The best soundbars for small TVs can do wonders for your living room audio, giving you cinema-quality sound at home no matter the size of the screen you're looking at – and soundbars of any size can save on space and clutter too.
The soundbars in this guide are not as big as some of the ones in our best soundbars guide, meaning they are specifically designed for smaller homes, smaller rooms, and smaller screens. However, that doesn't mean they don’t pack a punch.
When choosing the right soundbar for you, consider the size of your TV, space to position the 'bar, and we also recommend checking out the ports on each soundbar, as connectivity may vary between them. Most of the ones in this list have HDMI ARC (audio return channel) as standard, but checking your TV to see how many HDMI ARC ports you have is always a good idea, as the port may already be in use.
If you've not yet invested in a TV, then please do check out our best TVs guide, for all the latest and greatest screens for your home. For those of you looking for something more specific, we have a guide to the best soundbars for Samsung TVs if you want advice specifically for that brand.
Best soundbar for small TVs 2023: Top 3
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The best soundbar for small TVs for most people in this list is the Sonos Beam 2. We're hugely impressed by the sound it produces, and everything that comes along with the speaker (including the mobile phone apps, for example).
The best cheap soundbar for small TVs is the Yamaha SR-C20A. Clearly the low price is a big draw here, but despite the inexpensive cost it produces fantastic sound, and will really amp up the audio from your TV.
The best soundbar for big sound from small TVs is the Bose Smart Soundbar 600. It's compact enough for this category, but it packs a big punch in terms of audio output, and is great for music listening too.
In almost every respect, the Sonos Beam Gen 2 is a no-brainer. While its promise to create a Dolby Atmos effect isn't as pronounced as you might be hoping and it's a shame it doesn't have HDMI passthrough, in every other department this is the best small soundbar around.
Its sound is broad, properly balanced, surprisingly punchy and utterly believable, with real width and depth to movie soundtracks (and even the tiniest suggestion of height to Dolby Atmos content). The standard of build and finish is impeccable. And because it’s a Sonos, of course, it’s an object lesson in ergonomics. It’s simple to set up, to control, and to integrate into a wider Sonos-based surround-sound or multi-room system, or to use with Apple AirPlay 2 streaming.
So if your TV is of modest dimensions, the Sonos Beam Gen 2 will make an immodest difference to its sound. And it's a superb speaker for music too, and even has Alexa and Google Assistant built in, meaning it operates as a smart speaker too (if you want). Here's our full Sonos Beam (2nd Gen) review.
What Yamaha doesn’t know about soundbars isn’t worth knowing. And with the SR-C20A the company has taken decades of expertise and crammed them into a brilliantly compact soundbar that’s a truly entertaining listen.
Unless you get completely carried away where volume levels are concerned, the SR-C20A is a bold, detailed and quite expansive listen. Certainly it can give far more width and substance to movie soundtracks than your TV alone can manage, and with games it’s a dynamic and revealing performer too. It’s even prepared to have a go at being a music speaker – although for all its dynamism and detail retrieval, it’s not the most rhythmically adept soundbar around.
But then neither is it the biggest. If you want an affordable and discreet portable soundbar to do the business where movies and games are concerned, this Yamaha demands a listen, as our full Yamaha SR-C20A review explains.
With a compact size, plenty of features and a not-unreasonable price, the Bose Smart Soundbar 600 is an easy choice for our list of the best soundbars for small TVs. Of course that brand name gives you a certain amount of reassurance as well when it comes to the audio quality that you'll get from this unit.
There's Dolby Atmos spatial audio here, as well as voice control and the option to stream music wirelessly through the soundbar when you're not using it with your TV. It's simple to set up too (with no configuration routines to sit through), and it looks and feels like a solid piece of hardware.
The audio you get from the Bose Smart Soundbar 600 is warm, rich and substantial, and will be a substantial upgrade the built-in speakers on your small television set. Dynamic variations are handled well too, and whatever it is you're watching, this is a soundbar that's able to output it impressively.
The big sound from the Denon Home Sound Bar 550 belie its rather small dimensions: this soundbar creates a wall of sound, and unlike some movie-focused soundbars it delivers a great performance with music too. Then again, you'd expect that from a Denon.
In our Denon Home Sound Bar 550 review we suggested that its HDMI passthrough makes it one of the best soundbars for Samsung TVs as well as one of the best soundbars for LG TVs. But it's a good soundbar for any set and delivers impressive low end for a subwoofer-free setup.
The Denon sounds much bigger than it looks, but it's best kept to volume levels that won't upset the neighbours: crank it up too loud and it becomes overly aggressive and to our ears, a little strident. It's much more suited to slightly less dramatic volumes where it can let the audio benefit from its impressive treble and mid-range.
‘Soundslayer’ may make it sound like a character in Game of Thrones, but don’t be fooled – this Panasonic is all business. Despite being the smallest soundbar in this list, easily able to fit beneath even compact gaming monitors as well as the tiniest TVs, the SC-HTB01 fairly belts out soundtracks with something approaching relish.
‘Assertive’ only begins to describe it. The Panasonic may be giving away a little detail and a little outright scale compared to other similarly priced alternatives, but it makes up for that in sheer scale. Low frequency stuff may not be controlled with absolute precision here, but by heavens there’s plenty of it. The movie and/or game soundtrack that uses ‘bass’ as a shortcut to ‘excitement’ is hardly a rare beast, after all, which makes the Soundslayer an exciting listen.
And, let’s not forget, all that excitement is derived up by the smallest soundbar in this list – and one of the few that has HDMI passthrough, making it a practical choice.
It's especially of interest to gamers, because it has specific sound modes for different genres design to make it easier to stay competitive when you need to, or immersed in the vibes. But that doesn't mean it isn't ideal for movies too – as we go into in our full Panasonic SC-HTB01 Soundslayer review.
Just because you want a sensibly sized soundbar to go with your sensibly sized screen, that doesn’t mean you don’t want great big sound – and on that score (as well as quite a few others) the Samsung HW-S60T has you covered.
Thanks to its side-firing speaker drivers, the Samsung develops a sound far wider (and, indeed, a fair bit taller) than its physical dimensions. And it’s a precise, insightful sound at that – if you'll tweaks your EQs just so for your specific listening environment, there’s real presence to midrange dialogue, and very well controlled bite and attack at the top of the frequency range. Only the bass side of things, which is tentative where so many rivals are quite bolshy, stops the HW-S60T getting higher up this list.
Many listeners prefer clarity to bombast, though, and if you’re one of them then this Samsung should be a tempting option. Our full Samsung HW-S60T review goes even deeper into why.
Yamaha has packed 120 watts of amplification into what is a fairly compact soundbar (even if it’s the biggest on this list) and uses it to power a six-driver array. The result is sound that’s way beyond what your TV alone is capable of where dynamism and sheer scale are concerned – but not at the expense of clarity or insight.
Admittedly it’s a bit of a one-note wonder where the lowest frequencies are concerned – there’s not too much differentiation in the truly deep bass sounds. But at least they are present (which is more than some alternative designs can say) and everything that happens above them is detailed and prodigiously informative.
The SR-B20A even manages to give a laudable impression of effects steering. You'll never be convinced sound is coming from anywhere except in front of you, but there’s plenty of audio movement available, as our full Yamaha SR-B20A review goes into.
There’s small, and then there’s the LG QP5 Éclair. Even by the standards of these subwoofers, it’s a tiddler – to be clear, the soundbar is the smaller unit in the image above. And yet it still packs in five speaker drivers in an effort to deliver a facsimile of Dolby Atmos spatial audio. Unlike the rest of these soundbars, though, it recognises its physical limitations by partnering a wireless subwoofer (which itself isn’t all that big, yet looks pretty chunky next to the soundbar itself).
The trouble is, the LG has sacrificed a lot of what you might want a soundbar for in order to package itself so neatly. Tonality is skewed somewhat – the subwoofer does its punchy, if rather monotonal, thing, but the soundbar is a little dull at the top of the frequency range and rather boxy-sounding where the dialogue sits. The Atmos effect is barely discernible either.
However, it features HDMI passthrough despite its limited size, so if what you're looking for is a smart and tiny sound option with a subwoofer you can easily hide, it's still a good option. But other options here will deliver clearer audio. Here's our full LG QP5 Eclair review.
Like all of the soundbars on this list, the Bose Smart Soundbar 700 impresses in how much audio oomph it manages to produce from such a small unit – it measures less than a metre across, and yet generates a soundscape that's comparable with soundbar systems that are much bigger.
We like the voice control options here, we like the polished remote that comes with it, we like the wireless connectivity options, and of course we like the quality of the audio that you get – whether you're watching two people talking in a room or a group of dinosaurs crashing through a forest.
If we were being very picky, it is a bit on the expensive side for what you get for your money, but there's no doubting the quality that's here. As an added bonus the Bose app that you can install on your phone makes operating and customising the soundbar really simple and straightforward.
Let's be up front – this is not the most detailed and melodic soundbar of all time. It's very small, and very affordable, and so is somewhat basic compared to the others here. But what we ask a soundbar to do is improve on what's built into a TV, and for the 24-inch or basic 32-inch TVs that this is designed to be paired with, it absolutely will do that.
It doesn't have HDMI ARC, which is a bit of a shame, but actually a lot of very budget TVs don't include it either, so that's fine overall. You can connect it to your TV over optical or 3.5mm cable, and it has its own remote with volume controls.
As our full Bowfell Majority Compact Soundbar review says, "Watching TV and movies, the soundbar noticeably boosts voices. In comparison to a bedroom TV speaker, vocals came across clearer and louder … It also has a built-in subwoofer helps increase the depth of the soundstage."
At this price, that's all we're asking – if you have a tiny TV with weak speakers, this is a beefier replacement, and for barely any money at all.
How to buy the best soundbar for small TVs
It’s important to accept that smaller soundbars have their limitations, even the quite expensive ones. Some of the latest and greatest features get ditched, though at the same time you might be surprised at what you do get for your money.
You may need to resign yourself to a sound that, while far bigger and more impressive than that coming from your TV, isn’t going to trick you into thinking it’s coming from anywhere but in front of you.
The benefits you can expect are more detailed sound, clearer dialogue, and more impact for sound effects – it'll be more cinematic, but like a surround system. As long as you don't mind a few compromises, these soundbars are fantastic picks if you're looking for big sound from small sizes.
As always, read through the specs carefully, making sure the inputs match up with what your smaller television set can offer. If you need features like voice control – handy when you're sat on the sofa – make sure they're included.
