Maxell Digital Bluetooth Sound Deck (Refurbished)

  • 70 watts of RMS power, including a built-in 30-watt subwoofer: makes other under-$70 soundbars sound like airline earbuds
  • Can sit under any TV that weighs 110 lbs. or less, which these days is pretty much every TV
  • But why limit it to TV? With Bluetooth, 3.5mm, optical, and RCA inputs, it can do any job any other non-portable speaker can do
  • Model: SSB-3WB (there’s something aesthetically pleasing about all those big, curvy lines, artfully broken by the jagged W, and the hyphen even kinda works)
see more product specs

Get your TV off its back.

It must have seemed like a good idea at the time, the soundbar. Back in the heady days of the mid-'00s, with the rise of flat-panel TVs too flat to pack much of a speaker, it must have seemd like the perfect solution for those people who want better sound than those flat-panel TV speakers can provide, but don’t want the expense and hassle of a whatever-point-one surround system. So the captains of the audio industry threw their shoulders into the task. They spent fortunes designing and building and promoting soundbars. And lo, they did discover…

…that everybody who didn’t want a surround system was fine with their TV speakers.

OK, not everybody. But they weren’t fancy enough to satisfy the home theater aficionado. They were priced too high for people who were suspicious spending one penny to improve their TV sound. And there just weren’t enough customers left over to sustain it as a large-scale consumer endeavor.

Which is bad news for those companies. But great news for us. Because it doesn’t take a nation of millions to pay our bills. We don’t have to charge full price. And we don’t have some vice-president telling us we have to promote it as a home theater accessory to stake our claim in that “space.”

For what it’s designed to do - sit under a TV and sound much, much better than your TV speakers - the Maxell Digital Bluetooth Sound Deck is great, especially at this price. The flat “deck” design let them build in an actual down-firing subwoofer, with your TV sitting on top to ingeniously back it up. Its 70W RMS power, including that 30W subwoofer, are unheard of (LOL) in soundbars at twice this price.

But what about what else it can do? There’s no reason you have to use it with a TV. With Bluetooth, 3.5mm, optical, and RCA inputs, this soundbar can be your PC speaker, your phone speaker, your dorm room speaker, your speaker that makes your hair fly back and your drink slowly slide to the edge of the end table, Maxell-commercial style. It can be your bookshelf speaker - or what the hell, your bookshelf itself. Possibilities, man, possibilities.

Judging by their precipitous decline in prominence from their ballyhooed beginnings, who knows how much longer soundbars will even be a thing? If you’ve got a low, flat space where you could use a nice, loud speaker, your dollars-to-loudness ratio won’t get much better than right now. The marketplace may have rejected the soundbar as neither fish nor fowl. But that’s exactly what we feast on.

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