Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

I only have Samsung because that's what my TV's are.

Sonos are supposed to be good.

I don't really care as much as I used to, honestly.

I have a simple Samsung sound bar and subwoofer, and like Badge chose Samsung because it's the same brand as my TV. According to Amazon it was only $150 back in 2014, and it's been going strong ever since. I'm sure you can get a lot more for that amount of money now. 

The sound is MUCH better than the TV speakers--especially as the TV is mounted on the wall and like most modern TVs has speakers pointed--at the wall. 

It also helps because I'll often play Spotify through the TV via the Roku app rather than Bluetooth on my phone. So if you're looking for something like music when you're doing whatever the two are doing in the bedroom, it will help with the sound quality of that too. 

Ours is not hardwired. I used to have it wired via optical when my TV and sound bar were both on a stand together, but now with the TV on the wall and the sound bar on top of a tall bookshelf, I just use the "Samsung Soundconnect"--which is nice because with Samsung I can adjust the soundbar volume via the TV remote. I don't even have the sound bar remote easily accessible as I never have to use it. I've never experienced the static that CD mentions, but then we don't really get storms here so YMMV. 

DirecTV just changed our system here, it was poorly done, but we survived.  The feed is now over the internet instead of satellite.  The picture is better even though I have a 1K TV.  We used to lose signal if it was moderately cloudy.

Some company called Gigamonster used to do our Internet, now it's some outfit called Zentro.  They claimed they upgraded our baud rates or whatever they call it now.  Some residents have pointed out it didn't happen.  It's kinda funny, to me.

DirecTV just changed our system here, it was poorly done, but we survived.  The feed is now over the internet instead of satellite.  The picture is better even though I have a 1K TV.  We used to lose signal if it was moderately cloudy.

Yep, as I've mentioned several times since I've worked with these various companies, cable/satellite is a major headache. They have fixed bandwidth either within the cable or via a satellite feed, and they have a lot of legacy boxes out there in the world that only support less efficient compression. Which means if they are sending ESPN out there, they probably need to have MPEG-2, MPEG-4, and HEVC compression options so they have three different streams they have to fit into their bandwidth envelope for a single channel. 

Which means that they compress the HELL out of everything using settings that strip out a lot of the quality, because they're also trying to provide as many channels as possible. 

This tends to also affect streaming companies somewhat, as they have to pay for the bandwidth they use. However, their transmissions are point-to-point, which means that if I'm watching ESPN on Hulu, they don't have to send me 100 other channels 100% of the time. It also means that whatever box I have receiving it (whether it's a Roku, or a native TV app, or whatever) can identify which compression protocol it's capable of decoding, and Hulu only has to send one. So while they are also forced to compress quite a bit to save on bandwidth costs, they don't have the same constraints as cable/satellite... Hence why streaming DirecTV will be higher quality than satellite DirecTV. 

And that's also why digital OTA network broadcasts are often the highest picture quality. They don't have to worry much about compression settings because they're not "paying for bandwidth" in any meaningful sense. 

Which is funny, because people used to go to cable/satellite for the picture quality vs analog rabbit ears... And now the best picture quality is digital "rabbit ears" while cable/satellite is often the worst picture quality. 
  

Maybach interior.

It's got a nice TV and sound system, which is now the topic at hand.