Goodmans 20W Soundbar B&M Model 330368 Review

Having used this soundbar to upgrade the sound quality from my TV I thought it was worthy of a review to check out whether it was worth the money. The Soundbar is available from B&M in the UK and probably other places too.

I come from an era when Goodmans made fantastic speakers, so I was excited to find this in store. It looked a little bit small to be able to produce anything decent soundwise (my original Goodmans speakers from years ago were massive beasts) but I figured that technology had moved on and I’ve heard some great sound quality from small packages lately so I expected this would be a reasonable bet.

I was wrong.

The sound is all mid-range. There’s no bass at all, and not a lot of treble either. The sound is barely better than my TV produces, though to be fair it is a little better.

The Bluetooth range is not great either. Pairing is easy, and you get the little voice stating that it’s connected when your Bluetooth device connects. I’ve never had a problem with it reconnecting so that’s a plus. And it has RCA inputs or a 3.5mm auxilliary input which are switched using either a button on the side or the supplied mini-remote control.

Annoyingly if the device loses power (for example if you like to switch everything off at the wall) it forgets which input was last used, and defaults to the normal sound profile. Not that switching sound profiles makes all that much of a difference to be fair.

It is put together in a fairly nice looking package and has attachments at the rear to hang it on the wall if you should desire. It’s also on rubberised feet so it won’t scratch the surface of your TV cabinet if you decide just to stand it in front of the TV. Being compact it does sit nicely under the bezel of most TVs and shouldn’t interfere with the remote control sensor.

To be honest though, I should’ve put the 30 quid toward something a bit more expensive. The old adage of ‘You get what you pay for’ might apply here as 30 quid for a Bluetooth soundbar isn’t too bad I suppose (when you consider the Bose’s and Samsung’s are going for well over 10 times that) – however, I’d not buy this again but would rather spend a few quid extra and get something with significantly better sound quality ( such as the Logitech Z533 – although that doesn’t have Bluetooth ).