Top critical review
1.0 out of 5 starsNever buy a Vizio Product!
Reviewed in the United States on September 4, 2021
(UPDATED REVIEW: July 3rd, 2022)
After over 10 months, the Vizio M-Series 5.1 soundbar has died, it won’t ever turn on anymore. And way before that, the soundbar started acted funny after like a few months of owning the soundbar, from broken eARC to low volume issues, particularly with my Apple TV 4K and even 4K Blu-rays are affected by this. And then don’t get started on shoddy software support. Do yourselves a favor and don’t buy this soundbar nor anything Vizio in general. Vizio has definitely gone downhill in the past few years, never again will I spend a dime on Vizio. I've since replaced this soundbar with the new LG S80QY soundbar, and it’s leagues ahead of Vizio in every single category.
(ORIGINAL REVIEW: September 3rd, 2021)
Vizio for a long time now has been delivering very good soundbars for surprisingly at more realistic prices than most of the bigger brands out there and I'm here to report that this trend continues with the M-Series 5.1 soundbar M51ax-J6. The M51ax-J6 soundbar offers really exceptional sound quality, great amount of features, a pretty good remote to use, decent subwoofer bass, and overall good price to performance ratio. It's also very nice to see this soundbar having actual support for Dolby Atmos and DTS:X though don't expect either one to be anything special with this soundbar, only because due to no upfiring speakers, it heavily relies on virtual height simulation to do the job for Atmos and DTS:X, and yes it definitely varies from person to person, you might have a better or worse experience than me. Also nice to see on a soundbar at this price class is true 4K HDR passthrough via HDMI 2.0 even including Dolby Vision and HDR10+ support.
If there's one major issue I have with this soundbar so far, the Dolby Vision passthrough through it's HDMI input is broken and pretty much unusable due to horrendous screen tearing resulting in a unwatchable picture, hopefully Vizio will fixed that problem with a firmware patch down the road. Fortunately HDR10 and HDR10+ both work without a problem. Also fortunately with me unlike some other folks out there, I haven't had any real latency/lip syncing issues with this soundbar, though it might vary from TV to TV.
In conclusion, despite a bug or two, the Vizio M51ax-J6 is a great value 5.1 soundbar and I highly recommend it. If Atmos and DTS:X both are very important to you, you may wanna spend an extra couple of hundred dollars on the M512a-H6 soundbar that actually has upfiring speakers, giving you a better Atmos/DTS:X performance than the M51ax-J6.