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July 1st, 2013 
System
Over the past few years, soundbars (aka, surround-sound bars) have become popular devices for delivering sound in the home. They are wide, but only a few centimetres tall and deep. Their usefulness is clear: with modern panel TVs, they fit in both visually and physically.
And, of course, they sound much better than any TV’s built-in speakers.
One such is the Boston Acoustics TVee 26. This deals with one of the major problems with soundbars: weakness in the bass. It comes with a compact subwoofer that connects wirelessly to the bar in the 2.4GHz radio spectrum.
This unit operates in stereo and surround modes. The latter applies digital processing to the sound to give it the sense of surround sound.
The soundbar has amplifiers built in for its two 51x127mm speakers (they are shaped like rectangles with round ends). The company labels these HHRT drivers, which stands for Hyperbolic High Rigidity Transducer. Presumably, the shape of the cones is designed to allow the drivers to withstand the accelerations involved in sound reproduction in order to reduce distortion.
The subwoofer is a very lightweight unit, bass-reflex loaded, with its smallish 165mm driver firing downwards. There are no input sockets, so it relies entirely upon its wireless connection to the soundbar.
A simple credit card-sized remote is provided, but you can readily train the unit to respond to a different remote control, such as your TV’s. Many modern TVs allow you to switch off their internal speakers in a menu, so their remotes’ volume controls can control the soundbar instead.
There are three inputs to the soundbar: two 3.5mm analogue inputs and one optical digital audio input. All are on the back, so you may want to leave the supplied 3.5mm cable plugged in for convenient use with your MP3 player.
Sound
The subwoofer and soundbar performed their handshake and connection within seconds after being switched on, requiring no intervention. If they do lose their connection, pairing buttons on both units allow it to be re-established.
Generally, you will use the optical input with a modern TV. Plug your Blu-ray player into the TV, and the TV into this unit’s optical input. This input didn’t support DTS, but it worked with both Dolby Digital (including the 5.1-channel version) and PCM. Indeed, it worked with 96kHz, 24-bit PCM, although we doubt you’re going to realise a noticeable improvement in sound quality from that.
The sound was surprisingly good for the most part. The mid-range and treble was well balanced and clean. The bar delivered volume levels that will kill any TV, produced dialogue that was easy to hear and coherent and delivered good musicality. As we wrote this, we had Santana’s Supernatural DVD running, and the guitar was smooth and tuneful, while the many percussionists’ efforts were punching out cleanly.
Since the audio is in 5.1 channels, we had the bar in “surround” mode. The spread of the sound across the front of our room feels as though it is at least twice as wide as the bar, with a definite air of sound from other parts of the room.
Testing with a voice track that rotates in 5.1 channels around the room helps identify what is going on. It turns out that in surround mode, this unit does about as good a job in producing surround sound as other bars that cost four times the price. It tracked the voice reasonably well across the front and down the sides of the room, collapsing momentarily to the front only when the sound was supposed to be centred at the rear. This is common behaviour.
More importantly, the system actually uses the LFE (Low Frequency Effects) channel of 5.1 audio to drive the subwoofer. Surprisingly, many systems just ignore that channel.
Another strong point of the system is that the bass was surprisingly deep. Much more so than we expected from a lightly built, plastic-bodied subwoofer.
But we had a difficult time getting the balance right between the subwoofer and soundbar (there’s a level control on the former). When we had the subwoofer in the corner of our room where we normally put subbies, the sound was curiously disconnected between the two. We decided to take a hit on volume (corner placement gives a big advantage here) and put the subwoofer right under the soundbar. That solved the sense of disconnection, but not the level problem.
It would seem too quiet, so we’d turn it up, and then with the next track it would be too loud, with the volume limits of the subwoofer being so obviously pushed that it was becoming muddy and monotonal.
Some measurements revealed what was going on. The soundbar provided respectably even levels of output from nearly 20,000 Hertz down to 200 Hertz, below which you’d expect the subwoofer to take over. But its main band of output was from an impressive 38 Hertz up to just 100 Hertz, above which its output fell off rapidly. So there was a gap in the upper bass range. Turn up the subwoofer to provide balance on the middle strings of a bass guitar, and the kick drum is too loud. Get the bass drum in balance, and the stuff above it is too quiet.
Conclusion
That upper bass issue is a definite weakness, which is a pity. Otherwise, the Boston Acoustics TVee 26 is a good, low-cost enhancement to just about any panel TV.
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