If you’re looking to improve your home theater set-up with a nice booming soundbar, you might be checking out Amazon’s options, because the online giant is a reliable name in affordable gadgetry. However it has two different devices: the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar and a new Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus.
The first of those, the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar, was the brand’s first foray into movie and TV show-enhancing speaker systems, back in 2023.
But more recently, in November 2024, the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus was announced with some upgrades, a design change and a higher price. So which should you opt for?
Having tested both the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar and Fire TV Soundbar Plus, I’m in a good position to help you decide which of them is best for you to buy.
That’s what I’ll do in this article, so let’s compare the Soundbar and Soundbar Plus now. And if you’re on the market for other Amazon streaming devices, I’ve also compared all of the Fire TV streaming sticks here.
Amazon Fire TV Soundbar vs Soundbar Plus: price information
One of the most pronounced differences between the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar and Soundbar Plus is in the pricing department — one of these gadgets costs twice the price of the other and you’ll get no points for guessing which.
Let’s start with the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar: it will set you back $119.99 / £119.99, so it’s pretty cheap compared to loads of other soundbars on the market.
Then the Fire TV Soundbar Plus will set you back a full $249.99 / £249.99, so there’s a fair price hike involved. If you’re on a budget, you probably shouldn’t be considering this model, unless the features and audio appeal to you.
Bear in mind that both options see frequent deals, so you could well find either will set you back a bit less than you were expecting.
Then cost for either speaker can increase, if you opt to pay more to get it installed for you, of if you buy it alongside secondary speakers to improve the audio even further.
Amazon Fire TV Soundbar vs Soundbar Plus: design
The design of a soundbar is important, so you know whether you can place it in your home and connect it to your TV with the right ports.
The Fire TV Soundbar is the smaller of the two options. It’s 61cm long, 9cm tall and 6.5cm deep, so it’s pretty easy to position on shelves. The Fire TV Soundbar Plus, for comparison, is 94cm long, 6.4cm tall and 13.2cm deep, and it barely fit on my shelf.
Ports-wise, both offer you ways to connect via HDMI-arc, HDMI or optical. They also both have the same number of buttons on top: power, input, Bluetooth, volume up and volume down.
The remotes look pretty similar too but the Fire TV Soundbar Plus’ one has a few extra buttons for some of the new features it introduces. Beyond that, you could easily confuse the two.
Amazon Fire TV Soundbar vs Soundbar Plus: audio
This section will look at the pure audio offerings of the two Fire TV Soundbars, not including any features as they’ll be detailed in the next section.
The Amazon Fire TV Soundbar offers 2.0 channel sound, which means it has 2 speakers and no bass-oriented subwoofers. These two speakers are 20W blasters on either side of the bar.
On the Fire TV Soundbar Plus you’ll get 3.1 channel sound, which again refers to the ratio of speakers to woofers. Here there are three full-range speakers, three tweeters and two woofers, dispersed across the length of the soundbar.
So for more powerful bass, and sharper audio across the spectrum, the Plus is the way to go.
Amazon Fire TV Soundbar vs Soundbar Plus: features
There’s a decent feature set on the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar, but the Soundbar Plus offers improved versions of most of them.
The former has surround-sound from Dolby Digital and DTS Virtual:X, but thanks to its improved set-up of speakers, the Plus can upgrade them to fully-fleshed out Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, which will make the surround-sound more realistic and believable.
The Soundbar Plus also offers DTS TruVolume, which balances out the volume level of different videos so that there isn’t a weird discrepancy in the sound. In effect that means it can boost the sound of quiet talking scenes, and dampen loud commercials.
Both soundbars offer the ability to boost the bass with the remote, but the Plus also lets you do so with treble, and while both have a range of equalization presets including movie, dialogue and music, the Plus has two more which are night and sports.
Talking of dialogue, the Fire TV Soundbar Plus has a handy feature which lets you boost the volume of spoken word in relation to everything else, making mumbly lines a lot easier to hear. The closest you’ll get on the standard Fire TV Soundbar is the dialogue preset.
Amazon Fire TV Soundbar vs Soundbar Plus: which should you buy?
Because of its improved range of speakers, new features and better sound, the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus is obviously the better soundbar. However that doesn’t mean you should buy it.
The Fire TV Soundbar is the better choice for people who don’t have the budget or shelf space for the Plus, but I’d also say it’s better for people who aren’t too picky about their audio. You’re paying for extra features you may not really notice.
No-one should buy this device, though, if they don’t already have a Fire TV streaming stick or telly, because