Runner-up

This system produces more immersive sound than our top pick, but it has fewer features and is more complicated to set up and use.

If you’re willing to give up features such as Wi-Fi streaming and a remote control to get a more immersive surround-sound experience for about the same price as you’d pay for our top pick, we recommend the Vizio Elevate SE. You have to set up the included surround speakers and wire them to the subwoofer, but the result is a more seamless, wraparound sound than our top pick produces.

This system adds up-firing drivers and dedicated surround speakers for more immersive sound. The soundbar itself has left, center, and right speakers plus an additional motorized speaker at each end. Normally the two end speakers fire forward — but when Dolby Atmos or DTS:X content is detected, they rotate upward to create a sense that sound effects are happening above you. The vents for these speakers also rotate and light up when they’re playing immersive content. Not only does this serve as a signal that the soundbar is receiving the desired audio format, but it also looks cool.

The package also includes two surround speakers (which must be hard-wired to the subwoofer) for placement at the sides or back of the room. Each speaker has just one driver, but it points up at an angle to create a more immersive effect.

Tonally, the Elevate SE sounds similar to our top pick, just more enveloping and slightly more trebly. We thought our previous runner-up, the similar and now-discontinued Vizio M-Series Elevate, didn’t sound great with music, but the Elevate SE does. It has the clear voices and detailed treble you might expect from a decent, inexpensive bookshelf speaker, but with a more spacious sound.

Bass fanatics (probably) won’t be disappointed. Some of the subwoofers included with recent Vizio soundbars left us wanting more oomph, but the Elevate SE’s subwoofer offers a good amount of excitement for its size. In our CTA-2010 measurements, the 6.5-inch woofer’s output averaged 107.2 dB in the mid-bass and 91.6 dB in the low bass. That’s not as much as what you can get from a good dedicated subwoofer, but it’s more than enough to keep up with the soundbar; we often found ourselves turning it down a few notches.

The mobile app gives you lots of control. Vizio’s WatchFree+ app (iOS and Android) lets you switch sources and control the volume, as well as fine-tune the balance of the different speakers to get your desired amount of bass and treble, subwoofer level, surround effect, and height effect.

It also gives you access to the ClearDialog feature, which boosts upper-midrange frequencies to make voices sound clearer; you can further improve dialogue clarity by raising the center-channel volume.

All of these operations are intuitive and easy to use. You can also access other features, such as keeping the motorized height speakers on all the time and changing the color of their internal lights (or turning the lights off, which would be a shame).

Flaws but not dealbreakers

There’s really just one input — and no Wi-Fi streaming. The Elevate SE includes a single HDMI eARC port. To get immersive sound, you need a TV with HDMI eARC capability. It has no dedicated HDMI inputs, nor does it offer digital or analog audio inputs.

It does have a USB-A jack, and the manual says this is an input that accepts WAV and MP3 files — but we couldn’t get either file type to play from a PC laptop or a Samsung Galaxy S10 phone. We tried switching to the USB input in the app, but it just kept switching back to the HDMI input.

The only way we were able to transmit audio from a phone, tablet, or computer was via Bluetooth, since this system also lacks support for Wi-Fi streaming protocols such as AirPlay and Chromecast.

You have to deal with extra wires. The subwoofer itself is wireless, but you must wire the surround speakers to it. The included speaker cables are long and tipped with RCA plugs, so they’re easy to connect. Even so, you have to run cables across the room (and presumably hide them under rugs or furniture), and you pretty much have to place the subwoofer in the back of the room.

The system doesn’t come with a remote. To control the soundbar, you must use either the four buttons on the left side of the bar (for volume, Bluetooth, and power) or the mobile app. Or, more likely, you can just program volume control into your TV or source device’s remote (or a universal remote). We rarely use soundbar remotes except to select the sound mode, such as Movies or Music, and the Vizio app lets you do that.

If you want a similarly designed soundbar with a conventional remote control, we recommend the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus, which comes with a subwoofer, surround-sound speakers, and a remote. It offers similarly excellent performance, although we thought its sound was somewhat less enveloping than what the Vizio Elevate SE delivered.