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Greg asked: “I recently purchased the LG UF7700 4K Smart TV. I love the TV, but the volume just doesn’t get loud enough for me. I’d like your recommendation of a good soundbar that would be compatible with that TV. Something in the range of $50 – $300, if possible.
I’d also like to upgrade my router. I currently have the WNR2000 router from Netgear. With the tech advances over the years, I’m sure I’m not getting the full use of my smart TV with my current router. Price is not as much a concern for me, as making sure my next router will, so to speak, get me further into tomorrow and not be outdated in six months.”
If all you want is louder sound you can spend as little as $80 and get yourself something like a Vizio SB2920 Soundbar. If you’re looking for better sound, not just louder sound and you don’t mind going a little higher in the price range you gave us, for about $250 you can buy a 300W Samsung HW-J450 soundbar with a subwoofer. That should give you plenty of power to fill a room and give you deeper bass as well.
Since we’re getting close to your $300 limit already, we might as well suggest a VIZIO SB3851-C0, this one is a little more involved than you might prefer, but it is a soundbar, with a subwoofer, and 2 rear speakers, so you would get real 5.1 sound out of it and it would cost you about the same as the Samsung option we gave you.
Over here we have tested Yamaha soundbars that do sound good, but they’re probably a good $100 over your price limit. If you think you want to go a little higher, you can give them a try too.
Unless you have a gigabit connection or you stream content from your local network to your smart TV you probably wouldn’t see much of a benefit from upgrading your router right now.
As for replacing your router, if you don’t need any specific features such as built in VPN support, or OpenWRT support really the main thing you’d get from an upgrade is improved speed. However, your current router supports 802.11N so the upgrade from that would be an 802.11AC router. Unless you have a gigabit connection or you stream content from your local network to your smart TV you probably wouldn’t see much of a benefit from upgrading your router right now.
You may be better off waiting until your connection speed starts to approach the limits of your current WNR2000, and then spend the money for something newer around that time, by then 802.11AX (a 10 gbps standard, that’s currently being worked on) might actually be a reality and it may be a better upgrade than 802.11AC. If you replace it right now, you probably won’t notice a change in performance, at least not on videos you get from sources like Netflix unless your connection is close to the gigabit range.