What Brand Is Best Buy's Most Affordable Surround Sound System & What Does It Cost?

There was a time when surround sound was well out of the reach of most consumers' wallets. This changed during the DVD boom of the aughts: Very inexpensive systems, usually referred to as "home theaters in a box" (HTIB for short) made their way to retail, and for most people, they were good enough. Suddenly, you didn't need to spend several hundred dollars on a receiver and speakers; you could spend $100 to $300 and get a self-contained system that would perform perfectly fine when it came to giving you an immersive experience watching movies or even music mixed for surround, even if they wouldn't necessarily qualify as hi-fi.

In recent years, though, soundbars with "virtual surround" modes have largely pushed out HTIBs. For a true surround experience, you generally need to spend at least $600 to bundle a speaker set and a receiver, but there are exceptions. And at electronics superstore chain Best Buy, there's one particularly big exception: Vizio's V51-H6, a soundbar with semi-wireless surround speakers that enable full surround sound in a package that retails for just $249.99, or under $200.00 for My Best Buy Plus members or Amazon customers.

Finding a genuine surround system for $200 to $250 is incredibly rare these days, so you might be skeptical of what Vizio's selling here. But with a 4.5-star average out of five from customers on both Best Buy and Amazon's websites amidst thousands of user reviews, plus positive professional reviews, it's worth taking a deeper look at.

By "semi-wireless" surround sound, we mean that the V51-H6 has some wires, but they won't run across your living room floor. The soundbar connects wirelessly to the subwoofer, and that subwoofer is designed to be stationed next to your couch. The satellite surround speakers are then wired — with very long included speaker wires — to the subwoofer, so the cables can run neatly behind your couch.

Numerous professional reviewers have weighed in on the V51-H6, and they've been very positive. Most notably, both Digital Trends and USA Today's Reviewed gave the budget system their "Editors' Choice" recommendations. In listing the pros of the Vizio package, Digital Trends praised its ease of setup, "[i]mmersive surround sound," and the pleasant surprise that was its music reproduction abilities,  as that can be a weak spot in this kind of budget surround sound system. "For a couple hundred dollars, this 5.1-channel surround system really has no business being so robust and flexible," concluded that review.

CNN Underscored, Consumer Reports, Soundbars.com, and RTINGS all delivered praise across the board for the V51-H6, as well. Taken together, it's pretty clear: If you're looking to upgrade your living room's sonic experience but don't have much to spend, it seems like it's pretty hard to beat the Vizio V51-H6 at a retail price of $249.99 and going as low as roughly $200.00.