I use a Sonos Arc Ultra every single day. It sits under the telly in the studio, it is the best soundbar I have ever tested, and I’d happily recommend it to a lot of you.

It is nowhere near what’s in my living room.

That’s a Denon AVR-X2900H, which went in a few weeks ago to replace the receiver I’d been running for years. Every house I’ve owned has had a wired surround system in it, so this isn’t me discovering speakers for the first time. But it is the first time I’ve had both things in front of me every day - and the gap genuinely surprised me.

So let’s have the argument properly. Not brand versus brand. Category versus category.

Those are the only two reasons anybody stops at a soundbar, and ten years ago both were fair. Neither holds now.

Here’s the bit that never changes, though. A soundbar is one box under your telly pretending to be a room full of speakers. It fires sound at the ceiling and hopes. A surround system puts an actual speaker where the sound is meant to come from. That’s the whole argument - the rest of this is me showing you it’s less work and less money than you think.

Telly to receiver is one HDMI cable into the eARC port. Speakers are red to red, black to black - five of them, ten connections, ten minutes. The sub is a single RCA. Then you put the microphone that came in the box on the sofa at head height, press go, and make a cup of tea while Audyssey measures the room and sorts levels, distances and EQ for you.

I’ll be straight with you: my speaker cable is channelled into the walls, which I did years ago, so mine was a box swap. If you’re not chasing walls, you’ve got options - along the skirting, under the carpet edge, or flat cable painted over. Denon has also promised Denon Home speakers as wireless rears in a future firmware update, though there’s no date on that one yet.

The two things a soundbar simply cannot do

The first is a centre speaker: a box pointed at your face whose entire job is dialogue. No subtitles, no reaching for the remote every time somebody whispers. The second is width - a soundbar’s soundstage is exactly as wide as the soundbar, where a proper left and right either side of a big telly make the sound as wide as the picture.

What that means in practice is a film you can play at one volume the whole way through. A jet that passes overhead and lands behind you instead of being hinted at. Rain and room tone and footsteps that put you inside a scene rather than in front of it. And 95W a channel into real speakers makes music an entirely different proposition.

The honest caveat

The Arc Ultra is still the right call for my studio. It’s the right call for a flat, or a bedroom, or anywhere you simply cannot put five boxes. It is the best thing in its category. It’s just the wrong category for a big living-room telly.

And if it’s the rear speakers putting you off…

Three speakers across the front and the same receiver still gets you both of the things a bar can’t do. Then add rears later, heights after that, same box. A soundbar is finished the day you buy it.

Mark