How to Connect a Turntable to a Soundbar

The short answer: a soundbar can play records, but only through an analog input or Bluetooth, and the signal has to be at line level before it gets there. So the decision tree is short. If your bar has a 3.5 mm or RCA input, feed it from a turntable whose built-in preamp is switched to LINE, or add a phono preamp. If your bar takes Bluetooth audio, buy a turntable that transmits and skip the cable. If your bar has only HDMI and optical — which is increasingly common — the analog signal has to be converted, usually by routing it through a television that has an analog input of its own.

Why this is harder than it looks

A soundbar is an amplifier and a set of speakers in one cabinet, which is exactly what a turntable needs. The problem is that soundbars were designed for televisions, and a television sends audio digitally. So the input list is usually HDMI, optical and Bluetooth, with an analog aux socket as an afterthought when it exists at all.

On top of that, no soundbar we are aware of has a phono input. A phono input is a special case: it applies the RIAA equalization curve and a large amount of gain, because a cartridge’s output is a tiny, deliberately bass-reduced signal. Plug a raw turntable output into a line input and you get something quiet and thin with no low end — which is the single most common complaint behind this question. Our do I need a phono preamp page covers that in full, and phono vs line explains why the two sockets are not interchangeable.

Route one: the soundbar has an analog input

This is the best case and it is a cable plus, possibly, one small box. You need a line-level signal, and there are two ways to produce one. The cheaper way is a deck with a switchable built-in phono preamp — set it to LINE, run RCA to the bar, done. Most current entry turntables have this, including every deck in our built-in preamp roundup.

If your deck has no preamp inside — which is normal once you get above the entry tier, and true of most Fluance Reference decks — then a standalone phono stage goes between the two. It takes the phono signal in, applies RIAA and gain, and puts line level out. Our picks under $100 cover the price range that makes sense next to a soundbar; spending more than the bar cost is a decision to make deliberately.

Route two: the soundbar takes Bluetooth

If the bar accepts a Bluetooth audio source, a turntable that transmits Bluetooth connects to it directly with nothing else at all — no phono preamp, no cable, no settings. That is the tidiest version of this setup and the reason the Bluetooth deck is on this page.

One trap to avoid: a great many record players advertise Bluetooth and only receive it, so you can stream a phone through the player’s own speakers. That is useless here. The listing has to say the deck sends, transmits or outputs Bluetooth. Our Bluetooth turntable picks only include decks that transmit, which is most of the work of that page. If headphones are a likelier destination than the bar, the headphone routes guide covers the same decision for a private listening chain.

Route three: the soundbar has neither

If the input list is HDMI and optical only, there is no way to hand it an analog signal directly. Two honest options remain. The first costs nothing: if the bar is already connected to a television over HDMI-ARC or optical, and that television has an analog input, plug the line-level signal into the television and let the audio pass through to the bar. Whether this works depends entirely on your television, because analog inputs are disappearing from them too.

The second is a converter that turns line-level analog into optical or HDMI. We do not rank one — there is no verified listing for that class of product in our registry and we will not invent a pick to finish a page. If you reach this point, it is worth comparing the total cost of the converter route against a pair of powered speakers, because at that stage the soundbar has stopped being the cheap option.

Two problems specific to soundbars

Grounding. Many turntables have a thin ground wire intended for a grounding terminal on a phono preamp or an amplifier. Soundbars do not have one. If you are using an external phono stage, the ground goes there. If you are running a deck’s own line output straight to the bar, there is nowhere for it to go, and a constant hum usually means the deck wants a ground it cannot have in that configuration.

Feedback. Soundbars very often come with a subwoofer, and a subwoofer is a machine for putting low-frequency energy into the floor. A stylus is a vibration sensor. If the bass booms or howls as the volume rises, that is the loop closing — move the turntable onto different furniture from the bar and the sub, and if it continues, put the deck on an isolation platform or wall shelf. This is the same failure mode we describe on our tower speaker page, and it has the same fix.

Is a soundbar actually the right destination?

It is the right destination if you already own one and the alternative is not listening to records. It is not the right destination if you are buying from scratch: both channels come out of one cabinet, so stereo separation is limited by the width of the bar, and most are voiced for dialogue rather than music. A pair of powered bookshelf speakers at the same money gives you two separated sources, a line input as standard and, on some models, a phono input so no extra box is needed at all — that class is ranked on our speakers with a built-in phono preamp page.