TV speakers are terrible no matter how much you pay for them, but thankfully it doesn’t cost a fortune to make your living room’s audio experience better these days, and what intrigues us this time is the SonicGear SonicBar BT5300 soundbar, which not only adds up to 80W of total power to your home entertainment setup, but also comes with microphone inputs so that you can do karaoke at the comfort of your home.
Best of all, this soundbar costs just RM299, complete with a wireless subwoofer.
For what it is priced for, this SonicBar BT5300 looks pretty attractive for a budget soundbar, you get a black fabric covering the front with a chrome swirly case on the left and right, the glossy piano black paint job can only be found at the back of the soundbar which you might not care even if it gets scratched someday.
On the front, you get a simple LED display that tells you the operating mode and four nice physical buttons that changes source and playback controls. Audio input is good for a budget soundbar, you get an Optical In, AUX In, HDMI ARC and two 6.3mm microphone inputs, it supports Bluetooth 5.3 that offers reliable music streaming from your smartphone.
Inside the SonicBar BT5300 is a pair of 60x90mm racetrack driver that pushes 40W output, when paired with the 6.5-inch subwoofer driver that also produces 40W, it gives a total maximum power of 80W, this easily fills up a large living hall that offers an immersive audio experience when watching movies.
What’s even better is that the soundbar features a DSP with three different sound profiles of TV, Music and Movie, which can be activated using its remote control. Personally, I left it on Movie mode all the time as I find other sound profiles to have weak bass.
The SonicBar BT5300 produces decent sound quality with clear vocals and instrumentals, the subwoofer presents the rumbles and explosions in movies nicely and can get really strong when you max out the bass level, but like other budget soundbars, it can sound muddy when there’s too many things playing at the same time.
There’s one pretty weird issue that continues to persist on SonicGear’s soundbar remote control, as it tends to conflict with my Xiaomi TV’s remote input when I tried adjusting the volume, it pauses my Netflix movie and does some other weird inputs, which I would have to use the TV remote to adjust the soundbar’s volume when I need to.
SonicGear has provided me a pair of its WM3300UL UHF wireless microphone to test out with the soundbar, and I was impressed with how nice it sounded when I tried to talk and sing with it, the microphone can be purchased separately for an additional RM249.
The SonicGear SonicBar BT5300 is a decent soundbar for those who simply wants better audio for music and movies than their TV speakers without breaking the bank, it has a wireless subwoofer and HDMI ARC that branded alternatives don’t offer, its sound quality exceeds expectations on what you would expect from a RM300 soundbar, and finally, it can very well be a good budget karaoke speaker.
The SonicGear SonicBar BT5300 can be purchased at here.