I tried a $1,700 soundbar system, and it ruined TV speakers for me

I’ve always wanted something close to a theater experience at home, but I knew my TV speakers would never get me there. Yes, they’re perfectly fine for regular TV use, but you can only expect so much sound from speakers squeezed into an incredibly thin TV. Movies still sound good, just not quite as big, dramatic, or immersive as I want them to be.

So, for a while now, I’ve had the idea of adding a proper soundbar setup at home, hoping it could bring some of that theater-like scale to my living room.

The JBL Bar 1300XMK2 was already one of the systems I had my eye on, but with the kind of money involved, I didn’t want to buy one without knowing what it would actually be like in my own living room. Thankfully, a friend of mine already had one, so I borrowed his setup and spent a month with it at home before deciding.

And I’m glad I tried it first, because the Bar 1300XMK2 won me over quickly. What started as a way to see if it was worth the money ended with me pretty convinced I’d found the system I wanted at home.

A handsome pile of hardware

Before I get into how ridiculously good this thing sounds, I need to talk about the design, because unlike the sound, I’ll be looking at this every single day. At first glance, the JBL Bar 1300XMK2 doesn’t try particularly hard to reinvent what a soundbar should look like. It’s still essentially a long black bar sitting underneath your TV, but I actually think that simplicity works in its favor. The all-black finish looks clean and understated, and I like how naturally it disappears into the setup.

What I wasn’t quite prepared for was the weight. This thing is heavy. Picking it up for the first time immediately gave me that reassuring feeling that I was dealing with some serious hardware; the same goes for the finish. Run your hand across the main bar or pick up one of the detachable surround speakers, and everything feels premium and extremely well put together.

And those detachable speakers are actually my favorite part of the whole design. They’re basically two adorable black boxes that snap onto either end of the soundbar, but I liked them even more once I pulled them off and placed them beside my couch. There’s something incredibly satisfying about having these tiny speakers sitting on either side of you, knowing they’re responsible for making sounds fly around the room.

They’re surprisingly versatile, too. You can leave them attached to the main bar, pull them off and use them as rear surround speakers, or even use them independently as Bluetooth speakers. JBL also includes slide-on end caps for the main soundbar once you detach the speakers. I appreciate it because you’re not left staring at exposed connectors on either end; the whole thing still looks finished.

Then there’s the subwoofer, which is considerably harder to ignore. It’s big, really big. In fact, when I first set it up, I couldn’t get over how much it looked like a giant black stool sitting in my living room. And apparently, that wasn’t just my imagination, because someone actually tried to use it as one. One of my friends came over, and almost sat on the subwoofer because he thought it was an ottoman. I wish I were exaggerating. There was a brief moment where I genuinely thought I was about to watch a very expensive subwoofer become a chair.

So yes, the Bar 1300XMK2 is a lot of hardware to bring into your living room, but JBL has done a really good job making it feel like part of the space rather than something you’ll constantly want to hide. And considering what all of that hardware does once you hit play, I became very willing to make room for it.

This is where the fun really begins

As good as the Bar 1300XMK2 looks, a soundbar this big obviously has one job to do: sound ridiculously good. The first thing I played on the Bar was a 360-degree nature sound video on YouTube. I thought it would be a good way to get an immediate sense of the surround sound, bass, and just how well the system could fill the room.

That turned out to be a pretty good idea. Within the first few minutes, I could feel the bass, not just hear it. The vibrations traveled through the room, sounds seemed to pop up from different directions, and suddenly everything felt much bigger than the TV sitting in front of me. It was probably the simplest thing I played during my time with the Bar 1300XMK2, but it gave me a very quick idea of what I was in for.

And there’s a lot of power behind all of this. It gets seriously loud, fills the room with ease, and throughout my time with it, I never once felt like I needed more volume.

Over the next few days, I also bounced between Obsession, 6 Underground, and, because I apparently cannot go very long without watching it, The Big Bang Theory. Doing this showed me three very different sides of the system.

Obsession made me appreciate just how good the Bar 1300XMK2 can sound when things are actually quiet. Being a psychological horror/thriller, there are long stretches where not much is happening, and you’re basically waiting for something horrible to happen. That made all those infinitesimal background noises, low hums, and subtle sounds much easier to notice. I was hearing details around the room that I’d probably never pay attention to. Of course, that also meant the jump scares worked a little too well. You go from sitting in near silence to having the entire system suddenly come alive around you. My ears were having a fantastic time; my nerves, perhaps not so much.

After that, I figured I might as well go to the complete opposite extreme, which is how I ended up watching 6 Underground. I picked it specifically because it is loud, chaotic, and seemingly determined to have something explode every few minutes. Cars, gunfire, explosions, music — everything filled the room. There were moments when something happened behind or beside me, and I instinctively paid attention to that side of the room. I knew perfectly well there was a speaker sitting there, but my brain kept falling for it anyway.

To be honest, I’m really not an action-movie person; 6 Underground isn’t a movie I’d normally choose when I have a couple of hours to kill. Yet I kept watching because I was having so much fun with the sound.

Then came the least glamorous test of the lot, but probably the most useful one for me: The Big Bang Theory. It’s my all-time favorite show, and I watch it so often that I already know exactly how it sounds through my TV. That familiarity made it perfect for testing the JBL because I didn’t have to look for differences. Even something as ordinary as the audience’s laughter had much more presence, while conversations between the characters remained wonderfully clear.

The volume difference caught me off guard, too. I normally keep my TV at around 40 to 42, so out of habit, I initially expected the JBL to be in that neighborhood. Nope, I rarely went beyond 22 because by that point, it was already plenty loud for my room. More importantly, the bass wasn’t barging into every scene because there’s an enormous subwoofer sitting nearby. Sheldon could still complain about something without the low end trying to steal his thunder. Dialogue remained crisp, even when there was plenty happening around it.

After spending so much time listening to the system myself, I also wanted to know what someone who hadn’t been analyzing every little detail would think. So one day, I asked a friend to sit on the couch and played something for her.

Her first reaction was that the vibrations scared her, which I completely understood. If you aren’t expecting it, suddenly feeling the couch and the space around you come alive can be a little startling. But once she settled into it, she told me it felt like she was sitting in a movie theater. What stood out to me was that I hadn’t mentioned the theater comparison at all; that was entirely her reaction. And in a way, it perfectly summed up what I had been feeling about the system all along.

It’s not just about being loud

A lot of that comes down to Dolby Atmos and those detachable rear speakers. It’s really hard to explain without sounding like the usual “immersive audio” marketing spiel, but the simplest way I can put it is that my living room suddenly felt much larger whenever I pressed play. And then I started using it for music. Michael Jackson, The Weeknd, Coldplay — I threw a bit of everything at it, and this was when the Bar 1300XMK2 started becoming more than just my movie setup. I’d put something on, walk into another room to work, and then realize I could still make out the vocals clearly. I wasn’t just hearing a muffled beat traveling through the house.

That separation was what I enjoyed most. Vocals had room to breathe, instruments didn’t get mashed together into one loud wall of sound, and the bass could still make itself known without swallowing everything else. Even when I wasn’t sitting in the sweet spot on the couch, I could follow the lyrics and pick out the music behind them without everything fighting for my attention.

There’s one catch, though, just not for me

Connectivity is mostly straightforward on the Bar 1300XMK2, and it has pretty much everything I need. There is one limitation, though, and while it doesn’t bother me much, my partner definitely has a problem with it: there’s no 4K/120Hz passthrough. That matters because he uses a PS5, and our TV supports 120Hz. If we connect the console directly to the soundbar, we can’t take full advantage of that 120Hz refresh rate. If your TV only goes up to 60Hz, this probably won’t make any difference. But when you have a 120Hz TV and a console that can use it, it becomes something you have to work around.

Thankfully, the workaround is pretty simple. We connect the PS5 directly to one of the TV’s HDMI 2.1 ports and send the audio back to the JBL over eARC. For my partner, who actually plays on the PS5, it’s an annoyance he deals with every day. For me, though, I barely touch the PS5, so I’m happily sitting on the other side of this problem.

I don’t think I can go back

After borrowing the Bar 1300XMK2 from my friend, I can comfortably say that I don’t want to go back to my TV speakers. There’s really no comparison anymore, and once you get used to this kind of sound at home, built-in TV speakers suddenly feel like a big downgrade. More importantly, the month I spent with it answered the question I had when I first borrowed it: yes, I actually want to buy one for myself.

Of course, $1,700 is a lot of money for a soundbar system, especially when plenty of cheaper options are out there. JBL’s own Bar 1000MK2 runs $500 less and works the same way, with detachable rears that charge on the bar, though you give up channels and power to get there.

So after properly living with the Bar 1300XMK2, I can see what that money gets me. It sounds fantastic; the detachable rear speakers make a lot of difference, and the whole setup looks and feels premium. I wanted something that could give me that theater-like experience at home, and this is exactly what I was looking for.