Key takeaways
- The channel numbers are a layout, not a quality score. 5.1 means five speakers and one subwoofer; the trailing figure in 5.1.2 counts height channels.
- A good soundbar beats a badly placed surround system. If you can’t position rear speakers properly, a quality bar with a subwoofer is the better result.
- HDMI-ARC or eARC is the connection you want. One cable carries audio back from the TV. eARC additionally passes the higher-bandwidth uncompressed formats.
- The subwoofer is the biggest single upgrade. It carries the weight that small drivers physically cannot produce, whatever the rest of the system.
- Room and seating decide the layout. A single sofa suits a focused arrangement; a wide or open-plan room needs a different approach entirely.
Most home theatre sound guides assume you're building a dedicated media room with rear speakers wired into the walls. Most people aren't. Most people have a TV on one wall of a room that also has to work as a living room, and for that space the honest answer is usually a soundbar, not a receiver and a stack of separate boxes.
This is the version of that guide for a normal room: what a soundbar actually gets you, when full surround is worth the extra wiring and furniture rearranging, what the channel numbers on the box mean, and the two things — the HDMI connection and where the bar physically sits — that decide whether any of it sounds any good.
- Most rooms
- A soundbar with a separate subwoofer. Simpler to install, and usually the better result for the space you actually have.
- Dedicated media room
- Discrete 5.1 or 7.1 speakers with an AV receiver — if the rear speakers have somewhere real to go.
- The channel numbers
- First number is speakers, second is subwoofers. 5.1.2 adds two height channels for Atmos.
- Connection to use
- HDMI eARC where the TV and the bar both support it. Optical as the fallback on older gear.
- Placement
- Centred below the screen, firing at seated ear level — not wherever there happens to be a shelf.
- Hard-surfaced rooms
- Bare walls, tile and big windows bounce sound around. A rug and soft furniture fix more than a better soundbar does.
Soundbar or Surround Sound: Which One Do You Actually Need?
A soundbar is one unit, sometimes with a wireless subwoofer, that plugs into your TV and does its own amplification. A surround system is a set of separate speakers — front, centre, sometimes rear — driven by an AV receiver that decodes the signal and powers each one. Both play the same movie. They get there differently, and the difference is mostly about your room, not your budget.
Surround sound wins on raw separation: sound genuinely arriving from behind you instead of being simulated from the front. It only wins if the rear speakers land somewhere sensible, and in a real living room — a doorway, a hallway, a sofa against the one wall that would take a rear speaker — that's a harder ask than it sounds on a spec sheet. Wire the rears in and you've turned a TV install into a cabling job.
A soundbar sidesteps that by putting everything in one unit under the screen. Modern bars fake width and height convincingly enough, bouncing sound off the ceiling and side walls, that most people can't tell the difference from a properly set up surround system in an average-sized room. Where a bar loses is at the top end: distortion at real volume, and a ceiling of "convincing" rather than "actually there."
We mount soundbars and run the cabling that goes with them — including for a full surround setup someone else has speced out — but we don't spec or tune AV receivers. If you're set on discrete rear speakers, that's a conversation with an AV specialist before it's a conversation with us. Our soundbar mounting page covers where and how we hang the bar itself, on drywall, plaster or condo concrete, and our TV and soundbar installation page covers booking both in one visit.
What Do 5.1, 7.1 and Atmos Actually Mean?
The numbers describe a layout, not a quality tier. The first number is how many main speakers sit around the room. The second is subwoofers. A third number, where there is one, counts overhead or upward-firing height channels.
5.1 is five speakers — left, centre, right, and two surrounds — plus one subwoofer. It's still what most movies, shows and broadcast content is mixed for. 7.1 adds two more rear speakers for a bigger room. Dolby Atmos changes the approach rather than just the count: instead of assigning a sound to "left surround," it places it as an object in three-dimensional space and lets your gear decide which speakers reproduce it, height included. Written as 5.1.2, that's a 5.1 layout plus two height channels.
Soundbars borrow this shorthand even without five separate boxes. A bar labelled "3.1.2" has three forward-firing channels built into the one unit, a subwoofer, and two upward-firing drivers for Atmos height. The physical speaker count is lower; the labelling convention is the one surround systems use.
Is a Soundbar Good Enough for Your Living Room?
For most rooms, yes — and pairing it with a separate subwoofer closes most of the gap that's left. Television speakers are thin because the panel is thin; there's no getting real bass or clean dialogue out of drivers the size of a couple of coins, whatever the TV costs. A soundbar and a sub fix the specific problem most people are actually trying to fix, which is not being able to hear people talk without turning the volume up during every action scene.
Where a soundbar falls short is scale, not clarity. At real volume in a large or open-plan room, a proper multi-speaker system has more cabinet space and more drivers sharing the load, so it stays clean where a bar starts to compress. If you've got a genuinely dedicated home theatre room and the rear speakers have somewhere real to go, that's the case for going further. If you've got a TV on the living room wall, a soundbar is very likely the right stopping point — and getting its placement and connection right will do more for what you actually hear than moving up to a bigger system would.
HDMI eARC vs Optical: Which Connection Do You Need?
Both send audio back down a cable from the TV to the soundbar, so you don't need a separate audio run from your source devices — the TV becomes the hub and the sound comes back out through one cable. The difference is bandwidth.
Optical (TOSLINK) carries compressed surround formats fine — regular Dolby Digital, DTS — and it's what older TVs and older bars use. HDMI eARC carries far more data, enough for uncompressed and object-based formats like Dolby Atmos to pass through without being squeezed down. If your TV and your soundbar both have an eARC-labelled HDMI port, use it. If either one doesn't, optical is a perfectly reasonable fallback; you're just capped at what it can carry.
| HDMI eARC | Optical (TOSLINK) | |
|---|---|---|
| Carries Dolby Atmos | Yes, uncompressed | No — compressed formats only |
| Needs | eARC support on both the TV and the bar | Any TV and bar with a TOSLINK port |
| Cable | Standard high-speed HDMI | Fibre-optic TOSLINK cable |
| Typical use | Recent TVs and soundbars | Older sets, or one older device in the chain |
Check before you assume
Not every HDMI-ARC port is eARC — plenty of TVs have plain ARC, which is closer to optical in what it can carry than to true eARC. Check your TV's spec sheet for the word "eARC" specifically, and the same for the soundbar, before assuming the newer-looking cable buys you anything.
The signal cable is one problem; getting it out of sight is a separate one. In-wall-rated cable can run inside a hollow wall between two brush plates, but the cord that ships in a soundbar's box usually isn't rated for it. Our wire concealment service covers that side once the connection itself is sorted.
Where the Soundbar Should Sit Relative to the Screen
Centred below the TV, close enough that the two read as one object, with enough of a gap to clear the panel's bottom bezel and its infrared sensor. On a typical 65-inch screen that's usually a couple of inches. Sit where you actually watch and check the sightline — a bar that looks fine standing up can block the bottom of the picture from a low sofa.
Height matters as much as the horizontal position, and it's the part that's easy to get wrong when the TV itself is hung too high. A soundbar is voiced to fire at seated ear level. If the screen is mounted for standing-height viewing — common above a fireplace — the bar underneath ends up firing over your head instead of at you, no matter how well it's built. We cover the ear-level math and the fireplace case specifically on our soundbar mounting page, along with what changes when the bar goes onto the TV mount itself instead of the wall.
What a Hard-Surfaced Room Does to Your Sound
Bare drywall, tile or hardwood floors, big windows and a high ceiling all reflect sound instead of absorbing it, which is why an empty or minimally furnished room sounds harsher and echoier than a lived-in one — regardless of what's plugged in. A condo living room with a floor-to-ceiling window behind the seating and hard flooring throughout is fighting the acoustics before the soundbar is even switched on.
A rug on a hard floor, curtains over a big window, and upholstered furniture instead of all glass and metal do more for how a room actually sounds than upgrading the bar again. None of it is soundproofing — it's just giving the sound something to land on besides a flat, hard surface. Worth doing before you assume the gear is the problem.
When It's Worth Calling Someone
Plugging in a soundbar and pointing it at the couch is a DIY job, and most people should just do that. Where it's worth a call: the wall is condo concrete and needs a hammer drill and sleeve anchors rather than a couple of screws into drywall; you want the HDMI or speaker cable run inside the wall instead of hanging down to the console; the bar is going onto an existing TV mount and you need to know it's rated for the extra weight; or you're wiring rear speakers for a genuine surround setup, which is a structured-cabling job as much as an audio one — see our low-voltage cabling page for what that involves.
GTA TV Wall Mounting mounts soundbars and TVs and runs the cable that goes with them across Toronto and the surrounding GTA service areas. We carry $2,000,000 commercial liability insurance, every job comes with a one year material and workmanship warranty, and we're up to 50% less than comparable big-box store installation services. Send us the TV and soundbar model numbers and a photo of the wall, and we'll tell you what the install actually involves before anyone shows up with a drill.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can a soundbar be mounted under a TV?
Yes, and it's the tidiest place for it. Mount it centred below the screen with enough gap that it doesn't block the panel's bottom edge or its infrared receiver.
Some TV brackets take a soundbar arm directly, which keeps the bar and the screen aligned and lets them move together on a full-motion mount.
How much space should I leave between the TV and the soundbar?
Enough that the bar doesn't creep into the bottom of the picture and doesn't cover the remote sensor — a couple of inches is typical. Check by sitting where you'll actually watch, because the sightline from a low sofa is what matters.
What do 5.1 and 7.1 actually mean?
The first number is how many main speakers there are, and the one after the dot is the number of subwoofers. So 5.1 is five speakers plus a sub. A third number, as in 5.1.2, counts upward-firing or ceiling height channels for formats like Dolby Atmos.
Is a soundbar good enough for a home theatre?
For most rooms, yes — particularly a bar paired with a separate subwoofer. A full surround system only outperforms it if the rear speakers can be placed properly, and in a lot of real living rooms they can't be.
What's the difference between ARC and eARC?
Both send audio back down the HDMI cable from the TV to your bar or receiver, so you don't need a separate audio run. eARC has considerably more bandwidth, which is what lets it carry uncompressed and object-based formats that plain ARC has to compress.
Do I need an AV receiver?
Only for separate speakers. A soundbar has its amplification built in. Once you're running discrete speakers you need a receiver to power them, decode the surround formats and switch your sources.
Where should the subwoofer go?
Bass interacts strongly with room shape, so position matters more than people expect. A corner gives you the most output but often the least even response.
The reliable method is to put the sub where you sit, play something bass-heavy, then move around the room and listen for where it sounds best — that spot is where the sub goes.
How much should I spend on sound versus the TV?
Audio is usually where the bigger perceptual gain sits, because television speakers are constrained by how thin the panels are. If the budget is fixed, taking a little from the screen and putting it into a bar and subwoofer generally gives you more.