound like surround. Essentially this turned it into a really large TV speaker and nothing more.I am sure you could get the Atmos to work if you plugged in a Blu-Ray player that supported it. We are in the streaming age and nothing of the multiple services I tried would enable it, only Dolby Surround.Playing music on it sounded awesome, but I could not get Google Home to see it in order to add it to speaker groups.Yes I connected it to Wi-Fi and completed the update.Based on all this. I have decided to return it and look for a different product. If I am only going to get Surround then I will go with a true 5.1 / 7.1 set up