Philips HTL5160B/12 320 W Bluetooth SoundbarBlack, Stereo Channel

Excellent sound reproduction. Blue tooth also works very well. Very good for a led tv

I didn't pay attention to the specs when buying this and didn't notice the Google Cast support. What a pleasant surprise! My home setup involved a Bluetooth receiver (Logitech) paired with Altec Lansing ATP3 speakers before this. While I still love those speakers and can't complain about the BT receiver's price, it used to be a pain in practice. My phone would lose connection with the BT receiver as I moved around the house, and aggressively attempt to reconnect, emitting beeps at every connect and disconnect. I'd be woken up in the middle of the night as it made these surprise announcements. I had to physically switch off the receiver when not in use—and walk over to power it on everytime I felt like playing something, the physical act alone discouraging me from using the setup as often as I'd like to have. Having Google Cast on this changes everything. Not only does it work reliably, without stutter, the unit also powers on and off automatically, and from my phone I can choose to cast from a single, supported app (Google Play Music, TuneIn, YouTube) or from the entire device (for Apple Music Beta). Am I listening to music more often as a result? You bet. Needless to say, the primary function of supplementing my TV's audio works as well. The only hitch there is that my TV only has analog audio output, no HDMI ARC or optical. This soundbar supports analog audio input, but treats it as a secondary input. The socket is on the top of the soundbar, where the jack will stick up high enough to look odd, and the soundbar switches back to optical input when you power on or disconnect from Google Cast. You'll need to reach for the remote to switch back to "Audio In". But that's a minor quibble about an excellent soundbar. FWIW, the bass is also unnecessarily boomy. Bass -2 on the remote gets it down to a tolerable level.

So I recently purchased this in FK's BBD and was super excited to get it and install it. I setup everything and then started testing Bluetooth to play audio from my iPhone and that's it. The soundbar audio would keep breaking every few seconds when it starts playing the audio and that's from the Internet or a local file. At first, I thought It could be due to the Internet (I have a 100Mbps, So mostly I never really get any lag during any play) but even the local audio files would keep breaking, then I thought It could be my iPhone issue and tested with another iPhone and it's the same thing, then switched to Android and again, the same issue. Either this product is defective, or it's just like that. That was just Bluetooth. Next tested with USB play and it would never detect USB at all. No matter what USB cable I use to connect my iPhone or Android devices, it would still keep saying NO USB. Even a reboot doesn't do anything. Moving further, I then tried AUX and even that doesn't work either. I thought again it could be my cable fault but nope, it works fine on another device. As far as the sound is concerned, It's never clear. I played from YouTube, SoundCloud, and local MP3 files. The audio is always shallow and feels like there's no clarity. This is in spite after changing settings to Voice / Music / Surround and testing various other configs. No luck. On top of this, The bass is so terrible that I started getting a headache and my ears went deaf for a few mins (No, I didn't have it on full). I've got another set of speakers that I've been using it for years, and they still work well and much much better than this one, and they cost me few thousand as compared to this Philips soundbar. I was looking forward to this product and had high hopes it would be very good, but since this didn't have any reviews here, I took a chance and that turned out to be a nightmare. I got this today, checked today, and I'm gonna test it for the next 1-2 more days with more settings' tweaks and stuff and then probably place a request for replacement with FK if I'm sure this is a defective piece. I wouldn't recommend anyone looking to purchase this product. Be careful and avoid wasting your money on this. P.S. The design of the bar, remote and UI in app is good. Hence, that one additional star there.