When What Hi-Fi? announced its 2026 Award winners on 13 October, I wrote up the 25 speakers and amplifiers and left the soundbars for another day. This is that day. There are seven soundbar awards: three for a bar on its own and four for a soundbar system, which means a bar that ships with a subwoofer, or with a subwoofer and rear speakers.
Five of the seven winners are in our database. We hold 61 soundbars, each with its width, height and depth, so every winner below can be drawn to scale under the TV size you actually own. The two we do not hold are listed at the end, with the reason.
Sonos Beam (Gen 2) and KEF XIO, the cheapest and the dearest What Hi-Fi Awards 2026 soundbar winners, drawn to the same scale
Quick facts
- Seven awards: three solo bars and four systems, split by UK price band.
- Five winners are on Speaker Decision: the $499 Sonos Beam (Gen 2), the $1,099 Sonos Arc Ultra, the $2,500 KEF XIO, the $798 Sony Bravia Theatre System 6 and the $1,998 Samsung HW-Q990H.
- Sonos took two of the three solo-bar classes, and the winning Arc Ultra is also the soundbar readers compare most on this site.
- The dearest winner is the least looked at. The KEF XIO sits 58th of 61 soundbars by comparisons opened since August. Readers are comparing the Sonos and Samsung winners, not the KEF.
- Two winners are missing: the Hisense AX5125H and the Sony Bravia Theatre Trio system. Neither has a row yet.
The classes are pound bands, so take the dollars from our pages
What Hi-Fi? tests in Britain and splits each category by UK price: solo bars under GBP 500, GBP 500 to 1,000 and over GBP 1,000; systems under GBP 250, GBP 250 to 500, GBP 500 to 2,000 and over GBP 2,000. The bands are sensible, because they keep a GBP 2,000 bar from being judged against a GBP 300 one. They are also useless to a US buyer on their own, because the pound band says nothing about the US price. The Arc Ultra won the GBP 500 to 1,000 class and costs $1,099 here. Every price in this post is the US list price from our own database, not a conversion.
Sonos Arc Ultra, 1180 mm wide, winner of the 500 to 1000 pound soundbar class and the soundbar readers compare most on this site
Solo soundbars: three awards, all three ours
The under GBP 500 trophy went to the Sonos Beam (Gen 2), at $499. It is the smallest winner on the list by a long way: 651 mm wide, 70 mm tall, 2.8 kg, five drivers. It is also the only winner with no up-firing drivers. Sonos gets Dolby Atmos out of it by processing, which What Hi-Fi? calls virtual Atmos. Of the 61 soundbars we hold, 35 have real up-firing drivers. The Beam is one of the 26 that do not.
The GBP 500 to 1,000 class went to the Sonos Arc Ultra at $1,099: 1,180 mm wide, 80 mm tall, 5.9 kg, 14 drivers, two of them firing up. Sonos calls the result a 9.1.4 Dolby Atmos signal; we list it as 9.1.2, counting the physical height drivers rather than the processed channels. Either way it is the most ambitious channel count of the three solo winners, and it is the one bar on this list that readers of this site were already comparing more than any other soundbar we hold.
The over GBP 1,000 class went to the KEF XIO at $2,500, its second award in a row. It is 1,210 mm wide and 73 mm tall, so almost as wide as the Arc Ultra and a little lower, but at 10.5 kg it weighs nearly twice as much. Twelve drivers, two up-firing, 5.1.2, and unlike both Sonos bars it decodes DTS:X. It is the third-dearest soundbar in our database, behind only the $3,199 Devialet Dione Opera and the $2,800 Yamaha True X Bar 90A.
Here are the Arc Ultra and the XIO drawn to scale under a TV. Pick your own screen size in the box: the XIO is wider than a 50-inch picture and almost exactly as wide as a 55-inch one.
The Sonos Arc Ultra (solid) and KEF XIO (dashed outline), drawn to scale in front of a TV. Change the TV size and stand to see how it fits yours.
Open in the soundbar size simulator
The full Arc Ultra vs XIO comparison has every spec side by side. The short version: the Sonos has more channels and costs $1,400 less, the KEF has DTS:X, a lot more cabinet, and the KEF name.
Soundbar systems: four awards, two of them ours
A system in What Hi-Fi? terms is a bar that comes with a subwoofer, or with a subwoofer and rear speakers, in one box. We tag both on every row, so I can say this: of the 61 soundbars we hold, 33 ship with a subwoofer or have one built in, and only 6 ship with rear speakers as well. Two of those six won here.
The GBP 250 to 500 class went to the Sony Bravia Theatre System 6 at $798. It is a 5.1 system: a 908 mm bar with four drivers, a subwoofer and two rear speakers, all in the box. It is the cheapest soundbar in our database that ships with its rears, by $100 over the next one. There are no up-firing drivers, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X are decoded and processed rather than played from height channels, and the bar is only 65 mm tall, the lowest of the five winners.
Sony Bravia Theatre System 6, the cheapest soundbar we hold that ships with its rear speakers in the box
The GBP 500 to 2,000 class went to the Samsung HW-Q990H at $1,998. This is the other end of the systems idea: 11.1.4 channels across four boxes, 15 drivers in the bar alone, four of them firing up, two HDMI inputs, DTS:X, and a 1,232 mm bar that is the widest winner on the list, a little wider than a 55-inch picture. It needs a big TV to look proportionate and a room that can take a subwoofer and two rear speakers on stands or shelves.
Drawn together, the two system winners show what $1,200 buys in size alone:
The Sony BRAVIA Theater System 6 (solid) and Samsung HW-Q990H (dashed outline), drawn to scale in front of a TV. Change the TV size and stand to see how it fits yours.
Open in the soundbar size simulator
The other two system classes went to products we do not hold yet. Under GBP 250 went to the Hisense AX5125H, and over GBP 2,000 went to the Sony Bravia Theatre Trio with the Rear 9 and Sub 9. More on both at the end.
Which winners readers were already comparing
Since August this site has counted which soundbar comparisons readers open, and the award list lines up with that in an interesting way. One in four of all soundbar comparisons opened since then involved at least one of the five winners. The ranking inside the five is the useful part.
The Sonos Arc Ultra is first of all 61 soundbars by comparisons opened. Its most-opened rival is not a Sonos at all but the Samsung HW-QS90H, a $998 7.1.2 bar with its subwoofer built in. Arc Ultra vs HW-QS90H is the second most-opened soundbar pair on the site.
Samsung HW-QS90H, the 998 dollar bar with a built-in subwoofer that readers open against the Arc Ultra more than any other
The Sonos Beam (Gen 2) is third of 61, and here the story is a family one. The single most-opened soundbar pair on the whole site is Beam (Gen 2) vs Beam Ultra: the winner against the Beam Ultra that Sonos put above it in September at $699, with real up-firing drivers and 7.1.2. The award went to the older, cheaper bar. Readers are asking whether $200 more for height drivers is worth it, and I wrote about exactly that when the Beam Ultra arrived.
The Sonos Beam (Gen 2) (solid) and Sonos Beam Ultra (dashed outline), drawn to scale in front of a TV. Change the TV size and stand to see how it fits yours.
Open in the soundbar size simulator
The Samsung HW-Q990H is seventh of 61. Its most-opened rival is the JBL Bar 1300XMK2, the other 11.1.4 four-box system we hold, at $1,700. That pair is the third most-opened on the site. The Sony System 6 is 13th, and readers mostly put it against the Beam Ultra, which costs $100 less and has no subwoofer or rears at all.
Samsung HW-Q990H, 11.1.4 channels in four boxes, winner of the 500 to 2000 pound soundbar system class
And the KEF XIO is 58th of 61. Its most-opened rival is the Devialet Dione, the $2,399 bar that is its nearest neighbour in price. The three soundbars that get compared even less than the XIO are the Devialet Dione Opera, the Yamaha True X Bar 90A and the Sony Bravia Theatre Bar 9, all of them $1,498 or more. Expensive solo bars are a small market on this site, trophy or not.
Devialet Dione, 2399 dollars, the bar readers open against the KEF XIO most often
What the trophies do not say
Every one of the five has a weak point that a reader should know before the price. None of them is hidden in the specs, and all of them are on our pages.
Sonos Beam (Gen 2): no up-firing drivers, no HDMI input, no DTS:X, no Bluetooth. If you want height from height drivers, the Beam Ultra above it is the one to compare, and that is exactly what readers are doing.
Sonos Arc Ultra: one HDMI port, the eARC one, so nothing plugs into the bar but the TV. No DTS:X. The subwoofer and rears are optional extras at Sonos prices, so the channel count on the box is a starting point rather than what is in the carton.
KEF XIO: $2,500 and the subwoofer is still optional. There is no rear speaker option at all, so this is a solo bar for life. At 10.5 kg it is a heavy thing to wall-mount. And on this site almost nobody is comparing it, which tells you something about who it is for.
Sony Bravia Theatre System 6: no Wi-Fi, so no streaming from the bar and no AirPlay; Bluetooth only. No room correction. The bar carries four drivers, and 5.1 means no height channels at all. It is a TV-sound package, not a music system.
Samsung HW-Q990H: 1,232 mm wide, four boxes, 7.3 kg for the bar alone, and $1,998. Readers who open it against the JBL Bar 1300XMK2 are looking at $300 less for a 200 mm narrower bar with the same 11.1.4 count, and that comparison is worth a few minutes.
JBL Bar 1300XMK2, the other 11.1.4 four-box system we hold, 300 dollars less and 200 mm narrower than the Samsung
The two winners we do not hold
The Hisense AX5125H took the under GBP 250 system class. We hold no Hisense soundbars at all, so there is nothing to compare it against yet. It is on the list to add.
The Sony Bravia Theatre Trio with the Rear 9 and Sub 9 took the over GBP 2,000 class. The Trio is Sony’s split soundbar: three separate front pieces instead of one bar, which is why What Hi-Fi? calls it dissected. We hold its single-bar cousin, the Bravia Theatre Bar 9, at $1,498, but not the Trio, because three pieces do not fit a database built around one bar’s width. I will add it once I have decided how to store it honestly.
Where to start
If you own a TV and want to know which of these five will sit under it without hiding the picture, start with the soundbar size simulator. Pick the bar, pick your screen size, type in the gap between your TV stand and the bottom of the screen. If you want the whole list filtered by features, the soundbar page has the filters for up-firing drivers, included subwoofers and HDMI inputs. And the soundbar home page groups all 61 by TV size.
Which of the seven classes matters to you, and does the winner there line up with what you were already looking at?