Pulse Soundbar 2i

$1599

The Pulse Soundbar 2i offers a chance to integrate your TV sound into a wider home of streaming and multiroom products. It can play music as well as TV sound as an all-in-one home entertainment hub, and you can, of course, link it up to any other Bluesound product for multiroom playback. For music it has all the usual Buesound streaming options, including AirPlay 2 and aptX HD Bluetooth, along with Bluetooth out, so you can listen to TV on a pair of wireless headphones. And those who enjoy shouting at their technology can connect their soundbar to an Amazon Echo product for Alexa compatibility.

At over a metre in length and standing 14cm tall, this is not a soundbar you’d expect to be lacking power. In fact, it has a total of 120W racing through its pairs of 25mm tweeters, 5cm midrange drivers and 10cm woofers — each driven by its own dedicated amplifier channel and housed in individually optimised chambers — and that’s complemented by two 10cm passive radiators. And again that power rating, as you might expect from a company which is sister to NAD, seems quoted at hi-fi quality — THD distortion is listed as a mere 0.03%, whereas soundbar specs from many companies routinely allow a frightening 10%. This is by no means a budget soundbar, but you’re certainly getting what you pay for in terms of drivers and tech on board to justify the considerable price tag. The one compromise for having that array of sizeable drivers is that the soundbar will almost certainly block the bottom of most modern TVs. So unless your TV has very long legs or has a suitable shelf below it, wall-mounting this soundbar below your TV could be your best bet.

In terms of physical connections, Bluesound offers Ethernet alongside its dual-band Wi-Fi, a USB-A and USB-B computer input, optical, analogue and HDMI inputs, and an output for that subwoofer.Bluesound’s intuitive BluOS app puts you in control.

If you want a real surround sound experience, pair the Soundbar 2i with a couple of the smallest wireless speakers, the Pulse Flex speakers, so that they act as surround channels, using the Soundbar’s Dolby Digital decoding. With or without these it can pair with the $999 Pulse Sub (pictured in the lead image of this article) to beef up both music and movie bass.

And it’s as full-bodied a performance as you’d expect from those drivers, submerging the listener in a bold and widely dispersed soundfield that’s hard not to like. There’s detail too, the substantial girth and presence of the midrange dense with insight, laying out the timbre and tone of voices as competently as it renders the crashes and intensity of high-octane action. The versatility of adding further authority via the Pulse Sub should not go unconsidered, but it is far from a necessity; for most users, and in most rooms, there is enough low-end here to provide significant impact. You could start out with the Soundbar and upgrade if required, or take advantage of available package deals.