The Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus is a 37-inch, 3.1-channel soundbar with a built-in subwoofer that connects to any TV with an HDMI port. Dolby Atmos and DTS:X spatial audio decoding are built in for surround content, along with a dedicated center channel that keeps dialogue clear on top of everything else in the mix. Preset sound modes for Movie, Music, Sport, and Night viewing tune the audio to match what’s on screen, and Bluetooth pairs with a phone to stream music.
A simple but full-featured soundbar that can make all your content sound better
The center channel is the reason to buy a 3.1 soundbar over a 2.0 model. A 2.0 setup splits every dialogue line between the left and right speakers, which works fine when voices are the only thing on screen but muddies them the second music or effects join in. The Soundbar Plus routes dialogue through its own dedicated driver, keeping voices distinct from everything else in the mix, which turns two hours of subtitles for muffled conversations back into two hours of just watching.
Behind the mesh grille on the front of the bar are eight drivers, arranged as three full-range speakers and three tweeters for the main channels, plus two internal subwoofer drivers for the low end. Each of the three main channels gets its own full-range and tweeter pair, and the internal subwoofer drivers add real bass punch without an external sub taking up floor space, though optional wireless subwoofer and surround speaker add-ons are available for a full 5.1 upgrade down the line.
The Soundbar Plus has native decoding capabilities for Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, the two primary object-based audio formats found on all 4K Blu-ray discs you can buy and on many 4K streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+, and Apple TV+. Many other soundbars will only downmix those formats to stereo. Object-based audio allows the audio engineer to position sounds in 3D space relative to the listener, so that if a plane is flying overhead, it will sound like a plane flying overhead rather than just plane noise coming from one speaker. The Soundbar Plus also supports Amazon’s 3D Sound technology, which creates three-dimensional surround audio out of a pair of stereo speakers.
Fire TV Ready is Amazon’s term for the single-remote function that connects the Soundbar Plus to any Fire TV device or smart TV, allowing you to use one remote to turn the soundbar on and off, adjust volume, mute or unmute, and control all standard TV functions. The audio connection is via HDMI eARC, so no additional configuration steps are required to synchronize lip movements with the audio. Setup simply requires plugging an HDMI eARC cable into your television, and upon next startup, the soundbar will be recognized automatically.
The Fire TV Soundbar Plus adds real bass, clear dialogue, and Dolby Atmos to whatever’s already on the wall, without a receiver or a rack of components to configure. At $190, down from $250, the current sale takes $60 off the retail price.