If you’re tired of listening to the crackle from the speakers on the back of your TV but aren’t ready for the full subwoofer-boosted suite, I’ve got a good deal for you. The Klipsch Flexus Core 200 is currently marked down by $50 at Amazon, and it’s a great place to start if you’re looking for a soundbar that will give you options down the road.

It has fewer channels built into the sound bar than some of our other favorite picks, notably lacking the side-firing drivers that help with surround effects. That doesn’t keep it from sounding excellent, thanks to its 44-inch wide footprint and 2.25-inch drivers that reach all the way to either end. Our reviewer Ryan Waniata was impressed by the Core 200’s clarity and detail, and in particular called out the very punchy bass response.

While the bar has built-in controls for simple tasks like changing the volume and inputs, you can also use the mobile app to fine tune your audio experience. In addition to the stuff you’d expect, there’s also a three-band equalizer for those who like to fiddle and advanced settings for any extra speakers you add to the setup. With eARC to communicate with your TV, you shouldn’t need to touch the remote or app often anyway.

That’s right, one of the biggest selling points for the Klipsch Flexus Core 200 is the ability to add additional speakers to your setup. Both the Klipsch Flexus Surr 100 bookshelf speakers and Klipsch Flexus Sub 100 connect wirelessly to the Core 200 with a custom dongle, giving you a ton of freedom to stash the extra speakers wherever they’d sound best. If you have your own subwoofer that you like, there’s also an RCA jack on the bar to hook it up. That’s a lot of flexibility for any soundbar, let alone one at this price point.

If you’re ready to get the ball rolling on a proper sound system for your next movie night, you can save $50 on the Flexus Core 200, or meander over to our roundup of the best soundbars we’ve tested to find the best option for you.

The US added a record-breaking amount of energy storage in 2025, according to a new solar industry report published Monday. The growth of battery storage across the US is a rare success story for clean energy during the renewables-hostile second Trump administration—and also a sign of how utilities may be thinking about reorienting electric grids as demand goes up across the country.

The new report, issued by the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA), follows another dataset released last week by Bloomberg New Energy Finance showing a similar boom in battery growth. In 2025, according to the SEIA report, the US installed 57 gigawatt hours of new energy storage to the grid, with new installations growing almost 30 percent over the year before. (As its name suggests, a gigawatt hour is a measure of energy stored over time.) That’s enough storage, the SEIA report claims, to power more than 5 million homes each year.

The report predicts that the market could jump another 21 percent by the end of this year, increasing by an additional 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. These are monster numbers compared to less than a decade ago, when there was about half a gigawatt of storage on the grid in total.

Batteries have proven remarkably politically resilient. Tax credits for wind and solar were cut as part of the One Big Beautiful Bill last summer amid a large-scale attack on renewables from the administration, despite opposition from Republican lawmakers with clean-energy projects in their states. But battery tax credits were largely spared.

And despite Washington’s hostility toward renewable energy, batteries—along with solar—saw significant growth in some deep red states last year. One of the big renewable energy success stories of the moment is Texas, where solar met more than 15 percent of demand throughout the summer, beating out coal for the first time. The SEIA report predicts that Texas will overtake California this year to become the US state with the most gigawatt hours of storage deployed.

Jigar Shah, a managing partner at the advisory firm Multiplier and the former director of the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, points out that Texas’ independent and largely deregulated power grid—which operates much closer to a true free-market system than other grids in the country—has enabled solar and batteries to soar ahead of other options despite resistance in the White House. (Solar’s success story is so big that it does even seem to be reaching some voices on the right: Recent polling suggests that MAGA voters support solar, while Katie Miller, the influential former top communications official for the so-called Department of Government Efficiency to whom White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller is married, has been tweeting approvingly about solar energy in recent weeks.)

“Texas basically says, ‘I don’t care about your cultural bias,’” says Shah, who was not involved in the SEIA report. “‘These are the market signals. You guys do what you want to do. If you want to build new coal plants, great. If you want to build batteries, great.’ And it happened to be that batteries were most incentivized by their financial incentives.”

While batteries and solar are proving a killer combination in places like Texas, the majority of battery installations last year, the SEIA report found, were stand-alone ones not connected to specific solar projects. The growth of stand-alone storage is a good sign for grids that are increasingly stressed by skyrocketing demand.

On an average day, energy grids around the US use only about 50 percent of the energy available to them. This underutilization is by design; the grid needs a large amount of capacity for days when demand is at its peak. Installing batteries at all levels of the grid is one way to take advantage of the extra energy that’s not used during off-peak days so that it doesn’t go to waste.