SurroundSound Bar for Bedroom TV

Tanglewood -
The Yamaha sound bars don't use left and right speakers. They bounce directed sound off the side walls to create the side and rear speaker effects. On board digital processing controls the timing of the signals to produce a convincing effect.

This does create some room constraints. You need a reasonably symmetric room with parallel walls on the left and right.

The only additional speaker is an optional sub.

Polk's offerings are pretty impressive.

Hey Gerry, here's my do-it-on-the-cheap-but-effective idea.. Many Sony TV's still provide an analog audio output with a fixed/variable choice that you can assign from the TV's menu. On top of that, many Sony sets also have SRS-WOW simulated surround processing built in. If yours has it, you should see the little SRS logo on the TV somewhere. SRS processing does a great job of simulating surround with a pair of stereo speakers.

All you have to do is feed the "aux in" of a small bedroom stereo using the fixed setting, or feed a nice set of powered speakers using the variable setting, and enable the SRS mode in your TV and you should have very decent simulated surround without spending $500 for the Polk, Yamaha, et al..

I have an older Sony V series 27" tube in the spare room connected to a set of $79 Cambridge Soundworks "Soundworks" speakers (two small cubes and a small powered sub) and it sounds much better than you would expect for the money and it has high WAF!

This might be out of range for your budget, but I demoed the B&W Panorama the other week and I was blown away. Generally I have been skeptical of soundbars, but the Panorama has me convinced.

Even without a separate sub, the Panorama delivered very convincing bass. The surround effects were also impressive, though so much depends on the layout of your room. But what really impressed me was the wideness of the front soundstage. It was literally as wide as the width of the room.

In the demo room, they also had the B&W CM9s set-up as fronts with the corresponding CM line speakers fleshing out the 5.1. The Panaroma literally had a wider and more enveloping front soundstage than the CM9 set-up.

I think the reason for this is because the Panorama has driver pointing to the sides besides straight ahead. So the effect is that you literally hear sounds bouncing off from the side walls, giving you that impression of the room width soundstage.

I'm sure much also has to do with the room's set-up, so if the soundbar is not set-up directly in the center of the room, or if you have curtains or other surfaces that will not reflect the soundwaves, then the effect may be compromised.

At USD$2,200 list price, it's definitely an extremely expensive option for a soundbar, so not for everyone, but if that's within your budget, I would suggest a demo to see if it fits your needs.