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This soundbar is one of the best buys for your home theater, and today it’s on sale

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Vizio soundbar
Amazon

For all the advances televisions have made in picture and design quality over the years, the vast majority of them still sound feeble. You can rectify that with a good set of external speakers, but for some people, setting up a full-on audio system might require a bit too much effort.

Fortunately, there’s a compromise: soundbars. Those elongated speakers will typically sound less engrossing than a more dedicated setup, but they’re easier to manage, and they’ll still blow away whatever your TV’s working with by default. They’ll probably cost less, too.

We’ve made this point before, highlighting Vizio’s SB3821-C6 soundbar as a particularly good value along the way. Today, though, Amazon has a deal on one of that model’s bigger and brawnier siblings, the Vizio S5451w-C2. Normally priced at $500, the 5.1 channel bar is now down to $300, which is close to the cheapest it’s been on the site.

Now, the S5451w is a couple years old, and this discount is likely due to the fact that Vizio has new Sonos-esque soundbars on the way. If you don’t care about being able to Google Cast streaming services to your speaker, though, this is still a lot of soundbar for $300.

The whole package consists of a big, 54-inch bar — which itself has three drivers for the right, center, and left channels — an 8-inch wireless subwoofer, and two satellite speakers. It has HDMI in and out ports (though only one of each), optical and coax inputs, and built-in Bluetooth support (with aptX) for you to connect your gear. It’s all a little more cluttered than your everyday soundbar, but it should still be simpler to setup than a comparable home theater system. Just make sure your living room has enough space to fit it.

If you do, your reward is a more enveloping sound. If you haven’t made this sort of upgrade before, the difference should be massive — everything will be significantly louder, deeper, and more detailed. If you’re more of an audio enthusiast, it won’t be the sharpest or most nimble system you’ve heard, but it should still come closer to a theater-like, surround sound experience than most $300 setups can give you. It’s all about value here, per usual with Vizio.

Reviews on the S5451w have been positive. CNET, Sound and Vision, Reference Home Theater, About, and Digital Trends have lent their praise, and Vizio’s family of soundbars has a 4.4 rating after 4,650 user reviews on Amazon. If you want the relative convenience of a soundbar, without sacrificing too much in the way of potential sound, it should still be a good buy at this price.

Vizio S5451w-C2 5.1 Channel Soundbar with Subwoofer and Surrounds (2014 Model), $299.99 (originally $499.99), available at Amazon. [40% off]


 

Read the original article on Insider Picks. Copyright 2016. Follow Insider Picks on Twitter.
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