Bose Smart Soundbar 600

Despite its small stature, this soundbar delivers true Dolby Atmos 3D sound decoding with height channels, and it's rather capable indeed...

£474.95 bose.co.uk

The dream is to get great big home cinema sound from the smallest, most discreet speaker cabinet possible. Many have tried... and with a very few notable (and subsequently wildly successful) exceptions, the failure rate is through the roof.

Of course, these portents aren't enough to put off a company as serious and successful as Bose. And so here's the Smart Soundbar 600 - it's physically small and discreet, it's configured to serve up spatial audio, and it's priced to meet its very few realistic best soundbar competitors head-on. So is Bose living the dream?

The Bose wants to combine plug-and-play simplicity with a true impression of Dolby Atmos spatial audio, and so its feature set is strictly focused. Which, for those of us who like to be enjoying our nice new product inside 20 minutes of unboxing it, is nothing but good news.

Aside from mains power, the only connection required to extract top-shelf performance from the 600 is from your TV's eARC-enabled HDMI socket to the corresponding socket on the rear of the soundbar. There's no room-calibration routine to be run, and nothing to come between you and Dolby Atmos sound - simply start streaming some Atmos-equipped content from your favourite service and you're in business.