Maxell MXSP-SB3000 review

Sound bars can boost the sound quality of your TV setup without the need to clutter up your living room with lots of speakers and wires, and they’ve grown in popularity as prices have begun to drop. The Maxell MXSP-SB3000 is an entry-level sound bar at a great price that looks good and promises a lot.

Many sound bars sit in front of your TV, but the MXSP-SB3000 is long enough to sit underneath it. It has a sturdy wooden frame that, according to Maxell, can support a TV up to 80Kg in weight. As it has curved edges, any TV with a wider base won’t sit securely on top of it.

The MXSP-SB3000 looks great, too, with a brushed metal effect finish that should match the colour of many TVs. A single-line LCD display sits in the centre of the unit, and it lets you check volume and the active input at a glance. However, you’ll need to be sitting a few feet from the display as the text isn’t large enough to read clearly from far away. Even so, the display’s much clearer than competing sound bars from Orbitsound, which either rely on flashing LEDs to impart information or eschew source and volume indicators altogether. The option to dim the display is much appreciated, as it means you can reduce the brightness if you find the light distracting when watching films.

A row of touch-sensitive buttons sit on top of the unit, directly above the display. It’s useful for changing the volume or switching sources if you can’t find the remote control. The USB port on front is another useful inclusion, although you can only use it to charge your smartphone or tablet. Thankfully, you can still play music on your smartphone thanks to the MXSP-SB3000’s built-in Bluetooth connectivity.

It’s great to see high-quality aptX Bluetooth too, although regular A2DP streaming is also supported for devices that don’t support aptX. Switching to the Bluetooth source automatically makes the speaker visible to nearby devices, with no need to input a passcode to pair your handset or tablet.

The three HDMI inputs on its back panel are a generous inclusion for any sound bar, never mind a cheaper model such as this. All three support 3D pass-through and the single HDMI output is also Audio Return Channel (ARC) compatible, so you can use the MXSP-3000 with your TV’s integrated tuner. The MXSP-3000 also has digital optical and coaxial audio inputs to which you can connect devices with compatible outputs. You’ll also find analogue RCA and 3.5mm inputs on the back panel.

The MXSP-SB3000’s twin 30W speaker drivers and separate 100W subwoofer should be capable of significantly better audio than the tiny speakers built into your TV. Unfortunately, our testing revealed a distinctly lacklustre performance. Unless you’re sat directly in front of the system, which needs to be at a low height in order to get the best from it, it sounds hollow and tinny.

Even positioned on a high coffee table or an AV cabinet, much of the sound is lost to the room, with only the mid-range and a sharp high-end making its way to our ear. If you stand directly in front of the system there’s a respectable amount of bass for a unit without a dedicated subwoofer, but it may not travel depending on the layout of your room and the furniture within it.

Using the digital equaliser presets did little to help either music or films. Sadly, you can’t adjust bass manually, you can only choose from three different settings and the highest setting only provides a little low-end boost. The Cinema EQ preset sounded hollow, the Music preset aggressively sharpens the high-end and SRS mode produced mixed results. With certain musical genres it worked reasonably well, and we could pick out detail in delicate tracks, but it couldn’t cope with heavy rock tracks. It pushes the high-end much too far so that it dominates the mix, and although it adds bass we think the crossover point is set too high to give electronic and guitar tracks the right balance of drum beats and bass against the harsh snares and hi-hats.

There was a reasonable amount of stereo separation that added some much-needed presence to multi-channel films, and we could always hear speech over action in hectic movie scenes. However, with no side-firing speaker drivers the MXSP-SB3000 isn’t able to compete with many other sound bars that create a wider sound stage using multiple speakers.

Although it has plenty of connections, and provides Bluetooth connectivity and ARC, we just can’t recommend the MXSP-SB3000. At £230 it’s simply too expensive given its mediocre sound quality. Considering you can get the Best Buy-winning Philips HTL5120 for only a little more, there’s no reason to opt for the Maxell MXSP-SB3000.