Harmon Kardon SB16 Sound Bar for Home Theater
The Harmon Kardon SB16 Sound Bar for Home Theater sports an almost 2 foot tall 10-inch, 100 watt wireless sub-woofer with phase and cutoff controls directly on the sub make fine tuning that bass nice and smooth. The SB16 is not a super flashy design, it’s rather minimal, but we’re more interested in sound quality. Either way the design is rounded and organic in a contemporary way.
As with many electronics, the SB16 has it’s shortcomings as well. One being the seemingly narrow corridor for optimal sound. Secondly for the price tag of $600 you would expect some more fine tuning features and lots of inputs but it just falls a little short. There was a time when Harmon Kardon products, back probably 10+ years ago was top notch on build quality and circuitry, the buttons feel cheaply made on this product and do not make you feel warm and fuzzy when using them, not to mention there is no volume indicator to tell you what mode your sound bar is currently in. There are also no HDMI ports, instead you get both coaxial and optical digital inputs and stereo RCA input jacks.
There is no remote and has no universal remote code and uses a method to use an existing remote that doesn’t seem to make much sense over simply providing everyone with a universal remote code. This is by design forcing you to make all your connections through your Television rather than through the sound bar or sub-woofer. There are no presets for room arrangement or bar placement, but with few things you can modify, I guess they felt it wasn’t warranted and cut on costs.
The bottom line is that this falls into the category of very expensive for what it is, few custom options for sound, but good sound quality for out of the box performance. It just lacks on fine tuning ability, the connections and the remote
Via Gizmodo.com
