There are soundbars and then, frankly, there are soundbars. And unfortunately, for the most part the most reliable way to tell the true home cinema soundbar heroes from the rest is their price. Cue the Samsung HW-Q80R.
The HW-Q80R belongs very much in the premium soundbar category. Meaning that while, as we’ll see, it sounds seriously good, it doesn’t come cheap: $1048 in the US, and £799 in the UK. So what, exactly, does so much money get you?
At first glance you might think it hasn’t got you all that much. The Q80R system, after all, only consists of two parts: the main soundbar, and a wireless subwoofer. Even $1048 doesn’t get you physically separate rear, side or height speakers.
Look closer, though, and there’s a lot going on inside those soundbar and subwoofer units. The soundbar is heavy, big enough to hold some seriously large speaker enclosures by soundbar standards (but slim enough to fit under most TV screens), and bristling with drivers and power. The main left, right and centre channels, for instance, each benefit from three drivers: two woofers and a high-quality, wide-range tweeter. Peer down onto the top edge, and you’ll clearly see two large upfiring speakers provided to deliver the height effects associated with the Dolby Atmos and DTS:X ‘object based’ sound formats.
Similarly, check out the left and right sides of the Q80R soundbar and you’ll see that each end carries an angled speaker designed to deliver side channel audio effects.
It’s great to find the Q80R’s main soundbar carrying actual physical up- and side-firing speakers rather than depending solely on processing to create ‘virtual’ height and side effects like most soundbars do.
Bear in mind, though, that the Q80R’s side and height speakers depend on bouncing sound off walls and ceilings to work. This is something that could be an issue if your ceiling is very high, heavily beamed or vaulted, or if your side walls are a long way from where your TV/soundbar is positioned in your room.
Having said that, the 372W of total sound the Q80R is capable of pumping out handled a 7m long by 4m wide by 2.2m high test room with no problems whatsoever. So typical living or even home cinema rooms shouldn’t be a problem. Just treat the soundbar’s placement needs with the respect they deserve if you want to get the best from your hefty audio investment.
The subwoofer has been heavily redesigned from the one that shipped with last year’s high-end Samsung soundbar range. It looks prettier, thanks to some nicely rounded corners and a finish that harmonizes better with the main soundbar. Its amplification is built in, a large 8-inch woofer pushes rumbles out of its right side, and there’s a rear port to help all that air shift more smoothly.
The Q80R subwoofer’s large size makes it harder to hide in your room than some, but the bottom line is that a soundbar as potent as the Q80Rs needs serious bass for company. And that typically requires a subwoofer that has some chassis space to work with.
As noted earlier, the Q80R doesn’t ship with any rear speakers. If you want a full surround system with real rather than virtual rear speakers, you have two options. First, you could step up to Samsung’s HW-Q90R, which ships with rear speakers that carry up-firing drivers, to complete the three dimensional dome of sound associated with the DTS:X and Dolby Atmos object-based audio formats. The Q90R, though, will set you back an extra $400/£500. Alternatively you can add a pair of Samsung SWA-9000S wireless rears for a more affordable $180/£149. However, these optional rears don’t carry any upfiring drivers.
The Q80Rs connections are all found on the main soundbar, and comprise two HDMI inputs, one HDMI output (with eARC compatibility for receiving Dolby Atmos or DTS:X passthrough from TVs), and an optical audio input. There are also Wi-Fi and Bluetooth options for playing audio from your smart devices and accessing firmware updates.
It’s perhaps a shame on a £799 soundbar that Samsung couldn’t run to at least a third HDMI, and that a USB port on the soundbar’s bottom edge turns out to only be for applying software updates, not for playing files from USB sticks.
The Q80R is pretty flexible with what it can play, though. Obviously it’s primarily intended for playing Dolby Digital, DTS Master HD, Dolby Atmos and DTS:X multichannel sound formats. But Samsung and its design partner, high-end audio brand Harman Kardon, seem to have really worked on this latest model’s musicality too. So it’s good to see it supporting FLAC, ALAC, WAV, and ALAC file formats, among others – and up to 32-bit, too.
The Q80R can even upscale to 32-bit to give more compressed audio files a cleaner, more dynamic sound. There’s upscaling for movie soundtracks too, courtesy of a Surround mode that introduces height and side channel effects with 5.1 channel sources, and height channels for 7.1 content.
While purists might decide to give both of these audio upscalers a miss, they do actually work pretty well. At least to the extent that they add to sound-limited sources exactly what they say they’re going to add without the results sounding forced, artificial or tweaky.
As you would expect of a modern soundbar, the Q80R’s HDMI loopthrough can cope with all the latest HDR formats, including Dolby Vision and HDR10+.
Setting up and controlling the Q80R is pretty easy in most ways. The subwoofer and soundbar join together wirelessly with no trouble, and a small but bright and clear LED on the soundbar’s right side helps you track what you’re doing and which input you’re using. The remote control is comfortable and well built, and manages to use a limited button count without becoming confusing.
You can also control the Q80R via Samsung’s SmartThings app; a limited selection of touch-sensitive buttons on the soundbar itself; and by Alexa voice control if you have an external Alexa listening device (there’s a Samsung Wireless Audio ‘skill’). Oddly no other voice recognition systems are supported – even Samsung’s own Bixby system. But Alexa is pretty popular, I guess…
Note, too, that you can use the Alexa link to stream to the soundbar from Spotify Connect.
As you’d expect, you can adjust the volume of each of the soundbar’s channels independently to balance them out for your room. Though it’s a touch disappointing for its money, perhaps, that the Q80R doesn’t provide any automated set up system with a mic and test tones. Unless you feel like investing in an external audio calibration system, you’ll just have to stick a film on and tweak things by ear.
One final intriguing new feature Samsung has introduced for its 2019 soundbars is the Adaptive Sound mode. As with the Optimized Sound feature on Samsung’s latest TVs, Adaptive Sound adjusts the way sound is presented based on analysis of the audio source. So, for instance, if sport is detected, the speakers will work to create a stadium-like effect, with pretty much equal balance around the sound stage. Chat shows, news and the like will get an emphasized center channel, music will get a pop ‘tone’ and stereo emphasis, and so on.
It sounds gimmicky, but it’s actually clever enough to become a quite effective tool if you’re running your day to day TV viewing through your Q80R. I perhaps wouldn’t bother with it, though, if you only use the soundbar from time to time for special movie or music nights.
The Q80R’s ability to recognize the sort of sound it’s getting even extends to a Game Pro mode that can tell when you’re playing a game on a PS4 or Xbox One and automatically switch your TV into its fast-responding Game picture mode. Note, though, that this feature only works with compatible Samsung TVs.
In most ways, the Q80R is a fantastic performer. It delivers spectacular levels of room-filling power, precision, and dynamism that’s almost impossible to reconcile with the relatively compact nature of the speaker system producing all that lovely racket.
Of course, the Q80R isn’t the first Samsung soundbar to deliver a hugely powerful performance. Samsung’s first high-end collaboration with Harman Kardon, the HW-K950, single-handedly changed the whole soundbar game. The Q80R, though, introduces a couple of important improvements over the already excellent Samsung soundbars that have preceded it.
First, the Q80R enhances the extent to which its audio advances into your room. While Samsung’s previous two-piece soundbar systems have managed a strong sense of height and width in the their sound stages, the audio action has tended to stay pretty firmly in front of you. Here, though, some tweak in the Q80R’s speaker design or audio processing/management has sound more routinely appearing from above your head rather than merely above your TV, and down the sides of your seating position rather than just to the left and right of your TV.
There’s even occasionally a hint of sound coming from behind you if you’ve got the soundbar positioned to maximize its ‘sound bouncing’ capabilities. This rear sound isn’t at all precise in the way it manifests, but it’s there, giving you at least a vague sense that you’re in the world of the film you’re watching, rather than watching it from the side.
The other area where the Q80R clearly improves on its predecessor is bass. There’s a smoother feel to the sound the new subwoofer makes which blends into the soundbar’s output more effectively – without, crucially, compromising on the huge depth and range that’s always been a trademark of Samsung’s high-end external subwoofer soundbar systems.
This makes the sound stage feel more coherent and organic. So much so that despite previously not having felt aware of any problems with the bass on last year’s high-end Samsung soundbar systems (quite the opposite, in fact), going back to a 2018 Samsung N950 system after testing the Q80R made the older model’s bass immediately feel a touch baggy and phutty by comparison.
These new Q80R strengths join with the old ones always associated with Samsung’s high-end Harman Kardon soundbars. First, its dynamic range is truly huge by soundbar standards. Second, its exceptional audio projection makes it all but impossible to believe that all this room-filling sound is coming predominantly from a single speaker.
The Q80R also portrays a fantastic ability to ebb and swell along with even the most dynamic soundtracks, and there’s no loss of detail or finesse during either a film’s loudest or quietest moments. Dialogue always sounds convincing regardless of whether it’s a man, woman or child doing the talking, too.
The system sounds unexpectedly good with music as well for a system that seems to be built so uncompromisingly for movies. Yes, it slightly leans towards muscle over minutiae in its musical presentation compared with more hi-fi-oriented soundbars. But it’s much more engaging to listen to than might have been expected of such a home cinema powerhouse.
Two last strengths of the Q80R system are the way it’s responsive and sensitive enough to effectively and accurately adjust the scale of its movie sound stage whenever it’s required to do so, and the sometimes uncanny accuracy of its effects placement. At least across the front and vertical aspects of its sound stage.
This brings us to the Q80R’s main weakness: its lack of dedicated rear speakers. If you’ve experienced Dolby Atmos and DTS:X on a full speaker system, complete with dedicated rears, the Q80R’s occasional sense of some sort of sound coming from behind you falls far short of the full bore, highly detailed, fully immersive bubble of sound you can only really get if you have actual rather than virtual rear speakers in your system. Especially if those real rear speakers also have up-firing drivers.
Of course, precious few soundbar systems ship with dedicated rear speakers, so the Q80R is hardly alone in in its two-unit approach. The Q80R, though, is arguably a victim of its own success in that it does such an outstanding job of painting a bold, powerful, dynamic, energetic front sound stage, complete with a decent sense of side and overhead effects, that it kind of exaggerates your awareness of the lack of any dedicated rear speakers. It leaves you wanting more – in the shape of a fully rounded audio bubble – in a way that, ironically, less potent one- or two-piece soundbars might not.
You can, of course, add the optional rear speakers Samsung has made to go with the Q80R. I haven’t been able to test these, but based on the rear speakers you get with last year’s N950 system, I have no reason to suspect that they don’t sound good. The SWA-9000S do not, though, have the up-firing drivers you get with the rears included with this year’s Q90R soundbar (or last year’s N950). So while adding the Q80R’s optional rears would doubtless reduce the nagging sense that something is missing from its audio presentation, there would still be a rear height ‘gap’ in the way object-based soundtracks appear.
In other words, if you’re motivated more by combining a compact speaker system with uncompromising sound quality than you are by financial concerns, finding the extra $400/£500 you need to get Samsung’s Q90R system with its wireless forward- and up-firing rear speakers will likely be an investment you won’t regret. (So long as you don’t fall foul of the issues with dropped wireless subwoofer and rear speaker connections a few users are reporting, anyway).
This is categorically not to say, though, that the Q80R isn’t a superb soundbar. It truly is, outpowering its rivals with massive dynamics, stellar clarity and a huge sound stage. So if $1050/£799 is absolutely as far as your budget can stretch (and I can well imagine that it might be!), then rest assured that no soundbar gives you more sheer bang for your buck than the Q80R.
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