Harman Kardon's SB 16 Soundbar Emerges

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We don’t hear a lot out of Harman Kardon these days, and that’s a shame, because what they do with AV receivers is downright impressive, no two ways about it. But what they’re showing off now is a bit of a departure for them, and also a substantial bonus for the home theater buff out there. We’re talking about the SB 16 soundbar system, and though it doesn’t look really impressive on the outside, Harman Kardon’s got a reputation to uphold, so I hope for the sake of that reputation that this at least sounds pretty good in the end.

The Harman Kardon SB 16 is a 2.1 channel soundbar system, and it also comes with a wireless subwoofer to enhance the bass effects, as well as 3D virtual surround processing, making it sound like a surround sound system despite the fact that there’s only one big speaker in front of you.

It’s got three different kinds of connection–coaxial, optical and analog–which are pretty much tailor made for folks with older hardware, but if you’ve got newer stuff and you want to take advantage of HDMI capability, you won’t be able to actually use that here, since the SB 16 doesn’t actually have an HDMI output port. A further double-edged sword is that the Harman Kardon SB 16 can use your television remote to control it, but that means that it doesn’t actually come with a remote of its own.

Perhaps strangest of all is the cost on this one; it’s set to sell for $600, and that is a whole lot more than you’d expect to pay on a setup like this. There are entire home theater in a box setups (the common name for a system that includes speakers, subwoofer and often a disc player of some type) that even offer Blu-ray that sell for less than that, and this is just a two channel soundbar.

It’ll be interesting to see how this one actually fares when people get to hear it–it’s actually available right now–but I can’t imagine how this one will beat out what’s already available.,