The Boston Acoustics TVee Model 30 is a soundbar and subwoofer combo with a very clear purpose made apparent by its name: ‘TVee’.

In short, you mount it on a table or wall above or below your TV, plug the TV’s optical digital output into this unit’s input, and suddenly the sound quality of your TV makes a huge leap for the better.

It is a two box system. That is, there is the soundbar and the subwoofer, and that’s it. You don’t even get a remote control … not that you need it.

Control

One clever aspect of this unit is the remote control, or the lack of one. The normal process with such devices is to have their own compact remote, often just credit card sized. Bigger systems have bigger remotes, and many home theatre receivers have remotes capable of being set to control your other pieces of equipment.

But instead of including a universal remote control, this unit is itself universally controllable by whatever remote you have to hand. You simply have the unit itself memorise the commands emitted by a remote for each of its five controls (volume up, volume down, mute, input and sound mode). You could have it memorise commands from your TV’s remote (and the manual seems to envision this in part, although it recognises the problems that can result, such as the TV’s own volume increasing along with the sound system’s). I chose a remote control that happened to be laying around. Within two minutes I had a working remote for the system without adding yet another piece of hardware to my room.

Then things went wrong. It took a while to work out why the remote, which had been working so smoothly, suddenly became clunky and short in range. It was the grille, which I put on after setting up the system. This interfered badly with the remote. Boston Acoustics should consider putting another cutout over the remote receiver.

Setting up

As you may have gathered, setting up is incredibly easy. I put the soundbar on the bench in front of the TV, flicking its DSP switch to ‘Table Top’, and plugged an optical digital audio cable into it and the TV (a cable is supplied). I put the subwoofer in my room’s subwoofer corner. I had both units set to the same channel and powered both up. Instantly the sound was coming from both units. I started with the subwoofer level at 12 o’clock but after listening for a minute, backed it off to 10 o’clock for much better balance.

The sound seemed good but it’s hard to tell with TV content, so I plugged in a DVD player.

The unit can decode PCM and Dolby Digital delivered via the optical connection, but not DTS. I also checked it for 640kbps Dolby Digital (on some Blu-ray discs) and it worked well with that as well.

If you’re going to use a disc player – as surely you will – then plan out which way around you are going to connect things. You will want to have the TV plugged into the TVee, but also have the disc player plugged in. So one will have to be digital, and one analogue. Ideally the TV would use analogue since there is relatively little 5.1 channel material on TV, but your TV may not have analogue stereo outputs. If not, then you’ll have to use optical for the TV and analogue stereo for the player.

Note that the input key cycles through three settings: Bluetooth, optical and analogue. If you plug something into the side analogue input, it will override the RCA inputs.

Listening

The unit – aside from that remote control problem – was a pleasure to use. As soon as the TV switched on, sound came from the unit. There’s a reason for that: the unit apparently never switches off. There is no standby mode with the unit. Indeed, the main soundbar itself consumed 6W of power all the time it was sitting idle (I didn’t check the subwoofer). If you want to save power, you will have to reach behind the unit for the hard wired power control.

But most impressive was the sound. Boston Acoustics has in recent years been pretty good at getting a lot of sound – including fine bass – out of small units, and this one is no exception.

It went quite loud, very cleanly. My office is the size of a large lounge room, and it filled this effortlessly with sound, both with movies and with music. The tonal character of the sound was like that of a pair of decent quality high fidelity loudspeakers, precise and dynamic. Particularly impressive were drums, which punched through the mix considerably. More than they had any right to in such a small system.

The subwoofer was also strong, especially in the room corner. It more than kept up with the soundbar in level, and was a smooth performer. It sounded as though it rolled off below around 40Hz, smoothly. There was no lumpiness at the higher end of its range, and the integration was such (thanks, I suspect, to the bandpass design) that all directional information was delivered by the soundbar alone. The subwoofer just did not draw attention to itself.

You can switch between stereo and surround. The former largely switches out the centre speaker.

In general it’s best to leave the unit in surround mode because this makes use of all the speakers available. Having said that, the virtual surround sound the system produced wasn’t particularly impressive, although such systems rarely are. It did produce a wider sound stage than implied by the speakers dimensions, and a diffuse around-the-head sense to sound supposed to come from left or right surround. When the sound came from both equally, though, it collapsed back to the front.

You can’t really get surround sound without physical surround speakers, and the Boston Acoustics TVee Model 30 was no exception.

The Bluetooth connection worked nicely with my iPhone, once I’d set up the pairing (which wasn’t in itself hard). Once done, it was just a matter of switching the unit to the Bluetooth input, and selecting ‘TVeeM30’ from the list of speakers available on the phone’s iPod screen popup.

The quality from this was decent enough, although accompanied by a little white noise when played at high levels. I’d be inclined to pop a disc in a player for very close listening, but the rest of the time Bluetooth sounded fine.

Conclusion

The Boston Acoustics TVee Model 30 is a very well thought out system that is ideal for someone with a fine TV who wants sound to match the picture. It’s easy to install, easy to use, and sounds remarkably good.