JBL Bar 300MK2 review

For those who lack the space or budget for a multi-channel speaker system, choosing a soundbar is a great way to upgrade your TV’s often unsatisfactory audio performance and get a more cinematic experience.

This is where Dolby Atmos soundbars, in particular, have found their audience, as they can produce immersive, sometimes room-filling sound despite their often relatively compact dimensions and accessible pricing.

While you may think of JBL as more of a hi-fi brand with its headphone and speaker offerings, it’s also a big name in the world of soundbars.

Amazingly, though, it’s been 12 long years since a JBL soundbar last achieved the Hollywood handshake of the What Hi-Fi? world – that coveted five-star rating. Another one, then, is long overdue…

Price

The JBL Bar 300MK2 comes in at £350 / $450 / AU$549, which places it in the lower mid-range of the Dolby Atmos soundbar category.

Looming large in this area (despite its compact dimensions) is the Sonos Beam (Gen 2), which nominally costs £449 / $449 / AU$649 but is often available for less.

The Sonos model is a multiple What Hi-Fi? Awards winner, thanks to its effective Atmos handling, warm yet crisp character and impressive musicality. Still, the JBL’s cheaper price tag and more substantial spec sheet could have the class leader worried.

The JBL Bar 300MK2 is, as you will surely have guessed, the successor to the JBL Bar 300, which we tested at £330 / $400 / AU$529 but can now be bought for just £230 while stock lasts.

We enjoyed this original model’s clear dialogue and impressively deep bass, but its slightly weak midrange resulted in an overall four-star rating.

Build

In terms of design, the JBL Bar 300MK2 is not much different to its predecessor.

The black unit features rounded edges with a plastic grille on the front. On top, JBL has kept things simple, with buttons for volume and wi-fi that sit flush with the body. The soundbar can also be wall-mounted using the two included brackets.

There’s an LED display at the front of the bar, which is a pleasant surprise at this price (the Sonos Beam Gen 2 doesn't have a display of any kind) and makes volume and output changes instantly visible.

The soundbar weighs 2.9kg, so it’s easy to move around and position.

It measures 5 x 94 x 10cm, making it slightly wider than a 42-inch TV, and arguably perfectly suited to partnering with a 48- or 55-inch model. But, as you’d expect, it also fits easily under the 65-inch TV with which we test it. The 5cm height means it will sit in front of most TVs without blocking the screen.

The remote’s design is a similar affair to the main bar, in that it’s long, thin, simple and entirely black but for the symbols on the buttons. From here, you can turn on Dolby Atmos and Bluetooth, change the output, adjust the volume, and crank up the bass from 1 to 5.

There’s no backlight, which can make navigation in the dark a bit of a faff, but let’s bear in mind that many soundbars at this level (and many that cost significantly more) have no remote at all.

Features

Within the JBL’s slender body are five mid/bass racetrack drivers and four 0.75-inch tweeters, which together create a 5.0 sound system.

While the soundbar does not feature upward-firing drivers, it offers virtualised Dolby Atmos. DTS:X is not on the cards, though. In terms of power, the JBL is packing a claimed 450W.

Around the back of the bar, there are two HDMI connections – one dedicated input and an output that can also receive sound from your TV via eARC. While there’s no 4K/120Hz support, the HDMI passthrough does support Dolby Vision and HDR10+.

The JBL One app acts as an all-in-one hub to control the bar. You can also calibrate the soundbar from here to personalise the sound to your space. This is done by playing a range of different frequencies from the system in a quiet room. Once we’ve run this calibration, we certainly find that there is an extra sense of spaciousness to the sound in our test room.

The JBL One 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.

Rather unusually, there are no preset sound modes available (not even a night mode or speech enhancer), but you can adjust the treble and bass via the equaliser on the app. We don’t find it necessary to change these to get the best sound.

Sound

Straight out of the box, the JBL soundbar provides an immersive sound experience that is, as you would hope, a massive improvement on almost any TV’s audio.

We kick off with Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning on 4K Blu-ray to challenge the soundbar’s Dolby Atmos performance. As Tom Cruise’s Ethan Hunt takes a lift on a chopper over the ocean before jumping in (as you do), the 300MK2 delivers a convincing Atmos effect considering its size and price.

As the camera follows the progress of the helicopter in the sky, the sound stretches into the room, along the ceiling, to a point just above the listening position. While the solo soundbar can’t push audio beyond our seats, it does an excellent job of filling the room between us and the screen.

It packs a punch in terms of bass, too, which gives these action-heavy moments an extra level of excitement. When the helicopter flies overhead, we can feel the thrum of the chopping in the soles of our feet.

The 300MK2 even does reasonably well when we play our classic bass stress test in the form of Chapter 2 of Blade Runner 2049. The JBL manages to keep the different frequencies separate while still creating a floor-shaking bass effect.

As the soundtrack reaches almost subsonic low frequencies, though, you do get a bit of chuffing where the bass driver gets a little out of control. Bear in mind that most soundbars, even many more expensive ones, struggle with this more than the JBL, so this is a small niggle.

Even though the JBL offers a weighty performance, the bass does not overwhelm the rest of the sound, and voices remain clear. This becomes obvious when watching the energetic Dancing Through Life scene in Wicked. As Jonathan Bailey’s Prince Fiyero waltzes his way through a magical library, you can hear every word of the song with this forward midrange, all with the bass excellently keeping the beat.

The JBL also manages to maintain a dynamic range that evokes a good amount of tension. In the newly remastered Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World on 4K Blu-ray, the ship’s crew sit in anxious silence before being bombarded by cannonballs by the opposition.

This makes for a suitably tense audio experience, as the sound goes from eerily quiet to crashing and loud. You can hear the treble of the wood exploding as well as the fragments scattering across the deck. It doesn’t quite reach the same levels as the Sonos Beam (Gen 2), which is the more dynamic performer overall, but the JBL model still does well here.

When we switch to music via Spotify Connect, the JBL still performs well, but it’s certainly more suited to movies. We listen to Aurora’s My Name, which features various overlapping vocal tracks and a synth-heavy bass. The JBL bar again creates an immersive, bassy sound.

At the track’s most congested moments, though, the soundbar struggles to keep all the different elements effectively differentiated, which results in a slightly clogged delivery.

The Sonos Beam (Gen 2) is clearly more musical, with greater control, finesse and precision. These qualities lend themselves well to movies, too, with the Beam more accurately placing effects both spatially and rhythmically, and digging up more detail.

Verdict

The JBL Bar 300MK2 is a clear step up from its predecessor, improving on all aspects to give us one of the best Dolby Atmos soundbars we have tested at this price and giving the Sonos Beam (Gen 2) a real run for its money.

Ultimately, the Beam’s greater precision, detail and dynamics – and its musical ability – make it the better choice overall, but the JBL’s weightier, more bombastic and more room-filling sound will win it many fans.

SCORES

• Sound 5
• Features 4
• Build 4

MORE:

Read our review of the Sonos Beam (Gen 2)

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