Sound and Bar

[Ruined]

Originally Posted by LexInHD

I have two older Sony 2.1 soundbars - from the heyday of Blu-Ray - that take 5.1 audio and use the LFE channel. One does LPCM and Dolby/DTS and the other is a newer model that does LPCM, Dolby TrueHD, and DTS-HD. Today's 2.1 soundbars - which are pretty much all the low-cost soundbar models - tend to only handle 2.0 audio signals in their DSP, with no LFE channel processing, while 5.1 audio processing has been kicked up to the 3.1 soundbar units that occupy the space in the market that my Sony units once did. Those less expensive 2.1 units which only do 2.0 and have a sub simply take the bass from the audio and throw it at the sub, making it go boom-boom.

When you have to sell a 2.1 system, which includes a soundbar speaker, subwoofer, built-in amplifiers, processing, etc for $99 to be competitive, corners obviously need to be cut and keeping everything in the 2.0 realm is one way to do that. As you state, the system can just high pass filter the main channels for the subwoofer content - which of course would require the main channels to actually have content in the subwoofer frequency range to have any output: hello 2.0 channel mix.