Where a soundbar sounds best comes down to two things, nothing blocking it and how close it sits to your ears. The reference spot is right below the TV and centered on it, on top of the stand, on the wall or on an open shelf, as close as you can get to seated ear height (a little over 3 ft, or about 1 m, off the floor). If the bar fires at the ceiling, don’t put anything on top of it or on a shelf right above it.
Putting a soundbar in a cabinet works if you pull it out to the front edge of the cubby. In our acoustic simulation, pushing the same bar 12 cm (5 in) back into the cubby took the spread between peaks and dips in the voice range from 8 dB to 17 dB, twice as uneven as with the bar pulled out. Further down there’s a free way to check your own setup with pink noise and your phone’s microphone.
Soundbar placement, rule by rule
Good soundbar placement starts with nothing blocking the bar, which every brand asks for. Most of them put it below the TV, and Dolby adds ear height. They differ on the details, and each detail has a number.
- Below the TV and centered on the screen, so voices come from the picture. Dolby, Bose and Sony all put it there.
- On a shelf or in a cubby, front flush with the edge. Bose asks you to bring the front of the bar as close as possible to the front edge, and Sonos wants the Beam at the front of the shelf. Our simulation backs this up inside a cubby.
- Nothing above it if it fires at the ceiling, and room at the sides if it fires at the walls. Dolby asks for a clear line of sight to the ceiling and to the side walls, and Sonos wants 2 in (50 mm) free on each side of the Beam.
- A little space behind it. Bose asks for at least 0.4 in (1 cm) because its bar has rear ports, and Sony asks for 10 mm to keep the vents clear.
- At ear height. Dolby’s setup guide for Atmos soundbars wants it at about seated ear level (slightly above for bars that fire at the ceiling), and for those bars it also asks for at least 4 to 5 ft (1.2 to 1.5 m) to the couch. If the bar sits lower, tilt it up toward you.
There’s a sixth detail people forget. The bar shouldn’t cover the TV’s remote sensor, and Sony tells you to check by turning the TV on and off with its own remote once the bar is in place.
| Source | Inside a cabinet? | Behind | Above and at the sides | Gap to the TV |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dolby (bars with up-firing drivers) | Avoid it, and avoid a soffit above | – | Clear line of sight to the ceiling and side walls | In front of the screen, so it doesn’t block the overhead sound |
| Bose (Smart Soundbar) | Not in an enclosed cabinet | 0.4 in (1 cm) minimum | Top speakers unblocked, nothing on top | Wall-mounted, 4 in (10 cm) between bar and TV |
| Sony (Bravia Theatre Bar 8 and 9) | Not covered, asks for an open space in front of the TV | 10 mm (13/32 in) minimum | Don’t cover the top | Don’t block the screen or the remote sensor |
| Sonos Arc (guide for the original Arc) | Yes, in or on a TV stand | – | – | 4 in (102 mm) between the top of the bar and the TV |
| Sonos Beam | On a shelf, at the front | – | 2 in (50 mm) each side on a shelf, ends 30 mm from a wall | 2 in (50 mm) minimum |
| Samsung (wall mounting) | – | – | – | Wall-mounted, at least 5 cm (2 in) below the TV |
The brands don’t agree even on the same kind of bar. The Sonos Arc has up-firing drivers and Sonos allows it in a TV stand, while Bose, whose Smart Soundbar has speakers on top as well, advises against an enclosed cabinet, and Dolby says to avoid cabinets and soffits for bars that fire at the ceiling. What we can put numbers on is the other variable, how far back the bar sits, and that’s what comes next.
What happens to a soundbar in a cabinet
A soundbar in a cabinet deals with three problems. The air in the cubby resonates, more so the further back the bar sits, the shelf above blocks any drivers aimed at the ceiling, and the furniture itself rattles with the bass. The first two color the voice; the third adds boom.
The cubby rings like a box
A cubby is a box with an open front, and like any box it has frequencies at which the air inside resonates. The one that lands in the middle of the voice range is set by the cubby’s height (the speed of sound, 343 m/s, divided by twice the height), and in a 7 in (18 cm) cubby it sits at 950 Hz. The depth and width add lower ones, and combined with the height they give slightly higher resonances, which in a cubby 18 cm tall and 38 cm deep (7 × 15 in) fall at 980 and 1,170 Hz.
| Cubby dimension | Typical sizes | First resonance | What it colors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Height (between base and shelf) | 12 / 15 / 18 / 25 cm (5 / 6 / 7 / 10 in) | 1,430 / 1,140 / 950 / 690 Hz | Voice timbre (nasal or boxy) |
| Depth (open at the front) | 30 / 40 / 45 cm (12 / 16 / 18 in) | 290 / 210 / 190 Hz | The body of the voice and the upper bass |
| Width (between the side panels) | 60 / 100 / 150 cm (2 / 3.3 / 5 ft) | 290 / 170 / 115 Hz | The upper bass |
With the bar inside, the free air changes and these frequencies shift a little, but the order of magnitude holds. That’s why a bar tucked into a cubby sounds boxy, and it’s one of the usual answers to “why does my soundbar sound like it’s underwater?”
The further back it sits, the more it excites the cubby’s resonances
Pulled out to the edge, the bar radiates straight into the room and the cubby behind it plays a much smaller part. Set back from the opening, it has to play through the mouth of the cubby, and the air in front of and above it starts to resonate. In the simulation, the two resonances the math predicts for an 18 × 38 cm cubby, 980 and 1,170 Hz, show up with the bar 12 cm back as a plateau of about +7.5 dB between 930 Hz and 1 kHz and a +9.1 dB peak at 1.13 kHz, while with the bar at the edge that region stays below +3 dB. The edges of the opening diffract sound too, but with these dimensions the path difference is 2 to 4 cm (about 1 to 1.5 in), so that effect lands above roughly 4 kHz, well away from those peaks.
A shelf above blocks the up-firing speakers
Up-firing speakers in a Dolby Atmos soundbar aim at the ceiling so the sound bounces down and reaches you from above, and Dolby asks for a clear line of sight to the ceiling. With a shelf in the way, that sound bounces off the wood and back into the cubby, so you lose the height effect and add coloration on top. Pulling the bar to the edge doesn’t fix it, because the shelf is still overhead. Side-firing drivers run into the same issue with the sides of the cubby, since they need to see the room’s walls. Our Atmos guide covers the kinds of height speakers that bounce off the ceiling and how many you need.
Bars that virtualize Atmos get off easier. They create the height effect with processing instead of a ceiling bounce, and Dolby says its height virtualizer needs no special room conditions. The Sennheiser AMBEO Soundbar Mini is one of them, virtualizing up to 7.1.4 in a bar about 70 cm long, 7 cm tall and 10 cm deep (28 × 2.7 × 4 in). A shelf above hurts it less than it hurts a bar that bounces sound off the ceiling, although the cubby resonance affects it just the same.
The furniture rattles with the bass
A thin particleboard or melamine panel vibrates like a drumhead when the bar or the subwoofer feeds it bass, and that buzz joins whatever you’re hearing. Your hand is the test. Play a bass-heavy scene at normal volume and rest your palm on the panel next to the bar; if you feel it tingle, the furniture is singing along. Rubber or silicone feet under the bar stop it from shaking the panel through contact, although they don’t change what reaches you through the air, and moving the subwoofer off the furniture takes care of the other path.
How much the sound changes with the bar’s position
Inside a cubby, how far back the bar sits is what matters most. The same simulated bar went from an 8.2 dB spread between peaks and dips in the voice range when pulled out to the edge, to 14.0 dB when set 6 cm (2.4 in) back and 16.6 dB when set 12 cm (5 in) back, twice the unevenness. It’s the result that holds up best in the model, across every distance, bar height and floor type we tried.
| Bar position in the cubby | Peak-to-dip spread in the voice range (300-4,000 Hz) | What the curve shows |
|---|---|---|
| Pulled out to the edge | 8.2 dB | The most even, between -3.6 and +4.7 dB, with broad bumps near 390 and 540 Hz |
| 6 cm (2.4 in) back | 14.0 dB | A +8.3 dB peak near 1.2 kHz and a -5.6 dB dip near 720 Hz |
| 12 cm (5 in) back | 16.6 dB | Peaks of +8.0 dB near 480 Hz and +9.1 dB at 1.13 kHz, a -7.5 dB dip at 800 Hz |
| 12 cm back, with 3 cm (1.2 in) of foam on the back and ceiling of the cubby | 12.4 dB | Peaks of +7.3 dB near 430 Hz and +8.1 dB at 1.1 kHz remain |
| 12 cm back, in a 25 cm (10 in) tall cubby | 9.0 dB | The upper peak drops from 1.13 kHz to about 900 Hz, and the one near 480 Hz stays (+7.6 dB) |
The simulation solves, step by step, how sound travels through a side cross-section of the room in two dimensions (the FDTD method, short for finite-difference time-domain). The stand is 40 cm deep and 50 cm tall (16 × 20 in) with an 18 cm cubby, and a 65-inch TV sits on top with its screen 9 cm (3.5 in) above the top panel. The bar is 7 cm tall and 10 cm deep, the size of a compact soundbar, and we listen from a couch 3 m (10 ft) from the back of the stand, about 2.6 m (8.5 ft) in front of the bar, averaging five ear heights between 1.00 and 1.20 m. The grid is 5 mm, valid up to 5 kHz, and a 10 mm grid moves the figures by less than 1 dB and a 2.5 mm grid by a tenth at most. The room has no walls and the floor doesn’t reflect, on purpose, to isolate what the furniture does.
The ranking between pulled out and pushed back holds in everything we tried. With a different measure of unevenness, the standard deviation of the curve, it gives 2.2 dB pulled out, 3.3 dB at 6 cm, 3.5 dB at 12 cm and 3.1 dB with foam. With the couch closer, at 2 and 2.5 m (6.5 and 8 ft), the bar pulled out comes to 7.4 and 7.8 dB and the bar 12 cm back to 15.1 and 16.0 dB, and with a taller 9 cm (3.5 in) bar, to 6.8 and 14.9 dB. With a hard floor that reflects, the numbers rise by several decibels, but pulled out stays well ahead (10.7 against 18.0 dB at 3 m).
Foam only goes halfway. With no floor reflections it cuts the spread from 16.6 to 12.4 dB, and with a reflective floor from 18.0 to 15.5 dB, but in both cases it leaves the big peaks nearly untouched. A taller cubby helps more than you’d expect, since at 25 cm the same bar set 12 cm back comes out at 9.0 dB, close to the bar pulled out in an 18 cm cubby. For a bar on top of the stand, though, the model doesn’t give a stable answer. With the TV on the stand, at the edge (9.6 dB) and set back (9.4 dB) land close to the bar pulled out in the cubby, but with a reflective floor the order changes, so there we stick with what the manufacturers ask for.
Read these numbers as a trend, not as the curve of your living room. In two dimensions the stand, the TV and the bar extend sideways forever, which exaggerates some effects, and below 300 Hz the model isn’t reliable, so we draw no conclusions there. The bar is a single source with no directivity, no processing and no up-firing or side-firing drivers, and each position is compared with the bar in free air at its own height, so the cubby, 20 cm (8 in) lower than the top panel, isn’t penalized for sitting further below your ears. Your furniture and your bar will change the exact figures. What we expect to hold is the ranking, with the bar pulled out clearly ahead of the bar pushed back and foam as a partial fix.
If the bar has to stay in the cubby, do this
We simulated two fixes. Pulling the bar out to the edge cuts the spread from 16.6 to 8.2 dB for free, and lining the cubby with 3 cm of foam brings it to 12.4 dB. The rest comes from what manufacturers ask for and from our own judgment.
- Pull it out to the edge, or let it overhang by an inch if it stays stable. Nothing else did as much in the model.
- Add a pull-out tray or a riser that brings it forward, so you can slide it out for movie night and tuck it away afterward.
- If it fires at the ceiling and there’s a shelf above, there’s no fix inside the cubby. The height effect only comes back on top of the stand, on an open shelf or on the wall, and raising or wall-mounting the TV can make the room.
- Line the back and ceiling of the cubby with acoustic foam. In the model, 3 cm (1.2 in) took off about 4 dB of the spread; we didn’t simulate thicker foam or felt.
- Put rubber feet under it if the furniture rattles with the bass.
- Re-run room calibration after moving it. Sonos calls it Trueplay, Sony Sound Field Optimization, Samsung SpaceFit Sound and Bose ADAPTiQ, and Sony tells you to redo it whenever you move the bar or rearrange the furniture. EQ pulls down the cubby’s peaks well but fills in dips poorly. And when the calibration measures with the bar’s own microphone, as on the Samsung HW-Q990D, that mic sits inside the cubby and doesn’t hear what you hear.
Turning bass or treble up or down on the remote won’t fix it. Those controls work on the ends of the spectrum, and in the model the cubby’s peaks sit between 430 Hz and 1.2 kHz, right in the middle.
Soundbar height, as close to your ears as you can
The ideal height for the bar is your seated ear height, a little over 3 ft off the floor (Yamaha puts a seated person’s eyes at 42.5 in), or slightly above it for bars that fire at the ceiling, according to Dolby. You’ll rarely hit it. On a low TV bench, 16 to 24 in (40 to 60 cm) tall, the bar ends up about 20 in (50 cm) below your ears, and on the 30 in (76 cm) furniture that the same Yamaha installer calls typical, about 12 in (30 cm).
Twenty inches of drop at 10 ft is only about 10 degrees, but at 6.5 ft (2 m) it’s 14, and the treble, which beams more than the bass, starts to arrive a little softer. If you sit close, tilt the bar up a few degrees with a wedge or raise it on a shelf under the TV. Dolby adds one condition for bars that fire at the ceiling, which is not to place them so low that you’re looking down at the top of the bar, or the height effect falls apart.
Should you mount a soundbar on the wall or keep it on the stand?
Both work as long as you follow the rules. The wall wins when the cubby won’t let you pull the bar out, or when it has a shelf above and your bar fires at the ceiling. When you mount a soundbar on the wall, it’s clear above and at the sides, at whatever height you choose and with no panels to rattle. On the stand it’s easier to set up and move. If you hang it, its cables will show, and our guide on how to hide TV cables covers doing it with or without opening the wall.
Can the subwoofer go in the cabinet too?
It’s better on the floor. Sonos designs its Sub 4 to sit on the floor, asks you to keep at least one side of its slot clear and, if it goes under furniture, to leave 1 in (25 mm) above it. Inside a cubby, the sub makes the panels vibrate and its bass output can easily end up blocked. The right spot depends mostly on your room’s modes, which we explain in our guide on where to put the subwoofer. To test positions with your phone, use our tool to find the best subwoofer spot.
Is it the cabinet, or is the soundbar faulty?
You can tell in ten minutes by comparing both positions with pink noise and your phone’s microphone. If it sounds fine out of the cubby, the furniture was the culprit, and if it still sounds bad, the problem is the bar or the signal it’s getting.
- Play pink noise through the bar from a laptop or tablet connected over Bluetooth or HDMI, using our pink noise generator at a moderate volume.
- On the couch, open the spectrum analyzer on your phone in the “Bands ⅓ oct” view and keep the phone in the same spot every time, at head height.
- With the bar in the cubby, tap “Download CSV” two or three times, a few seconds apart.
- Pull the bar out to the edge or onto the top of the stand, leave the volume alone, and repeat the downloads.
- For each take, note the gap between the highest and the lowest band from 500 Hz to 1.25 kHz. If that gap shrinks by 3 dB or more in every take once the bar is out, the cubby was the problem (in our simulation it goes from 7.3 to 4.0 dB). Some band may go up, because the cubby creates dips too. Repeat with the phone a hand’s width to the side, since moving the bar also changes how the room responds.
Since you’re comparing takes from the same microphone in the same spot, it doesn’t need to be calibrated. If the bar also sounds bad outside the cabinet, with buzzing, crackling or a channel that stays silent, run our guided speaker diagnosis, which tells a damaged driver from a bad cable by ear, and read why a speaker sounds distorted. If it’s the surround sound that’s failing, the surround sound test checks channel by channel what arrives and in which format.
Frequently asked questions
Can you put a soundbar in a cabinet?
Yes, if the cubby is open at the front and the bar is pulled out to the edge. Sonos allows it for the Arc, Bose advises against enclosed cabinets and Dolby says to avoid it for bars that fire at the ceiling, because a shelf above kills the height effect, on an Arc too. In the simulation, the bar set 12 cm (5 in) back was twice as uneven in the voice range as the bar pulled out (16.6 against 8.2 dB).
How far below my TV should I place my soundbar?
Close, but without covering the screen or the remote sensor. On the wall, Samsung asks for at least 2 in (5 cm) and Bose for 4 in (10 cm). On a stand, Sonos wants 4 in (102 mm) between the top of the Arc and the bottom of the TV, and the Beam at least 2 in (50 mm) from the TV.
Is it better to mount a soundbar above or below a TV?
Below. Dolby says a wall-mounted soundbar is usually best below the TV and only suggests going above when the TV hangs low on the wall, and Sonos allows the Beam in either spot. Above the TV, the voices come from over the picture and the bar ends up far from the ear height Dolby wants for bars that fire at the ceiling. If above is the only option, angle it down toward the couch.
Can you put a soundbar on a shelf?
Yes, as long as it sits at the front edge of the shelf with nothing on top of it. Sonos asks for 2 in (50 mm) free on each side of the Beam on a shelf, and Bose wants the front of the bar as close to the edge as possible. If there’s another shelf above and the bar has up-firing drivers, you’ll lose the height effect.
What is the best under-TV shelf for a soundbar?
One that puts the bar in front of the TV, with nothing on top and as close to ear height as possible. A taller stand brings it closer, and on the 30 in (76 cm) furniture Yamaha calls typical, the bar sits about 12 in below your ears instead of 20. If it has a cubby, pick an open one with room at the sides (Sonos asks for 2 in on each side of the Beam). In the model, a 25 cm (10 in) tall cubby colored the sound far less than an 18 cm (7 in) one with the bar set back the same amount (9.0 against 16.6 dB). If your bar fires at the ceiling, avoid any shelf above it.
Is it okay to put a soundbar on the floor?
You can, but it’ll aim at your knees and dialogue will lose clarity, especially if you sit closer than 6.5 ft (2 m). If there’s no other spot, tilt it up toward the couch. It’s worse for a bar that fires at the ceiling, since Dolby says the bar shouldn’t sit so low that you’re looking down at its top.
Does mounting a soundbar affect sound quality?
Somewhat. On the wall the bar gets away from shelves and rattling panels, but the wall right behind it reinforces the bass, so re-run the calibration after mounting it, as Sony asks whenever you change how the bar is installed. Use the manufacturer’s bracket, which already sets the gap to the wall, and leave the space your brand asks for below the TV.
Why does my soundbar sound like it’s underwater?
Often because of where it sits. Tucked into a cubby, behind an object or well below ear height, dialogue loses clarity. A virtual surround or night mode left on can do it too. If it still sounds muffled once it’s at the edge of the stand, check those modes and the connection to the TV (ARC, eARC or optical), and make sure none of its drivers is damaged.
