The Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus proves sometimes more is less

In most circumstances, adding more features to a product creates the impression that it will be better. If you have the opportunity to upgrade from a cheaper, more minimal option to a beefier, features-heavy product, you may be swayed by the latter. Go big or go home, right?

When testing both of Amazon’s soundbars, however, it occurred to me that sometimes the opposite is true.

The Amazon Fire TV Soundbar is a basic 'bar that launched at £120 / $120. It does not offer Dolby Atmos and, despite its name, does not have any Fire TV capabilities or built-in Alexa.

Amazon's 'bar also struggles to make the lower frequencies feel impactful. When watching Dune 2, for example, the staggering impact of the creature moving through the sand "feels undefined instead of textured and floor-shaking."

Its feature list is slightly disappointing, then, and the sound does not reach five-star levels, perhaps, but its 2.0 speaker configuration does offer a good level of clarity when it comes to dialogue. It also manages to create a decent sense of space without Atmos, with loud scenes coming across "balanced and relatively composed".

As we say in our review: “If you are looking for a soundbar to improve upon your TV’s sound for a reasonable price, Amazon’s entry ticks a lot of boxes with its clear dialogue performance and unfussy features.”

So, when we got its big brother – the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus – into the test room, we were expecting it to be a jump in quality as well as price. If the retail giant is bumping the price tag up to £250 / $250 and adding Dolby Atmos, it must be better than its cheaper counterpart, right?

Well, upon hearing the soundbar in action, that illusion is completely shattered. We gave the 'bar a rare two-star review, citing its "flappy and thin" bass presentation and shrill overall sound performance.

Its 3.1 speaker configuration fails to improve upon that of its sibling, creating "a hard-to-ignore insistence to the upper midrange [...] that is both shrill and irritating."

It seems as if Dolby Atmos processing has been added without much thought being put into how it sounds, and the Plus version of Amazon’s Fire TV soundbar is much more chaotic and less cohesive in its delivery than the basic model.

At the bare minimum, you want a soundbar to improve your TV's audio performance; the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus does not succeed even in that.

In fact, it is one of those very rare soundbars that sounds worse than most TVs, whereas the basic model is an improvement on most TVs – even though it, too, is fairly weak by prevailing soundbar standards.

I'm sure it is tempting for companies to add more formats and features to justify a heftier price tag, but those ‘upgrades’ only make sense if the basics are already in the bag.

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Here is our in-depth review of the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar

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