Michael Antonoff

The power of music plus an eclectic mix of new gear from KEF, McIntosh, LG, and Klipsch.

PRICE $180

AT A GLANCE
Plus
Room-filling sound
Enhances dialogue
Built-in Roku streaming interface
Minus
None worth noting

THE VERDICT
The Roku Streambar Pro offers a considerable sound upgrade over a TV's internal speakers and comes with the company's comprehensive streaming platform built-in.

Soundbars are popular for a good reason. The speakers in a typical flat panel TVs sound puny compared with the visual sway of increasingly larger, higher-resolution displays. Also, since not every viewing room can accommodate the separate components of a home theater, a narrow-footprint soundbar solves the problem of raising the impact of the audio and it does so with one cable.

Whether you’re using a TV, tablet or phone to shelter at home, your screen is becoming ever more crowded. Though TV news still relies on a traditional split screen when an anchor hands off a story to a correspondent, Lester Holt now regularly leads off NBC Nightly News by addressing a gaggle of bobbleheads (some masked) in which ten correspondents peer into cameras from locations as wide ranging as the other side of the world to the other side of Lester’s desk.

The first thing to fade from my bloated cable bill when I dropped all sports channels was a line item called the Regional Sports Network Fee. It was a monthly tax that cost me $5.89 just for the ability to tune into channels I never watched. And it was a fraction of the more than $30 that instantly vanished from my cable bill once I customized my lineup minus the sports channels I'd been force-fed for years.