Mounting a Soundbar With Your TV — The Installer's Truth

How to actually decide

It comes down to the room and the budget.

If it's just about sound and the budget's flexible, your options open up across every brand.

If this is the main family room TV — the showcase where everyone gathers, where neighbors and friends are going to see it — that's where aesthetics start mattering more than budget. This is where people go with the Frame TV or the nicer QLED or OLED. They want better picture and the cleanest look. Everyone puts their best stuff in the family room, and people will spend extra to do it right.

The problem we see all the time: people overspend on the TV and then don't have budget left for the soundbar. They end up with a $150 Amazon special and a $20 erector-set bracket. If a DIYer installs it, forget it — you're looking at exposed wires, brackets, and bolts sticking out for the next five years.

The Sonos + Sanus revelation

When you're wall-mounting the TV and purposefully mounting a soundbar to it, this is where Sonos kills it and wins.

Sonos partnered with Sanus to make custom mounts specifically for the Sonos Beam and Sonos Arc Ultra. These mounts:

• Tuck the soundbar tight to the TV with no gap
• Bolt directly to the TV mount, so the soundbar tracks with the TV
• Have built-in cable routing — power and HDMI for eARC go behind the soundbar and up to the TV
• Include integrated zip-tie and Velcro channels for cable management
• Look like the soundbar came with the TV

A novice can install it in 30 minutes and it'll look professional.

Every other mount — and we don't care how good the installer is — takes 5× longer to install and never looks a quarter as good. You'll save a little money up front, but you'll lose it in time, frustration, and quality.

Universal soundbar mounts work with everything and work with nothing. You have to customize them, cut metal, and put your work in to save thirty or forty dollars. You're going to lose that in time and frustration. — Rick Baron, 28-year AV installer

If you're thinking about Sonos at all, this is the moment. This is the cleanest entry point.

You don't have to buy everything at once

If the Arc Ultra + Sub + surrounds bundle is too much for the budget right now, here's the phased path we recommend to clients:

1. Now: Buy the soundbar (Beam or Arc) + Sanus mount + TV mount. The soundbar + TV is the foundation. Get it cleanly installed and enjoy it.
2. Father's Day sale: Add the Sub or Sub Mini. The bass transforms the room. Takes 5 minutes to add and calibrate via the app.
3. Black Friday: Add the Era 100 surrounds. Now you've got real surround sound. Another 10-minute add via the app.

Each piece you add takes 5–10 minutes to bring into the system, the app handles calibration automatically, and you appreciate every upgrade more because you can hear the difference.

By the end of the cycle you've got a real cinema system without ever being forced to spend it all at once.

The articulating-mount advantage

Big factor most people don't think about until it's too late: if you mount the TV on an articulating arm (so you can swing it toward the kitchen, dining room, or breakfast bar), with the Sonos + Sanus bar mount, the sound follows the TV.

We've seen people wall-mount their Sonos Arc separately, then put the TV on an articulating arm aimed 45° toward the kitchen. The sound is still pointing at the empty couch. They crank the volume because the sound is going the wrong way.

The Sanus Arc mount keeps the soundbar aimed where the TV is aimed. Always.

What about all the other soundbars?

There are tons of soundbar brands. Nothing wrong with most of them at the right tier. But:

If you have an older soundbar and you're moving it down to an old basement TV, fine — we don't throw out gear that works. But in the family room? It needs to be eARC-capable.

The TV-speakers truth nobody tells you

All TVs now — except the Frame TV — have tiny piezo speakers firing out the back, bottom, or sides. They bounce sound off the walls. You find yourself cranking the TV to 85 just to hear dialogue, and it still comes out muffled.

Some are better than others. Top-end OLEDs have a bit more projection out of the panel. But here's the dirty secret: the more expensive the TV, the LESS they put into the speakers. Why? Because they assume you're going to pair it with a real sound system. Why else would you buy a $3,000 TV if you're not going to pair it with audio?

The Frame TV is the only exception. Samsung knows people aren't going to add a soundbar under a Frame (it kills the picture-frame look), so they put real engineering into the panel speakers. It actually sounds good on its own.

In a family room where it's a couple people watching the Frame for casual viewing, it's fine by itself. For everything else — soundbar.

If you really want to mount the soundbar separately on the wall

You CAN wall-mount a Sonos Arc or any soundbar to the wall with a 6-inch gap below the TV. It looks fine in catalogs. In real installs it's a pain.

Here's what you're signing up for:

• Perfect spacing. The mount-to-arm-to-TV alignment has to be planned dead-on before any drilling starts.
• Tiny adjustment window. Once the plate's in the wall, you've got maybe an inch of up/down adjustment on a 55", a little more on a 65", and only half an inch to maybe an inch and a half on a 75" or 85" before you have to take the whole thing off and re-bolt the bracket arms.
• Drywall repair. Mess up the spacing and you're patching walls at the end of your project instead of watching TV.
• Future regret. When the day comes that you swap the TV or want to move the layout, those soundbar holes don't go away.

We've installed thousands of soundbars. The flush-to-TV Sanus mount wins almost every time.

Measure twice, cut once is huge here.

The one-remote setup (do this)

When you've got newer gear — a recent TV, a recent Sonos, plus a Roku Ultra / Apple TV / Nvidia Shield — the system runs itself with one remote:

• TV remote (or Apple/Roku remote) turns the TV on automatically via IR or HDMI-CEC
• Same remote controls volume up/down via the TV → eARC → Sonos chain
• Sonos handles audio routing automatically
• All your apps live in the streamer

No more "where's the universal remote" stares from family or guests. No more cycling through three remotes. The system just works.

The full consultation walkthrough

This is how a real consult actually flows. First thing we'd ask is what TV you bought — model, size, what kind of soundbar (if any). From there everything else falls into place.

Picking the TV and the soundbar

If you've got a 65-inch LG OLED, you're in great shape. The C series and the G series are both fantastic. Don't stress too much about which exact model — any current OLED puts you in good shape.

The soundbar is where most people mess up. If you grabbed a cheap Vizio for $150 on sale, we'd push back. Your OLED probably sounds almost as good as that soundbar does, and the cheap bar is going to kill the look of what you have. You just got a really awesome TV — don't do it the injustice of pairing it with basically a free soundbar.

Skip the cheap soundbar — use the TV speakers

If you can stretch the budget to a Sonos Beam, that's where we'd point you. $499. Way more powerful than a Vizio. With the Sanus Beam mount it tucks tight to the TV, the install gets easier, and the wires hide automatically.

With the Vizio you're stuck with a universal erector-kit bracket from Amazon — bolts and nuts showing, wires hanging down, and the soundbar will sag over time. It kills the look of a beautiful OLED.

If you can't afford the Beam right now, don't get the Vizio either. Just run the TV speakers by themselves. The OLED has decent sound — not perfect, not home theater — but decent. The LG G series even has some panel-projection enhancements worth listening to. If you're going to go with a cheap soundbar, we'd rather have no soundbar.

Wait for a Black Friday or Father's Day sale, grab the Sonos Beam, and we'll put it all together later. The Sonos uses eARC directly from the TV, so whatever sources are plugged into the TV automatically control the soundbar. Cheap soundbars use IR and optical, which give no feedback to the volume, get stuck when you change settings, and force you to juggle multiple remotes.

Tilt mount vs flat mount vs articulating arm

For a clean look on the wall you've got three options.

A flat mount sits flush, tight to the wall, but you can't adjust anything after the fact.

A tilt mount is basically the same price, sits just as flush, but gives you the option to tilt the TV 1-5° if you get glare or if the wall isn't perfectly even. No wall is perfectly flush. Sometimes the TV ends up looking like it's leaning back slightly, and that creates a weird glare. Tilt mount gives you flexibility with no downside. We always recommend it over a flat mount.

Articulating arms are great if you actually need to pull the TV off the wall and angle it toward the kitchen or another room. But a lot of people put one on and never move it. Now the TV is sitting 6 inches off the wall and they're stuck looking at the business behind it forever. They end up not liking it.

The other case for an articulating arm is serviceability — once you hang a 65" TV, you need two people to get it back off the wall. With the arm, you can pull it out by yourself to unplug or reset something.

Power Bridge kit and cable routing

If your outlet is down low at the baseboard and the TV is going up high — say 8 feet up — you need a Power Bridge kit. It mounts near the existing outlet, fishes up through the open wall cavity, and gives you code-compliant Romex from top to bottom, plus a low-voltage side for HDMI runs.

The only unknown is whether there's fire blocking or insulation in the wall. Interior walls are usually safe to fish.

For HDMI, run 10-foot cables. You want extra slack so you can pull the TV off without breaking the cables, and enough at the cabinet to spin your components around when you add a receiver or sources later.

Hire a handyman vs hire a pro

TV installs are one area where you can find a lot of help that isn't a full AV integrator. Handymen have all hung TVs before. Where handymen get stuck is when you have a random TV, a random soundbar, and no mount. They don't know what mount goes with what soundbar, they don't know what cable to use, they're not going to calibrate the picture, and they're not going to know to plug your Apple TV 4K into the HDR-capable HDMI port on the TV.

If you work with our tool, we educate you on all of that. Then you only need a handyman for the physical task of mounting the bracket, finding the studs, cutting the drywall, and fishing the Power Bridge kit and HDMI cables. With our help, you hook up the components yourself and save a lot of money.

Rates in DC are around $150 per hour. Markets vary from $85 up to $225 depending on where you are.

Don't DIY the stud mount

This is the one part where we push back on full DIY. You want your four mounting bolts in the dead center of those studs. We've seen DIYers who think they know how to use a stud finder but never actually probe the stud. They hit the edge, or they hit just drywall, and two years later their $2,500 TV is sagging off the wall on one side.

If you've got a garage full of tools and you're comfortable with it, go for it. But if you can afford to pay somebody to do it, you'll be happier and you'll enjoy your TV a lot more if you didn't make the sausage.

Picture calibration — use the built-in ISF settings

If you're on one of the top three brands — LG, Samsung, or Sony — they all have THX-level cinematic calibrations built in, with ISF / Filmmaker / IMAX presets that are already calibrated from the factory. They get you 95% of the way there, the same calibration people used to pay $300-$500 for. We HIGHLY recommend using the built-in ISF settings out of the box on any newer TV. Set it and forget it.

Here's the catch — those calibrations are darker by design, the way THX and Spielberg Studio intended.

People walk into Best Buy or Costco and see TVs with contrast cranked to 100 to fight the fluorescent lights, running 4K demos they'll never see at home. Then they get home, hook up a 1080i cable feed, and ask what happened to the picture.

We calibrated hundreds of TVs professionally with the Spyder kit — two hours per TV, $300 service. Customer would walk in afterward and say it looks dull.

In real life, looking down at the ice, it's almost gray and dull. On TV, the ice gets boosted so bright and white you can barely see the puck because the motion blur is so strong. When we calibrate it properly, you can see the puck clearly. People say "what's wrong with my TV?" until we show them — then they get it intellectually, but they still prefer the over-bright vivid look. So we don't upsell people on what they think they want. — The hockey-puck calibration lesson

After watching most of those hundreds of customers revert back to factory vivid settings within a few weeks, we learned the whole insider take on this. So we changed our approach. Today we can eyeball custom tweaks in 1/10th the time of a full Spyder calibration and get 95% of the way there — which is right where the built-in ISF presets land anyway. That's why we tell people on newer TVs to just turn on the ISF / Filmmaker / IMAX mode and stop there.

Technically, you should calibrate separate settings for sports, news, and movies — they all need different settings. Nobody has the patience for that.

Let the TV burn in before calibrating

Don't calibrate right out of the box. The TV needs burn-in time. Set it to a factory preset, let it run for a few months, and then if you really want to tweak it, do it then.

99% of people forget about it because the factory setting is perfectly fine.

Mounting height — forget the eye-level rule

Eye level is the old rule from the days of console TVs and 300-pound Toshibas. That rule is gone. When you hang a flat panel low like that today, it doesn't flow with the rest of the room. Unless you have a component stand underneath to balance it out, it looks out of place.

The right approach is a happy medium between standing and sitting sight lines. Scan the whole wall and mount the TV like you're hanging a picture — what looks best aesthetically on the wall as a whole.

• Half the time you might be watching from the kitchen standing up.
• Two-thirds of the time you're sitting down.
• Mount it slightly higher than seated eye level and use a tilt mount angled down toward the couch.

That way it looks right on the wall, it works standing up, and the tilt brings it down to your eyes when you're seated.

The decision tree, simplified

By Bear & Rick Baron · 28 years residential AV installation · Verified 2026-05-22. About Rick · About Bear · Affiliate disclosure.