There's nothing like coming home after a tough day, cracking a brew, and cranking up your home theater system. Maybe it's Major League Baseball. Maybe it's analyzing Game of Thrones episodes. (But let's be real: not the Red Wedding. Not again.) Or maybe it's musing the intellectual profundity of the Michael Bay catalog. However you choose to decompress, there's one thing everyone wants: booming, sparkling audio that's easy to install and won't break your bank account.
And unless you have a surplus of both money and space, you probably want a sound bar.
But, as we've said before, investing in a sound bar is an act of concession. Sure, you eliminate messy cord-clutter and gain a large, attractive gadget that looks slick sitting in front of your Tyrano-vision sized TV. But this comes at a sonorous cost. No matter how advanced the tech gets, a sound bar can't quite match the audio performance of a 5.1 setup. But now Vizio offers something of a workaround with this home theater package.
The idea is simple: Vizio takes a three-channel sound bar plus a wireless subwoofer and adds a pair of wired rear channel speakers. These rear channels plug directly into the subwoofer, which you then ostensibly stash behind the couch. Voilà! The performance of a 5.1 system without a bunch of damn cords running everywhere.
Setting the unit up does not take long. The 42-inch sound bar links to the subwoofer via Bluetooth and comes preconnected so there's no need to futz around with a bunch of pairing kabuki. Color-coded wires help you connect the correct speakers to the proper ports. All told, it takes under 10 minutes to get things up and running.
And once it started running, I was initially impressed. To test out the system's cinematic chops, I queued up HBO Go and turned on some particularly raucous episodes of Game of Thrones. As the Battle of Blackwater raged, I heard all kinds of detail from the rear channels – swords clanging, men screaming as they were being burned to death. I half expected the Hound to burst into the living room and cut someone in half.
Sports, however, were equal parts hit and a miss. When tuning in to watch a Giants game, on-field action – the crack of a bat, the whump of a curveball winding its way into a catcher's mitt – was clear, almost like I was sitting in the dugout. But when the announcer came on, his voice sounded much less mellifluous than I expected. It wasn't much better than the TV's speakers.