VIZIO SB3651-E6 36" 5.1 SmartCast Sound Bar System


VIZIO SB3651-E6 36" 5.1 SmartCast Sound Bar System

Bought one a couple Woots ago. Had a problem with the sub, which Vizio promptly took care of. Sounds great!

Just finished installing the sound bar and surround speakers.
Sound bar is DOA. Won’t turn on!
Tried different power supply cord, no luck.
Contacts Woot customer service, hope to hear back soon

How did you get in touch with Vizio? I returned mine to w00t because Vizio never responded to me.

I grabbed one of these off a previous Woot, and it has been working flawlessly ever since. I was a bit nervous due to all the mixed reviews, but I haven’t noticed any problems whatsoever. The system sounds great, especially for the price.

I got one of these open box. It probably won’t fill a cavernous suburban living room with theater-quality sound, but it sounds pretty great for apartment use once you tweak the audio settings a bit. The unit is a little quirky, but once you figure out what causes weird behavior and understand the remote settings it’s pretty easy to live with. Here’s what I learned from a month of experience:

The remote and unit do not have a robust two-way connection- information only flows one direction, so the remote’s display shows settings changing during adjustment even if the main unit isn’t recognizing the remote’s signal because of an obstruction or because the main unit is frozen.

The unit tends to freeze and need to be hard reset (at the power cord) if the device it’s connected to over BT turns off. I use my laptop as my main media center, so I ran into this issue a bunch at first and thought the soundbar was broken because my laptop kept going into sleep mode. It’s probably much more stable when connected over HDMI ARC.

There’s also about 250ms of audio lag over BT, so synching video will be tough for some applications unless you have a software player that can adjust for it (like VLC,). This can make it annoying to watch Youtube or other streaming video services. The adjustment on the Vizio unit can only increase lag, not reduce it, which is pretty useless. Don’t really know why they even included it as a setting. This is only over BT. Lag shouldn’t be an issue over a hard-wired connection.

On the bright side, the BT audio lag is just about equal to the WiDi video lag over the ubiquitous Microsoft Wireless Display adapter, so if you use them together, everything generally syncs up perfectly.

One other note: Many aftermarket satellite speaker stands allow you to run the speaker wires through the main upright by threading it through holes. The connectors for these speakers are QUITE large and will not fit through most of them. Choose your stands wisely if you want to hide your wires.

Overall, this system is a terrific, low-cost solution at this price.

I bought one of these a few months ago and the remote was DOA. I contacted Vizio and they promptly replaced the remote and i have had no further problems.

When these work they work great and they’re somehow pulling off a sound experience you’d expect from a much higher price point.

When they don’t work, you have no freaking clue why or what’s going on. I’d have these invisibly power down at random before powering right back up, causing weird gaps in audio whenever you’d get sound right after a moment of silence. For example, the little boop effects when clicking through a Roku menu will sometimes just never be heard because the preceding total absence of sound for half a second made the speakers think they could take a break.

The poor support reps don’t have a script to follow after “do a factory reset”, so you always just end up getting a replacement with similarly weird problems popping up eventually.

I got one sale before last. Powers off randomly every so many hours of use, or not. Pop. Lose sound. Turn it back on, and get another “x” hours. Annoying.

Sorry for the problem. Have you tried contacting VIZIO?

I think I am beyond the Vizio warranty now (30 days), and into the Woot warranty. (60 days further?).

I really have not had time to deal with it. Will be in touch with Woot soon, I guess.

I think I did a chat with their support. It was super easy.

Bought one of these, had some issues with sound, I had to keep selecting source for it to stop. Five months in it has COMPLETELY stopped working, with nothing Woot can do for me. Stay away from product.