My Christmas confirmed one huge thing about soundbars – it was no surprise

There's no way I'm the only person in the world to have audio-visual problems whenever I go home for Christmas. I think it's almost a rite of passage for anyone who starts to get into their home cinema setup to have to go to their parents' or relatives' house for the holidays and accept a huge downgrade while they're there.

I'm not going to argue it's that massive a sacrifice – the free food, hospitality and festive cheer more than make up for it, but every year I do the same calculus in my head. I need to come up with a watchlist of movies that I'd happily watch, but which I don't mind watching on a smaller screen with subpar sound.

In my parents' case, that's always been a pretty decent Sony 4K set they got a good long while ago, but without any form of external soundbar – the TV was always too snug on its old stand to allow for one, despite the very muddy built-in audio that resulted.

They recently moved, though, and that opened up more space, making for the perfect slot for a hand-me-down first-generation Sonos Beam, and the difference it made was actually almost impossible to overplay.

I had a first-gen Beam of my own for around half a decade, and recently upgraded to the Beam Gen 2, so I'm a certified fan of the hardware in question, but what the change confirmed for me was more fundamental: every single person needs a soundbar under their TV.

Finally, I was able to watch recent movie releases without feeling like I was compromising hugely on the experience. That manifested in the form of Jay Kelly and Train Dreams on Netflix, both of which I found really interesting, and each of which has plenty of muddled vocal audio, a real challenge for even a good soundbar and doubtless annoying without one.

Don't get me wrong, though – I'd still have quite liked to hear the immersive soundscapes of Train Dreams on my own system, with a subwoofer rounding out the bass to really make its fire sequence land more deeply, for example. That's the curse of the expert, though: I'll always be aware if there's a flaw in the presentation.

Still, the good news is that the best soundbars on the market are often less prohibitively expensive than people might assume. If you're still watching TV and movies without one in your home, take this as your prompt: go look at what's out there and what could fit in your setup affordably. I promise you that it'll be an upgrade you won't regret, as my Christmas holiday just reiterated for me.