The Philips Fidelio FB1 soundbar is for audiophiles, and it’s $152 off for Black Friday

What’s the deal? 

The Philips Fidelio FB1 soundbar is 19% off for Black Friday, making it $648 instead of its original price of $800. 

Also: The best Black Friday deals live now

ZDNET’s key takeaways

• The Philips Fidelio FB1 soundbar retails for $800. 
• This soundbar comes with plenty of customizable EQ options to fully optimize your sound for whatever you’re listening to. 
• It’s large in size, and the setup can be a little complicated. 

Good sound is easily detectable — you know it when you hear it. 

While the Philips Fidelio FB1 soundbar<!–>produces dynamic sound, it lacks that “oomph” one might expect from an $800 soundbar. It still has all the bells and whistles an audiophile or soundbar enthusiast might want or really appreciate if they wish to fine-tune their listening experience, but for the average person, you can buy just as good of a soundbar for half, even a quarter, of the price.

Also: The best soundbars

First impressions

To clarify: I’m not saying this isn’t an impressive soundbar. Take, for example, its specs. The Philips Fidelio FB1 soundbar has two up-firing speakers, 15 drivers running off a rated 310W of amplification, Dolby Atmos, Play-Fi compatibility to connect to extra subwoofers or speakers, as well as Alexa and Google Assistant compatibility.

It also comes with an included mic that intelligently adjusts each channel’s output to deliver sublime surround sound.

The setup for this soundbar can be a little complicated. The most challenging part is finding where to put it since it’s so large (53.94 x 8.66 x 14.96 inches and almost 16 pounds). After that, it takes some plugging and unplugging of cords to figure out what works for your current setup. For example, I initially connected it with an HDMI cable, and the sound was less than satisfactory (this may be due to the age and quality of my TV).

But after connecting with an Optical cable, the sound was much better. However, the Optical cable did not allow for control of the TV and the soundbar using one remote. (Philips provides a separate remote for the Philips Fidelio FB1 soundbar should you need it.)

You can control the sound profile and add customizations – such as EQ presets or the audio balance of each speaker in the soundbar – via two different apps, but the user interface of these apps wasn’t intuitive. I also felt they could have been easily combined into one app.

Listen up

After the setup and finally figuring out the right way to optimize it, it did exceed my expectations with certain media. Listening to a crackling Yule log on the TV felt like your head was literally inside the fire, with flames and sparks flying all around you.