JBL Bar 5.1 vs Sonos Beam

Sonos Beam review

When testing Sonos Beam vs JBL Bar 5.1 it becomes clear that Beam is the latest home theater speaker system in the Sonos universe. Positioned as a compact soundbar, the model not only sounds good, but also bears the proud title of “smart” thanks to the integrated Alexa assistant. Beam is easy to plug in and set up, and overall this soundbar deserves a buying recommendation. There are 3.0 built-in channels.

JBL Bar 5.1 review

What was interesting when comparing JBL Bar 5.1 vs Sonos Beam is that its first strong point is connected with a real wireless subwoofer (up to 300 W) and a 25-cm speaker. The second plus of JBL Bar 5.1 is based on its removable surround speakers, working wirelessly for 10 hours. The soundbar is equipped with three pairs of 6 x 5.7 cm bass midrange speakers and three 3.2 cm tweeters distributed across the three front channels (left, right and center). Each channel is amplified by a special power module with a total peak power of 300 watts. This corresponds to a peak of 50 watts per channel or continuous power of 20 watts, good enough for this type of speaker. JBL Bar 5.1 has three HDMI 2.0 inputs with support for HDCP 2.2 (UHD Blu-ray) and 4K up to 60 frames per second and 4: 4: 4 color coding. It does not implement video scaling, but also does not degrade the signal.

Sonos Beam pros & cons

JBL Bar 5.1 pros & cons