whats a good music cd to play to check out my new phlips soundbar?

My experience in researching sound bars is that they have midrange only. No highs or lows. If you want something that sounds good, I would recommend something with a lot of acoustical guitar instruments.

Welcome to the forum.

What are some albums that you own and genres that you generally like? I would start by going through some of your favorite albums.

Just play whatever you want, can't help much with soundbars.

The reason I recommended acoustical guitar music is because when I was researching sound bars, one of the stores I was in (Best Buy Magnolia) had one connected up (about $1000.00) in their biggest display room and was playing some concert Blu-ray with a group (don't remember name) that played exclusively acoustical guitars. It sounded really great and I was thinking about buying it, but wanted to play one of my CD's on it first. So, I went out to my car, grabbed a Gipsy King CD and played it. It only took a few seconds when both myself and the salesman said that the sound quality just wasn't there.

I went back to Best Buy where I heard/saw that blu-ray concert with acoustical guitars that I liked so well and bought it.

It's Dave Matthews and Tim Reynolds, Live at Radio City.

That's a great concert!

I agree that soundbars do sound awesome in display rooms. On a recent trip I made to Fry'z Electronics I walked into their demo room to snicker at their feeble attempts at audio reproduction. My jaw litterally hit the floor when I walked in, it sounded a million times better than I had anticipated and even started to question whether or not my speakers could sound as good as those did.

After taking it all in I realized that audition rooms are no place to determine which speaker to buy because their dynamics are completely controlled and have no correlation to what they'll sound like in my living room what-so-ever. Another controlled slice of the equation is what they're playing through those speakers. I've noticed they love to play a lot of live material because those performances have so much space and depth in them that sound really incredible, but they aren't mixed nearly as good as a studio recording so the bass, midrange treble... well basically none of the sonic elements are recorded at a high fidelity level, so critical listening goes out the window. In other words they can sound fantastically spacious without having to worry about being very accurate.

The last thing I'll point out is that these systems you'll find in audition rooms such as the one I visited aren't usually built to play LOUD extremelly well. So they might do alright for guys like JohnK who only needs 25 watts to plant a grin on his pie hole. But more demanding consumers such as myself might feel a little bit let down when we try to play these systems to reference levels.