HARMAN KARDON MULTIBEAM 700

Telling soundbars apart is often akin to playing the world’s most tedious game of Where’s Wally? – but there’s only so much you can do to a long slab without making it needlessly ostentatious.

That said, Harman Kardon’s Citation Multibeam 700 is about as sleek and sophisticated as soundbar design gets, with an acoustically transparent Kvadrat wool covering and neat, compact dimensions that don’t compromise the sound.

At each end you’ll find a 25mm horn-loaded tweeter, combining with five 50mm front-facing woofers to fire out the audio at different angles, bouncing it off the walls of your gaff to create some semblance of surround sound. Sure, it’s never going to compete with a proper Dolby Atmos setup, but it certainly spreads wider than the width of the unit itself. There are four EQ settings to choose from: Standard, Movie, Music and News, the latter of which should make everything sound that bit more serious.

Powered by 210W of Class D amplification, it wields enough power to fill all but the most cavernous living rooms, with plenty of dynamism and good separation. While bass is well controlled, there can be a little too much of it, but that’s a very minor complaint considering how well it performs overall.

The modern design extends to the features too, so there’s Wi-fi and Airplay 2 on board plus support for Google Home, which means easy setup and built-in Chromecast. You also get access to Google Assistant and loads of music streaming services.

On top you’ll also find a small OLED display, which is nice and bright, but it’s much easier just to use the bundled remote, which is weighty and matches the build quality of the soundbar itself. £450 / stuff.tv/multibeam700

Key specs

● 210W ● 2x 1in tweeter, 5x 2in woofers ● Wi-fi, Bluetooth 4.3, HDMI ARC, optical, 3.5mm

● 790x130x65mm, 3.7kg

STUFF SAYS ★★★★★

Compact, capable and classy: a worthy upgrade to almost any telly