Hisense AX3120Q Review

Design

• Attractive, low-rise bar section
• Tapered cotton grille detail
• Slim easy-placement subwoofer

With such a commoditised segment as TV soundbars, it’s refreshing when manufacturers make bold design choices. Now, the Hisense hardly wins industry awards, but I like the way the soundbar’s deep charcoal grey front cotton grille tapers in at the left and right ends.

Those details complement the smart dot-matrix-grille plates that conceal the up-firing Atmos drivers and pseudo-brushed aluminium topside. As the bar is just over a metre long, and thankfully comparatively flat at 5.7cm, it’s a snug fit for most TV bottom bezels – and, importantly, doesn’t get in the way.

The main black plastic body is a single injection-moulded chunk. And the rearside connection recess leaves plenty of room for disobedient cable terminations. Even though the 2.7-kg weight doesn’t quite feel robust enough for the price, the devil will hopefully be in the listening details.

Workable power, input and volume buttons are shunted off the centre line towards the right, as is the perfectly legible LED display behind the grille just below. While the remote control is a standard Chinese-made plastic affair, it’s nothing to write home about. And there is just a nagging feeling that everything should be a bit more rugged and grown-up for £450.

But I do also like the handsome sub, for the most part. Again, it’s not museum-worthy, but rather functional. The 6.5-inch driver gets a dark grille to match the soundbar. And a passive reflex port gawps out to the rear, rather than to the front, as found on some of the cheaper soundbar specimens I’ve investigated on these pages.

Hisense has also gone for a slim width profile, in this case 16cm, making the AX3120Q a good candidate for sliding behind or to the side of a TV or AV console.

Features

• Bluetooth 5.3 streaming
• 440-watt power output
• HDMI pass-through

Hisense wisely includes an HDMI pass-through, as well as an HDMI eARC input. The former means you can connect a games deck or disc spinner without reducing input lag or risking a muddied-up video signal, among other advantages. The latter allows you to pull down immersive audio codecs from your display.

HDMI pass-through doesn’t always get a look-in on budget or mid-price soundbars, so it’s good to see it here. Sidling up to these two inputs on the soundbar’s rear side are a USB port for music files, optical TOSLINK (useful for legacy TVs) and a 3.5mm auxiliary for other stereo sources.

The Chinese maker says that the AX3120Q distributes 440 watts between the seven soundbar drivers and one subwoofer cone. 240 watts of that is farmed out to the subwoofer. But there’s a deficit of information available concerning the size or distribution of the soundbar’s small speakers. I do know, however, that two of the modules are upfiring.

Therefore, at a guess, potentially three 2-inch mid-range speakers take on centre duties and fire out to the sides, and two mid-bass drivers provide a bit more low-frequency girth. Hisense does also tell me the frequency response should straddle a 40 Hz to 20 kHz range. And remember that if you can’t live without Dolby Atmos and DTS:X (which is often overlooked completely on mid-priced soundbars), then the AX3120Q could have your name on it.

I’d like to see Wi-Fi included on a £450 soundbar, but musos and podcast fans will have to settle Bluetooth 5.3. With Hisense TV owners in mind, there are also a number of features specifically for those people, although not all. You will have to check your TV’s model number to see if you get a shot at using Hi-Concerto for sharing audio with your display, Room Fitting Tuning to calibrate the sound for your space, and EzPlay 3.0 for controlling audio through said display.

Note that the remote control sports independent bass and treble controls, along with a dedicated subwoofer level toggle. Seeing as my experience with the subwoofer was not always stellar, it was handy to have the option to dial it down when it over-exerted. The remote control can be a little tardy when actioning your commands, so be aware.

Sound Quality

• Coherent voices
• Big, convincing sound
• Lumbering subwoofer

The Hisense AX3120Q does most of what it should for the price. If it’s an uplift in vocals that you need primarily, then the soundbar will happily oblige.

Skimming through some broadcast TV selections, and in one of my first encounters, I found the various presenter voices in BBC’s The Repair Shop to be grounded and resonant. An improvement over my TCL TV’s built-in sound system? That would certainly be the case, and the stereo music inserts feel clear and spacious.

When I turn to some music selections, the output is a little less edifying. Not because the Hisense is necessarily lacking clarity or any semblance of dynamics, but because the subwoofer fails to lock in satisfactorily with the rest of the soundstage.

And that’s highlighted in Kool and the Gang’s Let’s Go Dancing where the bass guitar is just about audible, but the sub is clodhopping and simply out of time. Moving the bass enclosure away from the wall helped the situation partially. But subwoofers included in soundbar combos should not be constrained by placement, not least because most of us will not have the space to negotiate their optimal location.

The upper mid-range clarity does go some way to balancing the situation. I particularly like the soaring and articulate guitar in the Main Title from the Grand Canyon soundtrack, for example. There’s obviously a pay-off for Hisense placing the left and right drivers (and up-firers) out to the extremities of the enclosure – indeed, it’s that wide-cast panoply that reaps the dividends. But the bassy sloppiness is never far away when the band in this track picks up the pace.

And things do improve with movies. Whether it’s because the busier mixes baked into filmed entertainment selections are masking the timing indiscretions of the sub is debatable. The AX3120Q picks up on the weirdness and a good dose of the music and sound effects distribution for the I Lied to You sequence from Sinners (Dolby Atmos).

The immersive audio up-firers deliver confident height-bound information, adding significant scale to the proceedings. And some of those visceral bass cues do make their presence known, if not quite enough to make your trousers flap.

The Hisense surprisingly latches on to the grinding trombones during the helicopter chase in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (Dolby Atmos). There’s enough weight from Lorne Balfe’s score and the punchy gunshots to engulf the average living room. Luckily the interspersed dialogue competes well when confronted with the fracas, so once again the soundbar fulfills its remit to tell a story without too much hindrance.

Should you buy it?