JBL Bar 1300 review: Big Atmos sound in a versatile surround sound package

JBL’s new flagship soundbar has quite a lot to shout about. Not only does the Bar 1300 (known as the Bar 1300X is some regions) manage to match the huge 11.1.4 channel count of Samsung’s excellent HW-Q990C, but it also claims an almost absurdly huge total power output of 1170W – not to mention an included subwoofer that boasts a class-leadingly large 10-inch driver.

It’s also one of a rare soundbar breed that conveniently features battery-powered wireless rear speakers that you can actually attach to the ends of the package’s main bar when you don’t want them cluttering the back of your room – or you need to recharge them.

The Bar 1300 certainly talks a very good talk – especially for a package which, at $1,300/£1,300, nestles in nicely against key full surround rivals from the likes of Samsung and LG. But does it have the performance to back up the hype? Here’s my full review.

Design and build

• Soundbar dimensions:
  • Total soundbar (with detachable rears attached): 1376(h) x 60(h) x 139(d)mm
  • Main bar with detachable rears detached: 1000(w) x 60(h) x 139(d)mm
  • Detachable surrounds: 202(w) x 60(h) x 139(d)mm; subwoofer: 305(w) x 440.4(h) x 305(d)mm
• Main bar weight: 4.3kg; Surround speakers weight (each): 1.25kg; Subwoofer weight: 10kg/
• Only available in black

The main bar component of the Bar 1300 isn’t particularly striking to look at. It’s just a long grey-black rectangle, really, with angular edges, rounded corners, and a hard plastic grilled finish over much of its edges and top. There’s also a rather awkward-looking, flat, non-grilled plate in the bottom right corner of its top panel, in which some control buttons have been placed.

Its only really distinguishing aesthetic traits are that it’s quite a bit deeper than most rivals (nearly 14cm – so make sure your TV stand can find room for it as well as your TV) and that its ends can come off.

Yes, you read that right. Its two end sections can detach to become the system’s completely wireless (since they can run off an internal battery) rear speakers. JBL isn’t the first brand to take this novel rear speaker approach on a soundbar, to be clear – but as you’ll see in the features section, JBL has taken the detachable rear speakers idea to another level by giving them independent Bluetooth playback capability.

When the rear speakers are detached from the main soundbar, magnetic covers can be clipped onto the main bar’s ends to make it look like a finished product again, rather than like a bar that’s, well, had its ends lopped off.

The main bar looks so much smaller and weighs so much less with the rear speaker ends removed that it makes you question its potential power compared with, say, the much bigger, much heavier main bar you get with the Samsung Q990C soundbar package. But then it does still manage to fit in six 46x90mm racetrack drivers, five 19mm tweeters and four 70mm up-firing drivers – and eats up a good chunk of the system’s huge 1170W of claimed power.

The rear speakers when detached adopt an unusually horizontal stance when sat or wall hung behind you, but again, still cram in a 46x90mm race track driver, a 19mm tweeter, a 70mm up-firing full-range driver, and two rounded rectangle passive radiators per speaker.

The subwoofer, finally, is a seriously substantial affair. The biggest I can recall seeing as part of a soundbar package, in fact. It wears its bulk reasonably attractively, though, with its lightly textured finish and rounded corners, and its huge 10-inch down- rather than side-firing driver gives you plenty of room position flexibility. It also feels more reassuringly heavy and well built than the slightly lightweight main bar.

Connections and control

• Three HDMI inputs, one HDMI output
• Controllable via JBL One app, included remote or on-bar controls
• Wi-Fi/Bluetooth/Airplay 2/Spotify Connect/Chromecast/Alexa Multiroom support
• Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant voice control (via external listening devices)
• Auto calibration system

The JBL Bar 1300 gets off to a great start by providing no less than three HDMI inputs alongside the HDMI output for passing video on to your TV. The vast majority of soundbars only provide two, but sometimes one or even no HDMI inputs – however, the sort of household serious enough about home entertainment to invest in a premium soundbar like the Bar 1300 will likely have at least three sources they would like to attach to it.

Having three HDMI inputs means you really can use the Bar 1300 as a system switching box like you can an AV receiver. Though for good measure the Bar 1300’’ output HDMI port is equipped with eARC functionality, so that the soundbar can receive lossless Dolby Atmos tracks passed on to it via your TV (assuming your TV is capable of doing so).

Soundbars that don’t bother with HDMI loopthrough, including the Sonos Arc, will use the Bar 1300’s eARC compatibility to question the point of including three HDMI inputs. But not everyone’s TV supports eARC and Dolby Atmos passthrough, and even where they do, I have seen plenty of evidence over the years of eARC sometimes causing audio syncing issues with certain kit combinations. Setting up eARC correctly can sometimes be quite a faff, too.

The Bar 1300’s HDMIs handily support passthrough of Dolby Vision HDR signals – though as usual there’s no support for passthrough of 4K/120Hz and variable refresh rate gaming signals, or the HDR10+ format created by Samsung as a rival to Dolby Vision.

Gamers with the latest consoles and premium graphics cards can always, of course, attach their gaming devices directly to their TVs and send audio on to the soundbar using HDMI’s eARC feature. But there can occasionally be issues with this approach, as noted earlier.

Other connections comprise a digital optical audio input, a 5V USB port for service use or powering HDMI video sticks, and an ethernet port if you want to hardwire the soundbar to your router rather than depending on Wi-Fi.

The Bar 1300 provides no less than four different ways of controlling it. The most obvious is its remote control – an unusually stylish and well laid out but rather plasticky affair, with an initially confusing but ultimately easy-to-learn button layout. JBL also offers the JBL One app for iOS and Android that connects easily to the soundbar, makes it much easier to get the soundbar on your Wi-Fi network, and offers a neat graphical control interface.

You can also issue verbal instructions to the Bar 1300 if you link it up to an external Alexa, Siri or Google Assistant device, and finally there’s a basic set of touch-sensitive buttons on the main soundbar’s top edge.

One final bit of good news is that the Bar 1300 features a very easy-to-read LED display on its front edge to help you track such key information as selected input, volume levels, and source formats.

Features

• 11.1.4 channel count
• Dolby Atmos and DTS:X playback
• Detachable and fully wireless rear speakers
• Included subwoofer with 10-inch driver
• 1170W of quoted output power

If you’re thinking $1,300/£1,300 sounds like a lot to pay for a soundbar, you’re about to learn that the JBL Bar 1300 is no ordinary soundbar.

For starters it comprises four components: the main soundbar, a subwoofer, and two wireless rear speakers. So it’a one of a still relatively rare breed of soundbar that delivers full surround sound and a dedicated bass component right out of the box. In fact, in this case it delivers a full Dolby Atmos and DTS:X experience, complete with up-firing speakers to cater to those premium audio formats’ overhead effects.

The Bar 1300 is the first non-Samsung soundbar I’ve tested, too, that delivers its surround sound thrills using a whopping 16 channels of sound, in an 11.1.4 set up. Multibeam technology is used to rebound the sound for some channels off side walls and ceilings to make them appear like they’re coming from the correct place in a surround mix.

These channels are backed by some serious power, too – namely 650W for the main bar, 2 x 110W to the rears, and 300W to the subwoofer.

The 300W going to the subwoofer is fed, too, let’s not forget, into a down-firing 10-inch driver – the biggest I’ve seen in any soundbar package to date.

The totally wireless rear speakers are rated as capable of running for up to 12 hours on a full charge (though their exact battery life will depend, of course, on how loudly you run them), and impressively you can actually use one or both of them independently of the main soundbar as separate or stereo portable Bluetooth speakers. They also carry USB charge points if you don’t want to bother attaching them to the main bar to recharge, but no USB charge plugs are included.

While the Bar 1300’s remote control helpfully offers direct volume control buttons for each of its main bar, subwoofer and rear speaker components, the soundbar also, as you would expect of such a premium model, provides an auto-calibration system that takes about a minute to run and works so well – even in quite awkward room configurations – that I’d recommend you run it each time you put the rear speakers back in place after they’ve been re-attached to the main soundbar.

The Bar 1300’s source compatibility is pretty comprehensive. As well as the physical connections mentioned earlier, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options are also in play, complete with Chromecast and AirPlay 2 support (as well as support for the Alexa Multi-Room speaker system). The Chromecast and AirPlay 2 support essentially delivers wireless access to more than 300 online music services, so you won’t go wanting.

Performance

It only takes a few moments of having your hair blown back, your floor violently wobbled and your spine thoroughly tingled by just how much you feel embroiled in the heart of whatever movie world you’re watching to realise that the JBL Bar 1300 is a seriously great soundbar. Uniquely so, in some ways.

Its single greatest talent is it ability to steer and place effects in even the most complicated, dense and large-scale Dolby Atmos or DTS:X mixes with uncanny precision. Not even the subtlest effect a sound mixer has taken the trouble to include passes the Bar 1300’s ultra-sensitive drivers by; so much so that with almost every 4K Blu-ray I played through it, I genuinely noticed some ambient effects and specific background or object placement details that I’d never heard before. And that’s having heard these discs hundreds of times before on some very impressive soundbars.

The accuracy of the effects placement extends, brilliantly, to overhead sounds, which appear with as much presence, definition and sheer verticality as I’ve heard from any soundbar. When a film rains on the Bar 1300, for instance, you’ll be absolutely convinced that it’s also raining in your living room.

Maybe even better than the startling accuracy of the Bar 1300’s effect placement, is the integrity of the three-dimensional soundstage it creates for those effects to ‘live in’. Provided you’ve run the full two-step auto calibration routine, you’ll find yourself sat within a seemingly perfect bubble of sound that extends all around and above you with seemingly no gaps or holes through which its immersive qualities might escape.

Samsung’s Q990C is the only other soundbar I’ve heard that’s capable of delivering such a perfectly realised hemisphere of sound for the object-based Dolby Atmos and DTS:X formats to strut their stuff in. And while there are a couple of areas where the Q990C outguns the Bar 1300 slightly, JBL’s bar actually manages to achieve more effect clarity in that sound hemisphere than even Samsung does.

Some of this clarity and sound stage building prowess is down, I suspect, to the excellent steering capabilities of the multibeam sound design. Some of it is down to the remarkable balance in power and dynamic range the system achieves between the drivers in its wireless rears and those in the main soundbar, and some of it is down – I think – to the huge amount of power the Bar 1300 has at its disposal. Without this, it’s hard to imagine so many details and effects being carried so precisely, cohesively and convincingly to all four corners of your room.

The mountain of power is also put to great use in a more standard way by enabling the Bar 1300 to hit massive volume levels without – for the most part – succumbing to distortion, muddiness or brittleness. It’s remarkably agile with its volume too, managing to escalate from murmurs to explosive, bass-laden impact sounds and score ‘outbursts’ in an instant. You’ve not experienced one of It (Chapter One’s) jump scares until you’ve had it hit you like a truck from the JBL 1300.

In fact, the soundbar manages to push big-sound escalations out with so much aggression that you don’t just hear but also feel the soundwave drive across your room.

The subwoofer, as you might hope given how massive it and its driver are, underpins the already massive sound from the main bar and rears with huge amounts of bass. The dynamic range achieved by the main bar and wireless rears is itself remarkable, but the subwoofer adds a whole extra dimension of heft and scale to proceedings. In fact, it appears to hit frequency depths without sounding compressed or boxed in that extend beyond those of any other soundbar I’ve heard.

From time to time the subwoofer’s monster depths can actually start to sound a little heavy and ‘flappy’. That’s not to say the sub lacks nimbleness; in fact it typically adapts well, especially when it comes to the volume of its interjections, to the shifting demands of a movie soundtrack. But at its very deepest, its output can become just slightly distracting.

Now I’ve hit on a minor negative about the Bar 1300, I’ll add a few more. Starting with a slightly harsh presentation of very shrill and aggressive sound effects. There are rare moments, too, where male dialogue can sound a touch ‘electronic’ and muffled, while shrill child or female voices can sound a touch too bright.

Finally, the soundbar needs to be run at quite high volumes; it loses a lot of projection, heft and detail at anything less than ‘loud’. But I’d much rather a serious soundbar like this was unapologetic about loving loudness than the other way round.

Let none of these niggles leave you in any doubt, in any case, that while a little different in its strengths and weakness to its main rival, Samsung’s Q990C, the JBL Bar 1300 remains a truly stellar movie performer.

Aside from occasionally letting a vocal blend a little too much into the mix, it’s also a fantastic performer with Dolby Atmos music mixes. The same colossal dynamic range, attention to detail and precise effect placement delivers just the sort of epic and immersive or, depending on the track, intimate and spartan atmosphere only a good Atmos music track can provide.

The Bar 1300 is, though, less confident with stereo music. With the rears muted and the Atmos effect set to Low to get close to a native stereo experience, there’s a slight tendency for the sound – especially particularly bold lead vocals – to feel as if it’s ebbing in and out, rather than presenting totally consistent staging. The scale of the left and right separation is predictably spectacular, though, and detailing is still impressive without becoming clinical. The subwoofer also contributes remarkably subtly to proceedings considering how huge it is, and the sheer volumes the system can hit without breaking into a sweat remain prodigious. The option for remixing stereo into all the available channels works reasonably well too – albeit no rival for a true Dolby Atmos mix.

Verdict

JBL’s return to the soundbar fray sounds incredible on paper – and actually sounds pretty incredible in action, too.

Its colossal power is used to deliver colossal dynamics and a large and exceptionally precise, detailed soundstage, rather than just being used to deliver massive volumes (though it does that too).

Its eye-catchingly chunky subwoofer proves surprisingly nimble for something capable of hitting the deepest low frequency depths in the soundbar world. And those potentially gimmicky, totally wireless rears actually do as good a job as we’ve ever heard of both blending in tonally with the main bar and completing a flawless hemisphere of sound – especially during Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks.

In fact, I’d go as far to say that the Bar 1300 delivers one of the most immersive Dolby Atmos and DTS:X performances the soundbar world has ever seen.