Projectors Reviews, price and comparision

To be worthwhile, a sound bar speaker system must do two things: sound better than your TV's speakers, and sound louder than your TV's speakers. If it can't amp up the sound from your television, why bother? The Insignia NS-BAR-A Home Theater Soundbar retails for just $199.99 (exclusively at Best Buy), making it seem, on paper, to be an affordable way to enhance your TV-watching experience. Unfortunately, it lacks the oomph and fidelity to justify the effort.

Design
The 3.5 by 38 by 4.6 inch (HWD), 7-pound sound bar is a plain, trapezoid-shaped block distinguished only by a rectangular black Insignia logo in the middle of its soft front grille. Control buttons, including a light-up Power button, sit in the center of the top edge of the bar. The back of the sound bar holds a 3.5-mm line input, a stereo RCA input, a subwoofer output, two switches for using the sound bar with other, optional devices like subwoofers, and an INcontrol cable jack, for connecting to and controlling the system with an Insignia HDTV. The device lacks an optical audio input, which could have provided both simpler (one-cable), and higher quality audio connections with HDTVs, Blu-ray players, and other home-theater devices. Since the sound bar doesn't offer even simulated surround sound, the lack of a 5.1-channel-capable optical input isn't a dealbreaker, but it's certainly a missed convenience. At 38 inches, the Insignia sound bar will line up width-wise with 36- to 42-inch HDTVs, though you could use it with any size set.

The 6.8-inch remote is blocky and simple, with buttons for Power, Input, Volume, Subwoofer, and Audyssey Dynamic Volume levels. Considering the sound bar doesn't come with a subwoofer and the Audyssey Dynamic Volume settings could have had a single button rather than one each for Off, Light, Medium, and Heavy levels, the remote could have been much, much more compact.

While it has some interesting features on paper, the Insignia system is a very simple, barebones device in practice. If you want to deck out your home theater with nothing but Best Buy products from Rocketfish and Insignia brands, you can do things like pick up a Rocketboost wireless card to wirelessly stream audio to the sound bar, or control the sound bar through your TV remote with an INcontrol cable. These features are worthless if you want to use other device brands, though, so you can ignore them unless you're dedicated enough to buy only a few specific items and only from Best Buy. Besides Rocketboost and Incontrol, the sound bar incorporates Audyssey Dynamic Volume for preventing commercials/songs/fights from getting too loud. It's really only useful for TV watching, when the volume of programming and commercials can vary wildly. It's a minor convenience, and one found on the (the Vizio VHT510 system ($389.99, 4 stars), which uses SRS Labs' TruVolume HD.

Performance
With 120 watts of peak power and no subwoofer (putting all 120 watts into the sound bar alone), the system should have plenty of punch. It sports two 3.5-inch woofers, two 2-inch midrange drivers, and a 0.8-inch tweeter. In practice all of these drivers only pump out a modest stereo soundscape. I tested the sound bar with John Carpenter's Escape from New York, and while it certainly expressed everything from the whirr of the helicopters to the synthesizer-heavy 80s soundtrack well enough, it didn't kick out appreciably better-sounding audio than the speakers on the Sony HDTV with which I tested it. It certainly got louder, but finer sounds like dialog sounded rough and fuzzy at higher-than-TV volumes.

Our standard bass test track, The Knife's "Silent Shout," uncovered a strange quirk on the sound bar. At medium volume the song's thumping bass sounded decent (but not great), but when I maxed out the volume the low end cut out completely, reducing the bass to a vague popping sound. While this prevented the sound bar from blowing out, it also prevented it from putting out a satisfyingly full sound at the highest volume levels.

The Insignia NS-BAR-A Home Theater Soundbar adds a decent amount of kick to your TV's generally anemic speakers, but the low quality of audio prevents it from being a good speaker replacement. While other sound bar systems we've reviewed, the Vizio VHT510 and the Samsung HW-D550 ($499.99, 4 stars), cost at least twice as much as the Insignia, they also put out far superior sound.