JBL Bar 1000MK2 review

You are watching the game of the season, but that food you put in the oven is almost ready. Do you pause or make a frantic dash to rescue your meal before you miss the winning goal?

Well, the JBL Bar 1000MK2 offers a possible solution with its latest mid-range soundbar package. It features two detachable surrounds which can be taken to another room while the sound from your TV or Bluetooth device continues to play, transforming it into a neat wireless speaker.

This works by selecting either a mono or stereo downmix via the accompanying app, then taking one or both of the speakers to a different room to deliver the mix you have chosen.

That’s ideal if you don’t want to miss any of the action. And this is just the party trick of the JBL model, as these detachable surrounds also deliver “immersive, cinematic surround sound” for movie viewing, according to the brand.

It’s a tempting proposition, but can the soundbar deliver on such a promise?

Price

The JBL Bar 1000MK2 launched at £1000 / £1200 / AU$1600. We have seen this price drop slightly since its release, though. In the UK, you can pick it up for £900 at a variety of retailers.

At this price, the JBL is up against some stiff competition in the form of the Sonos Arc Ultra (£999 / $999 / AU$1799). This Award-winner impresses with its clean, three-dimensional sound as well as its excellent level of detail. It is an all-in-one design, contrasting with the JBL package, which consists of a wireless subwoofer, detachable surrounds and main soundbar.

The Samsung HW-Q990F is a closer match to the JBL in terms of design – a system also including a subwoofer, two surrounds and a main soundbar. Although it launched at almost double the price, it has dropped to around £850 / $1600 / AU$1399 (from £1699 / $1999 / AU$1999).

The Samsung snagged a What Hi-Fi? Award last year, scoring highly for its articulate bass and its dynamic overall performance. Tough competition for the JBL, indeed.

Design

This JBL’s design highlight is its versatile battery-powered rear speakers, which can be connected to the main soundbar via a magnetic port, or used wirelessly.

They have a claimed 10 hours of battery life, and can be juiced up by plugging them into the mains or just connecting them back to the main soundbar. JBL also provides plastic covers to hide the rather unsightly ports on the soundbar ends when the surrounds are disconnected.

The surrounds are light, weighing just 900g, and feel reasonably solid and well-made, as does the rest of the package. As a whole, this JBL system looks unassuming, though neat enough to blend into most rooms. The various units in this package may be predominantly made out of plastic, but that’s par for the course at this level.

Turning to the main soundbar, there is a nifty LED display at the front, something that is often lacking in models at this price. The display makes it easy to tell when you are changing the output or switching between modes, allowing for a more intuitive and simple experience.

The 1000MK2’s soundbar’s drive units are arranged in a 7.1.4-channel configuration and driven by a total power output of 960W. Under the hood, there are six racetrack drivers, two tweeters and two up-firing full-range drivers. Inside each surround speaker, you will find one up-firing driver as well as a racetrack driver.

The subwoofer is fairly hefty in size, measuring in at 40 x 33 x 33 cm (hwd), but is easy to move around as it weighs a reasonable 9kg. There is a single 26cm downward-facing drive unit, which is driven by an internal 300W amplifer.

Many users choose soundbars because they are compact, but when there is more kit in the mix, this inevitably means more clutter. In this case, it’s worth making sure you have enough space for the surrounds, as well as ensuring you can place the sub reasonably close to the main bar to help with integration.

This soundbar package can be controlled in two ways: via the JBL One app (more on this later) or by the handheld remote. The design of the latter is a simple affair, with a smooth shape that fits in the palm of the hand. From here, you can turn the soundbar on or off, adjust surround-sound and bass levels, turn on Bluetooth, and change the output and volume.

Features

The soundbar offers both Dolby Atmos and DTS:X support, which is good news for movie fans wanting surround sound options.

Around the back of the bar, you will find a range of physical connectivity ports. Very unusually, there are four HDMI sockets – three inputs and the output/eARC. While there’s no 4K/120Hz support, the HDMI passthrough supports signals up to 4K/60Hz as well as Dolby Vision and HDR10+.

The JBL One app acts as a hub where you can adjust the soundbar’s settings. You can access EQ controls, change the bass levels from 1 to 5, turn down the volume of the surrounds and connect to streaming services.

The app offers a variety of streaming support, including Tidal, Amazon Music, and Qobuz. Additionally, Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect are supported by the soundbar. You can send music to it using Bluetooth 5.3 as well.

There are three sound modes available: Movie, Music and Standard. Movie and Music are optimised for their intended purpose, leaving Standard as a bit of a third wheel that doesn’t shine in either scenario.

A Night mode is on offer, which mutes the surround speakers to keep noise disturbance to a minimum. This should benefit those with neighbours or housemates who are sensitive to noise.

There is also the option to calibrate the package to your room, although this is only available when the surrounds are used separately from the main bar. This is done by placing the surrounds in your listening position and playing a test signal, then moving them to their position just behind the viewer’s head and repeating. The microphones are built into the system rather than relying on the one in your phone.

After calibrating the soundbar, we can hear there is an extra sense of spaciousness and a more even tonal balance to the sound. It’s worth noting that the subwoofer is not being calibrated throughout this process, so it relies on you adjusting the bass by ear.

Sound

Straight out of the box with the surrounds positioned carefully behind us, the JBL delivers powerful bass that certainly makes an impact, but distracts from the rest of the frequencies. It also sounds a bit overblown, so we reach for the JBL One app to turn it down a notch.

After fiddling with the settings, we settle on a less floor-shaking bass that feels better balanced. It is still not the punchiest, but the subwoofer adds an extra oomph to movies, making for an exciting overall listening experience without being distractingly over-powerful.

Watching Spider-Man: Homecoming on 4K Blu-ray, the smash of the villainous Vulture’s punches and the roar of Iron Man’s suit thrusters is impactful yet detailed with a good amount of authority.

Turning to the soundbar’s performance with voices, JBL offers the PureVoice 2.0 feature, which it claims “automatically raises or optimises the dialogue, based on both ambient sound in the scene and your soundbar's volume”. While this feature makes vocals more prominent, they sound less natural and draw the focus away from the rest of the sound. For that reason, we opt to keep it off.

Voices are still clear with PureVoice disabled and, even with busy action scenes filled with explosions, you can make out every word thanks to the well-projected midrange.

The soundbar’s height effects work well but are bettered by class leaders, with the sound reaching to around the same height as the top of our TV’s screen. As Tom Holland’s Spider-Man clings on for dear life to a cloaked plane, we hear its engine sounds move around with precision.

Switching to Blade Runner 2049, we also get a sense of the JBL’s ability to create a wide soundfield. We watch as raindrops fall around Officer K and his digital companion Joi, and feel the downpour just behind the listening position. This track also shows off the soundbar’s sense of movement, as drones whizz past the viewer with an energy that will have you double-checking you are not sat next to a Replicant.

The separate surrounds could be pulling more of their weight here, though. Even when they are cranked up to their maximum volume, they don’t create as much scale as rival systems and struggle to generate a truly immersive dome of sound above us.

But what if you keep the surrounds connected to the main bar? This obviously makes the soundfield less immersive, but still keeps the frequencies nicely balanced. Using the soundbar with this layout means it loses the benefits of its clever design, however, so we can’t imagine many people listening like this unless they are charging the surrounds.

Jumping to Music mode and playing the Jurassic Park theme via Qobuz Connect, we still opt to knock the bass down a level to keep the frequencies more balanced. Once we do this, the soundbar keeps the first French horn solo clear and emotive. It builds to the well-known chorus with a tuneful and energetic feel.

It does not quite deliver the dynamic delicacy required for the start of the track as deftly as we would like, diluting the emotional impact that the music should have with these quieter moments.

We compare the JBL Bar 1000MK2 with the Award-winning Sonos Arc Ultra. Given the separate subwoofer, it comes as no surprise to find that the JBL is the stronger performer when it comes to generating powerful bass. When watching Thunderbolts, as an explosion rips through a secret government hideout, the JBL delivers more of floor-shaking impact than the Sonos model.

But the Sonos is more organised and rhythmically adept with both music and movies. With the Jurassic Park track, for instance, the low-level dynamics are delivered with excellent subtlety and finesse that build with the swell of the whole orchestra effectively. It also, perhaps surprisingly, manages to produce a more convincing and immersive surround-sound experience, despite it being just one soundbar.

Verdict

The JBL Bar 1000MK2 offers a clever and versatile design that stands out from the rest, giving the package a flexibility that rivals simply don’t have.

If they could apply this ingenuity to its sound as well, to deliver better dynamic finesse and a more effective surround sound experience, then JBL would be on to a real winner.

SCORES

• Sound 4
• Features 5
• Build 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Sonos Arc Ultra

Also consider the Samsung HW-Q990F

Read our Hisense AX5125H review

Best soundbars: options for every need, recommended by our experts