Atmos content is steadily becoming more widespread, making this budget bar a great choice if you want to take advantage of the latest and greatest surround sound audio format.

All amplifiers of any type – where it’s a car stereo amplifier, home stereo receiver, home theater amplifier, and so on, have a minimum Ohms (impedance) rating. It’s important that you pay attention and don’t exceed the minimum speaker impedance rating. The difference is how they behave when music is present when they’re connected to a musical amplifier of some sort.While genuine overhead sounds are perhaps a stretch too far for this petite performer, its virtual delivery of the Atmos format outstrips any similarly priced soundbar and even a few that are more expensive. The Beam Gen 2 offers an enveloping, spatial soundscape with rich, detailed audio as well as tangible motion and depth. As we found when reviewing the latest Beam, "the soundstage is expansive and we try pairing the new Beam both with larger 55-inch and 65-inch screens, as well as a more modest 43-incher, and it enhances the cinematic scale and viewing experience for all three".

Speaker impedance is just a more advanced way of finding the total resistance, and by tradition is measured in units called “Ohms.” Speakers are different than other devices in that they work using alternating current (AC) instead of direct current (DC). This is good news! It means you can’t harm your speakers in most cases by having the positive (“+”) and negative (“-“) wiring reversed. The resistance value comes from a long coil of wire inside each speaker called a voice coil. A voice coil is a coil of wire that, when placed inside a magnetic field, makes the speaker move and produce sound when driven by an amplifier. Ideally, we would recommend going all in on an AV amplifier and matching home theatre speaker system, but in reality, we understand that not everyone has the space and/or the budget for something like this. That's why we recommend a soundbar as a great alternative. For example, connecting a 4 ohm speaker to an amplifier that is labeled as working with 8 ohm speakers would mean it would have to produce double the electrical current to the speaker!Some soundbars will come with pre-programmed modes for different types of content. In our experience, soundbars with cinematic modes often use 'spatial' processing that can introduce high-frequency artefacts. In contrast, 'music' modes will usually have a bass and treble-heavy EQ that can sound a little brash. We tend to favour a flat standard mode, if one is available, that we manually adjust to our liking. But there is no one size fits all approach that will work for every room and listener. When it comes to sound input, the speaker supports wireless streaming via Bluetooth, as well as wired connections with both USB and aux-in. You can also pair two PS-949s in Duo Mode to enable left and right channel stereo sound from a single Bluetooth source. Generally speaking, the human ear will hear a very small amount of volume increase for each doubling of acoustic power: about 3 decibels (dB). For most people, the small amount of volume increase you notice when turning up a volume knob 1 notch is somewhere around 3dB.

So, if you don’t mind a bit of audio DIY, the Sharp HT-SBW460 is an attractive choice, but if you’d rather not tinker, you’re better off losing the extra audio channel and buying the Creative Stage 360 instead. There’s one important thing to understand, however: having 2 or 3 speakers instead of one does not double or triple the sound. It increases a few decibels (dB) for each speaker added.The Ray marks something of a departure for Sonos. It can form part of a wireless multi-room system using Apple AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect and the Sonos S2 app (though users should note there’s no Bluetooth streaming onboard). Similarly, it can be partnered with other Sonos speakers for a complete 5.1 surround system. The Sony HT-A7000 is an outstanding, future-proofed, all-in-one performer with excellent integration if you have a newer Sony Bravia TV. As they have electrical properties that include inductance and capacitance, their “total resistance” can actually change with the music slightly. Because of this, there’s some extramath needed to figure out the total resistance. The size of the soundbar is primarily down to the larger-than-enough drivers Sennheiser has managed to fit in, and the result is a sound big enough not to need its own subwoofer, with clear, direct dialogue and detail and subtlety in spades. The way it stretches the sound around you creates a great atmosphere and really draws you into the action.As we note in our review: "While some soundbars with external subwoofers go deeper, the bass here is delivered with weighty gusto and seamless integration. This is what helps the Sennheiser achieve the sort of effortless, natural tonality and texture that most rivals can’t begin to match." But the best thing about the Ambeo Max's sound? How little attention it draws; "there's none of the beamy, nasal harshness found in many other soundbars and on the whole, the processing is natural and convincing." For example, tweeters can’t reproduce bass frequencies (and can in fact be damaged by them) so a 2-way speaker crossover is used to prevent this. Similarly, a woofer can’t produce high pitch sounds well and is prevented from doing so.