Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

My wife and I bought this to replace our cheapo Vizio soundbar that has been dying. This Polk bar offered similar features to the Vizio one we bought, but also includes a built-in Alexa. 300$ was a bit much for a soundbar but the Alexa made us think it would be worth the price. We were wrong. The first thing we noticed was the bar was noticeably thicker and longer than our Vizio, and we had to move our TV around to fit it on the stand. Also the subwoofer was awkwardly cone-shaped and felt like cheap plastic. The box contains generously both an HDMI cord and an optical audio cord, which is nice. We connected the bar and followed the instructions for the initial setup. Turns out you need to download a mobile app to setup the Polk, separate to the standard Alexa app we already used. After downloading the app, we of course now need to create a Polk account to sign in. I reluctantly performed all this hoping it was just for a first time setup, but unfortunately I could not find a way to use the Polk Alexa from the Alexa app. The Polk app itself is fairly barren compared to the Alexa app. We completed the setup, and the TV finds the soundbar pretty quickly through the CEC, which is great. But then we notice just how LOUD Alexa is, much louder than the show we were testing the volume with. The Alexa voice does NOT have a separate volume control anywhere, and will always be louder than the TV output. So if we are sitting at the ideal volume for our show, and then ask Alexa to turn off the lights, she will SHOUT back at us. This is a feature that the Polk app desperately needed. One of the features we tested with the Polk Alexa was to have it play Spotify, which it did like we wanted. But when we told it to stop, it would not automatically resume playing TV sound. After fumbling with voice commands for 5-10 minutes, we had to use the remote to force it back to TV HDMI input. We dug through the rather small manual trying to find the appropriate voice command, only to eventually find it on the Polk app of all places, hidden under some menus. The phrase was something like "Alexa, set input to TV" and if you said anything less than exactly that phrase, Alexa would refuse. Normally Alexa allows for some flexibility in the way you issue commands, so this was frustrating to remember exactly how to phrase it. Regarding the sound quality itself, we were extremely disappointed. So disappointed that we decided to stay with our dying Vizio for a while longer than suffer using the Polk. Our bedroom is probably considered medium-sized, comfortable but not huge. At first I said to my wife "The sound doesn't seem much different than the TV speakers", which I soon discovered was because the TV speakers were overpowering the sound bar. I turned off the TV speakers so I could judge the bar by itself, and was shocked at how poor the quality was. I could not clearly hear sound from the Polk soundbar from greater than 7 or 8 feet away, and increasing the volume certainly made it louder but not clearer. After spending the better half of my day trying to convince myself to accept the Polk, we decided to cut our losses and go back to the Vizio.