JBL Soundbar 3.1 Review

Are you looking for a solution to your TVs’ poor sound that offers a lot of power, performance and inputs? Well, JBL’s got a great product to check out.

This is the JBL Bar 3.1. This soundbar’s got everything you need for an immersive home theatre experience without having to run wires all over the place. Looks-wise. It’s pretty decent.

On a typical soundbar, you have your grill on the front, and the top and sides are usually a solid material. This one’s got a wire mesh grill that runs across the front and wraps around the top. So it’s not radically different than other soundbars out there, but it is different.

I’m not sold on the looks, but looks are secondary to sound when it comes to this product type. And sound’s really where this speaker performs. The Bar 3.1 has a combined maximum total power output of 450 watts. That’s broken down as a max of 150 watts to the soundbar and up to 300 watts to the sub.

Inside the soundbars forty-inch wide cabinet, you get six two and a quarter inch racetrack drivers and three one and a quarter inch tweeters. Bass is supplied through a 10″ driver in the subwoofer.

Vocals come through nicely with a dedicated centre channel, and the left and right channels cover the rest of the mids and highs.

Bass was substantial, as it should be with the power this sub gets and gives you some great bottom end for those big booms and explosions. It makes your music listening experience more enjoyable too.

And to go along with the great sound, you also get a bunch of inputs. There’s three HDMI ins and an out with ARC, an analog, optical and USB input along with Bluetooth. That will be an excellent solution for someone who’s got a lot of AV sources but may not have enough connections on their TV.

Controlling the soundbar is easy and can be done with the basic onboard controls or, if you want to change around your sound settings, through the provided remote. Plus, in most cases, you can program your TVs remote to work with the soundbar, which saves you the headache of looking for another lost remote.

There’s a fair amount of soundbars available at this price point, so it can be tough to choose which one to go with, but I recommend giving this one a try before making your final decision.