IMO sound bars are a waste as a replacement for any descend discreet Quad or better surround setup. They do give improved sound over any TV's built in speakers as they rightfully should in any case. I bought one of the Zvox units claimed to be designed to improve dialog intelligibility and it works fairly well for that, having 3 or 4 different eq curves you can chose from to better understand the talking on TV shows. etc.
On the other hand soundbars and headphones might be the best thing that's ever happen to multich sound. The immersive techs like Atmos and Sony 3D is speaking directly to this market and it seems to be catching fire with much of the main
stream.
I'm hoping to see the new techs push MQA out of the public eye to be replaced with Atmos, etc. Now here is something that really does sound different and has much "improved spatial properties" to my ears. Maybe this will take multich encoded files to the level of popularity we had always hoped for over the decades since the first 3ch and quad recordings.