SENNHEISER AMBEO SOUNDBAR

Not many people are willing to spend over £2000 on their television, let alone a soundbar to go underneath it; but if you want the absolute best and have space for something that looks like a futuristic railway sleeper, Sennheiser’s Ambeo is the only choice.

Over 126cm long and weighing in at 18.5kg, the Ambeo is massive. It almost feels like you’d need to have your wall reinforced before mounting it (and it’s an extra £50 for the necessary bracket, which seems a bit stingy). It’s that big for good reason, though. There are 13 independent drivers inside: six

4in long-throw sandwich-cone woofers, five 1in aluminium-dome tweeters and a pair of top-firing 3.5in full-range drivers.

That’s powered by 500W of Class D amplification and, not surprisingly, it sounds big too.

The stage is high and wide, with individual elements positioned in their own distinct pockets of space. You won’t get better Dolby Atmos performance from any other soundbar.

Everything in its wide frequency range is balanced and integrated nicely: the top end is sharp but not harsh, voices in the middle have real texture, and the meaty bass is delivered with so much punch that you’d be crazy to bother with a separate sub.

Positioning is important, so it has the room it needs to perform at its full capacity. To help get it set up properly there’s a microphone included, which listens to a set of test tones to calibrate things. Once that’s done you control the bar using either the buttons on top, the included remote (which is a far cry from the flimsy zappers most soundbars come with) or Sennheiser’s app. There’s no voice control, but then this thing goes so loud it’d probably never be able to hear your feeble cries anyway. £2199 / stuff.tv/ambeosoundbar

Key specs

● 500W ● 6x 4in woofers, 5x 1in tweeters, 2x 3.5in full-range ● 4x HDMI, optical, USB, Ethernet, Bluetooth, Wi-fi ● 1265x171x135mm, 18.5kg

STUFF SAYS ★★★★★

As huge in size as it is in price, but it’s basically the best there is