LG S95QR soundbar review

It’s a 9.1.5-channel system with a total of 810W. The soundbar is impressive in the sound stage with clarity and detail. The race scene from Ready Player One feels as if you were sitting in the car itself. The speaker's separation is analytical with rich detail in the mids without sounding too bright. Unlike the Sony HT-A5000, the LG S95QR doesn’t colour the vocals either. The midrange is judged perfectly in this system and the centre drivers along with the side-firing ones bring great definition and openness to its sound.

The LG S95QR has three dedicated upward-firing height channels which in practice should produce height and surround characteristics for your movies but it rarely manages to achieve overhead sound. Dolby Atmos content doesn’t envelope your senses as well as Sony HT-A5000 or a dedicated home-theatre system. The two rear speakers have three channels each and connect wirelessly to the main soundbar and should, in practice, create a phantom bubble of spatial surround along with the soundbar but I am not sold on that. The Virtual Sound Dome, as LG likes to call it, sounds incomplete and the overhead sounds are anaemic at best. These rear speakers come as a part of the S95QR package so you cannot opt to remove these from the deal but thankfully this soundbar system is going on discount right now.

But look past that and the wide soundstage is impressive. This is LG’s best and the IMAX Enhanced supported movies sound incredible. In Ant-Man and The Wasp: Quantumania, LG’s soundbar really stretches its legs with Dolby Atmos. In the Cinematic sound profile, the LG up mixes everything so impressively that you’ll believe the audio is coming from outside the confines of its boxy shell. As it should! This is where the support for formats on the LG S95QR starts to feel fruitful.

We were thoroughly surprised by LG’s music chops. The attack and decay in Das Spiegel by The Chemical Brothers are timed well but the overall composition could be a bit cleaner. It’s best to keep the audio profile on standard and Music (which is tuned by Meridian) to actually enjoy the nuances of your source material. Also, turn off the surround from the LG Sound Bar app if you’re playing music. You can also tinker with the whole sound characteristics of your system from the app but we wish LG would let us create entirely new sound profiles for ourselves in the app. Maybe they can add that in a future update?

Respawn Entertainment's latest Star Wars Jedi: Survivor sounds like the real deal. You’ll hear every crackle and buzz from lightsabers and the meaty subwoofer keeps bass-heavy action sequences in check. It’s best to stick to the standard, cinematic and music profiles for your content.

The feature list also extends to the HDMI ports. The HDMI out supports HDMI 2.1 which allows 4K at 60Hz throughput and lets you connect the latest consoles. We connected the Nintendo Switch and it worked without any hiccups or lags. PS5 is a bit more serious and we’re better off connecting that to the TV directly because the soundbar HDMI port doesn’t support HDR10+ and 120Hz.

You can wait for the LG S95QR to go on a sizeable discount to make the deal feel more profitable. The S95QR soundbar is one of the finer models to come from LG. Stuffing the thing with more drivers pointing in every direction does help increase its sound performance.