Amazon Fire TV Soundbar review: low-cost soundbar offers a middling upgrade

We've long held that almost anyone who doesn't have a soundbar under their main TV is probably missing a major trick – some of the very best TVs out there still have surprisingly muddy sound, and a soundbar can fix that easily.

The best soundbars are often quite expensive, though, and Amazon has clearly clocked a relative gap in the market at lower-end prices. Thus, the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar on review here: a super-affordable multi-speaker soundbar that promises sonic upgrades without a huge price tag. But can it deliver?

Amazon Fire TV Soundbar: Price & Availability

Amazon's budget soundbar has been available in the US for nearly a year – but has only been on sale in the UK for a number of months. Being one of Amazon's own products you can get it delivered super promptly if you're a Prime member (or not, frankly).

Its full retail price was initially at £119.99 in the UK or $119 in the US, although relatively frequent sales have seen it fall below £100 or $100 – as you can see in the shopping widget embedded above.

Amazon Fire TV Soundbar review: Design & Features

The Amazon Fire TV Soundbar is a really compact soundbar, coming in at just a hair over 60cm long, and is pretty narrow. This makes it really straightforward to fit into most setups, whether you have a modest TV – such as the best 32in TV – on a stand or a bigger one – such as one of the best 48in TVs – with plenty of room.

There's a lot to be said for going with a more compact design and, having swapped out our normal Sonos Beam (1st Gen) for it, the footprint being taken up was almost identical.

Amazon's design isn't the most inspiring aside from its size, though. The soundbar is mostly covered with a greyish mesh cover at the front, while the rest of the body is black plastic, with some control buttons on the top of the unit.

These let you make adjustments if you like, although you also get an included remote which is more useful. Amazon has designed the soundbar to work with existing Fire TV device remotes, though, so after a quick and easy pairing setup you can stick the included remote in a drawer to gather dust if you already use a Fire TV Stick with your TV.

The speaker is a 2.0 one, meaning it's stereo, so you're not dealing with many channels. And while Amazon says that it has virtualised Dolby Atmos support built-in, you really shouldn't come to this device hoping for impressive virtual surround sound – it's almost non-existent.

Still, this means that the setup process is very simple – at the back of the soundbar there's a plug for power, another for an HDMI cable, or another for optical cable, depending on your choice.

You can also connect to the soundbar via Bluetooth to play music through it, although there's no persistent Wi-Fi option, so you will find it a little more limited than a smart speaker might be.

Finally, despite the name, it's worth clarifying that the soundbar cannot actually act as a Fire TV hub of its own – it can't run apps or anything, so you will need a separate product to do that.

Amazon Fire TV Soundbar review: Performance

A soundbar isn't the sort of thing that most of us expect to look beautiful, so if we're not blown away by the design of the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar that's no tragedy – it's sound performance that really makes it or breaks it. Given Amazon's sterling work on the likes of the Echo Dot and Echo Studio, we've been optimistic that this would be a slamdunk... but sadly things aren't quite that simple.

There's no doubt that hooking the Fire TV Soundbar up will likely feel like an upgrade on your TV audio in one obvious and immediate way – general oomph. It's got a decent whack of power, can get really loud, and has punchier bass than most built-in TV speakers can manage.

However, where precision and clarity come into play, we can't claim to be particularly impressed. One thing a soundbar shouldn't do is make dialogue hard to hear, and while the Fire TV Soundbar didn't worsen dialogue clarity compared to our TV's native speakers, it certainly didn't improve it – and compared to our Sonos Beam it was a huge step-down. Obviously, Sonos prices its products at far more premium points, but the difference is still stark. This lack of precision got worse at higher volumes, too.

As we mentioned earlier, the apparently virtualised surround sound also didn't really manifest at all in our testing – if the soundscape on offer was a bit wider than it might otherwise be, the difference seemed marginal, but there was certainly no impressive audio -ouncing going on.

While it might also be a specific issue on our end, we repeatedly found the soundbar's volume extremely inconsistent when swapping inputs – leaving our PS5 behind to go to Apple TV+'s smart app on an LG OLED would sometimes result in murderously loud sound at the start of a programme or the opposite problem of vanishingly low volume.

Amazon Fire TV Soundbar: Verdict

We love how Amazon has positioned the Fire TV Soundbar in terms of price, and its compact design shows an awareness of what makes sense for most people.

However, it's severely let down by distinctly middling sound quality and a relative paucity of features, making what we've previously thought of as a "no-brainer" upgrade look much less so.

If it included Fire TV streaming software and had more refined audio, this could be a real contender, but as it stands the Fire TV Soundbar should only really be considered if its price is the limit of your spending power.

Also consider

We've mentioned it a few times in our review so far, which means the Beam from Sonos is a great option for those happy to spend a little more. You can occasionally grab it renewed from Sonos at a discount, although the pricier second-gen model is obviously an even better buy if you can afford it.

At a more relevant price point, though, we think the Denon DHT-S316 is a great option. It's chunkier and comes with a subwoofer, but if you have the space for it you'll get terrific sound for the money.