Samsung HW-QS700F Australia review

Ten years gone – it’s been more than 10 years since Samsung set up what it calls the ‘LA Audio Lab’ in California under Allan Devantier, who is now Vice President and Head of Samsung Audio Lab, but was formerly a respected speaker designer with Harman, working on brands including JBL (notably the M2 Master Reference Monitor) and Infinity (the Prelude MTS).

With this background, Devantier modelled Samsung’s LA Audio Lab in part on the work of the legendary loudspeaker guru Floyd Toole, who had been a mentor to Devantier at Harman. Toole was behind the legendary listening and audio facilities of Canada’s National Research Council, which include a listening room where speakers can be whisked away and replaced almost instantly on hydraulics, allowing rapid comparison while retaining a single-speaker listening space.

Devantier’s Los Angeles laboratory followed similar principles, but instead of conventional loudspeakers it was entirely devoted to the humble soundbar, including a rotating stage where three different soundbar variations can be rapidly rotated and compared.

This proved a perfectly-timed innovation, given that soundbars were by then taking over the market for entertainment systems, but were offering highly variable performance, among which Samsung at the time performed only averagely at best.

The first bars we heard from the new Lab were the MS650 and MS750, which reached us in 2017 and 2018 respectively. They were brilliant: the former became the first soundbar Sound+Image ever recommended under A$1000, and notably delivered its powerful and balanced sound without even the supporting subwoofer which was an option on the second bar.

Since then we’ve been regularly reviewing Samsung’s soundbar releases to track their prowess. But we confess we’ve focused in recent years on the whizz-bang flagship models which come with wireless rears and subs and all kinds of tricks. Yet it was the lower simpler models that had really impressed us in those early Sound Lab days.

So this time around we requested not the latest Q990F Soundbar (lauded by the UK team here; in Australia it has a RRP of A$1999 (though this is reduced to A$1499 as we type this) but instead the HW-QS700F (RRP in Australia being A$999, initially disappointingly short on discounts, but cut to $599 as we went to press in print, now up to A$699 as we go online... obviously these things change a lot, and often).

Our goal is to find out whether Samsung still delivers bargains at this level, and how much they’ve advanced.

Early spoiler alert: yep, they’re still good.

Build & channel count

The QS700F soundbar does come with a subwoofer, which helps it to slim down over those early soundbars; it is a similar length at 116cm, but at 12cm it is less deep, requiring less bench space (or allowing it to sit in front of a central TV stand).

And its height is dramatically reduced: those early bars were 80mm high, which would threaten to cover the bottom of some TV screens, whereas this new subwoofer is just 51mm high, allowing plenty of clearance for all but the most surface-hugging of TV screens.

Its construction retains the solidity of early designs while reducing weight; the top surface uses ridges which break up any reflections while allowing acoustic transparency for its upfiring drivers; the front and side edges retain the solid punched metal look around the curved corners of the bar.

Just to emphasise the relative simplicity of the QS700F, we counted the drivers and compared them with the driver count on just the bar element of that higher flagship Q990F soundbar system. The flagship bar has 13 of them in all: up, sideways, and a shedload of ‘racetrack’ drivers arrayed along the front edge to power LCR (left, centre, right) channels.

Whereas the QS700F bar here has just seven drivers in total – and they’re not quite where we expected. Four of them are firing upward, with each end hosting a large flat-fronted dome speaker measuring some 65mm across the diameter of its roll surround, plus a smaller driver type which is repeated in the forward-facing LCR positions. Samsung’s specifications don’t give much away, and initially we thought these looked like 25mm tweeters in an eye-shaped horn, but an ‘exploded’ video of the product (image above) seems to show them as rounded racetrack-shaped drivers some 5 × 3cm, with circular dust-caps in the centre. The ones on top angle slightly forward; the LCR threesome point directly forward.

Or they do so if you just plonk the bar down in front of your TV. This gives a clear configuration of 3.1.2, as advertised: three front channels, one subwoofer channel, and two upfiring channels with twin drivers.

But one of the bar’s big headline abilities is “convertible fit”, which refers to the bar’s built-in ‘Gyro sensor’ and its stated ability to provide “optimised surround sound no matter how you place it”. This doesn’t really mean “no matter how you place it”, as putting the bar vertically or at the back of the room might confuse it mightily. Rather it means that you can mount it flat against the wall, rather than sticking out in its horizontal orientation, as was the case for the earlier bars.

To do this you flip the whole bar to put the ‘top’ drivers facing forwards and the ‘front’ LCR facing up (not down). The Gyro detects the new orientation and reassigns the role of the drivers – although you will notice that must mean losing the dedicated forward-facing centre channel.

So those four upward drivers, rather than just two, make more sense in this second orientation; we suspect the bar then virtualises a centre, so more like 2.1.2 – unless, perhaps, you have a Samsung TV which supports Q-Symphony, a functionality which integrates the TV’s own speakers with the soundbar; this commonly allocates the centre channel to the TV, which may not match well in driver terms, but would in this case solve the missing centre option.

The only minor side-effect of this bar-flipping adaptability is that the physical controls for power, input and volume on top of the bar (which you may never use) face backwards when the bar is on a table, so that they will be the right way round, facing forwards, if the bar is flipped onto the wall.

There are no visible ports on the soundbar, and the internal structure seems to isolate each driver within a hexagonally-strengthed chamber; controlling the back-force of the drivers in this way may keep their response tighter and better controlled.

The subwoofer definitely has no port, and it is remarkably small for a sealed design given that ports in general allow subs to go louder and deeper, though at the cost of more resonance or boom, and reducing the overall tail of deep bass. It’s also unusual in having a pair of opposing drivers where the smaller of the two (6.5-inch) is active but the larger (8-inch) driver is an entirely passive radiator.

We have no doubt that Samsung’s ‘Audio Lab’ has been optimising these drivers, but it has also maintained a firm focus on software control of them, optimising their delivery. One of the Lab’s early innovations was an algorithm that predicted driver response to prevent them bottoming out under pressure, so allowing the soundbars to play loud with much less distortion.

That sort of thing is now described as ‘AI’ control, of course, and Samsung has moved from the former mathematical models to ‘neural network’-driven predictions that allow the software to counteract driver imperfections and distortion.

Facilities & abilities

Inputs are fairly limited, but you do get one direct HDMI input as well as the HDMI output to your TV which also brings back TV audio via e/ARC. There’s an optical option as a fallback for TVs which might not support ARC, but that won’t give you Atmos soundtracks, should they be available from either streaming services on your TV or from sources plugged into your TV.

And you want the Atmos. With upward drivers available, this is a bar which can present these immersive soundtracks. The QS700F is certainly Atmos-compatible, although there is no mention of the rival DTS:X format anywhere in the manual, other than using DTS Virtual:X as a technology to expand lesser soundtracks to the full 3.1.2 available here. Omitting DTS:X processing on soundbars has been a reasonable decision for some time now, given that Atmos has so clearly won the immersive soundtrack format war; there is (very almost) no DTS:X on streaming services anywhere. Sony Pictures is still using it on some Blu-ray and UHD Blu-ray releases, but it’s unlikely that most QS700Fs will ever now encounter a DTS:X soundtrack in the wild.

Don’t bring chunky HDMI cables to wire up the soundbar; the input socketry is perhaps questionably designed, with the HDMI sockets facing directly sideways in a cut-out only 75mm wide, thus limiting the radiusing of thicker HDMI cables, even forcing too tight a curve for our preference on thinner cables.

But the rest of setting up was an absolute breeze. We just plugged in the HDMI cable to the TV, plugged in the power cables to the subwoofer and bar, and when we turned on the TV, it recognised the soundbar and immediately gave it the signals it needed. Granted this was with a Samsung TV – but we repeated the exercise later with a TCL Roku TV, and that was equally rapid at fully incorporating the QS700F.

There is a ‘Wireless Dolby Atmos’ connection available with TVs that support
it; we’d recommend a cable if you can, but going wireless certainly might tidy up a wall-mounted configuration.

Now it’s playing, you need to control it. You are spoiled for options. Your own TV remote will almost certainly control the soundbar volume (unless the TV’s HDMI CEC has been switched off). But you also get a dedicated remote control – Samsung TV owners will find this confusingly similar to their TV remote but it has very useful dedicated buttons for subwoofer level, an input shuttle selector, and the rather important ‘Sound Mode’ button.

There’s also a button marked ‘Ch level’, which allows you to adjust the centre level and height level relative to the L/R channels. It could also allow adjustment of the rears, if you had any; there is a HW-QS750F model in some markets which comes with little wireless rears, whereas here is seems you can buy the optional SWA-9500S wireless rears for A$349. Each of those also brings an upward driver, so expanding this system to 5.1.4.

The problem with using the remote control for some of these options is that the only feedback comes via a voice prompt from the bar: a nice lady announcing “Standard”, “Adaptive”, “DTS: Virtual X”, “Surround” and “Game Pro” as you shuttle through the sound modes, for example. But you may strain to hear what she’s saying if you have a movie playing, while music via Bluetooth at any reasonable listening level entirely drowned out the poor lady behind the strains of Philly soul, leaving us clueless as to our selected mode – unless we paused the music each time we changed, which then made it harder to compare the changes. Thank heavens, then, for the additional and essential control option of Samsung’s SmartThings app. This app will take over your whole smart home if you let it, but in this scenario it offers fingertip control over the soundbar’s usefully varied but not too overwhelming options.

Aside from a volume slider and direct source selection, the SmartThings app offers bass and treble controls, subwoofer level, and various modes including ‘voice enhancement’ (which unusually seems to remove mid-bass rather than pinching up voices, which is a clever idea) and ‘night mode’ (quieter, less bass, though see also ‘Moderate Bass’ below). There’s also access to those channel levels, even an audio sync adjustment (though only making audio delay longer, which will make most sync issues worse, rather than better).

Plus those crucial sound modes.

Listening sessions

With any Samsung soundbar, the ‘sound modes’ are key to achieving what you want, or need, from any particular sound source. This was initially hard with just the shouting lady telling us what we’d selected, until we updated our apparently ancient version of SmartThings on our phone. The sound modes then became available in the app, individually selectable, and with clear feedback.

If you don’t like messing with sound modes, you can select ‘Adaptive’ and leave it there; the bar then makes good decisions, seeming to favour a ‘surround’ mode which delivers everything through the full 3.1.2, whether upscaled from stereo, both up- and downscaled from 5.1, or processing true Atmos. Upscaling lesser formats to utilise additional drivers adds extra power as well as space to the sound, obviously to the good if it doesn’t also adversely affect things tonally.

This proved an effective path for nearly all TV and movie watching. Straight stereo soundtracks to TV shows could sound a bit muted in ‘Standard’ mode, with dialogue occasionally slightly soft, and the spare drivers in the bar obviously lying fallow. Upscaling using Adaptive or DTS Virtual:X modes brightened things up considerably, the soundfield enlarged, and while the sound thinned out somewhat in the process, this could help voice intelligibility on soft-sounding material. On speech-dominant TV shows, there seemed few deleterious downsides to these expansions, other than some extra sibilance on esses in dialogue.

For more effects-driven fare, the expansion was still friendly to the sonic results in ‘Surround’ and ‘Adaptive’ modes (which were often identical), while DTS Virtual:X seemed just a step too extreme, too thinning, too sibilant. It might be better suited to upscaling a DTS 5.1 soundtrack, for which processing is included here, along with all the Dolbies up to Atmos.

Note that in ‘Standard’ mode, a 5.1 soundtrack is delivered in only 3.1, whereas ‘Surround’ and ‘Adaptive’ modes will change 5.1 to 3.1.2 to utilise the upward-firing drivers.

When we ran an Atmos channel check in any of these modes, the rear channels played from the front drivers, and the rear height channels from the front height drivers, apparently without any attempt at pseudo-phasey virtualisation of rear information, which is a good choice that likely contributes to the overall clarity of presentation here.

Bass control could be a bit confusing, as there are multiple options. In the SmartThings app there’s the main woofer slider, in addition to the separate bass and treble controls in the equaliser (or under the ‘tone controls’ button of the remote). But you can also turn on ‘Bass enhancement’, and another option, which has our favourite name in ages for a bass button… it’s not SuperBass, it’s not MegaBass, no, it’s ‘Moderate Bass’.

Which is great; we’re all for moderate bass, it’s the best kind, right on the sweet spot. But it’s possible that something has been lost in translation here. There are two divergent descriptions provided.

In the app the explanation is: “Powerful bass is delivered from woofer, so you can enjoy a deep, rich bass sound.”

But Moderate Bass actually turns off the subwoofer completely, doing as the online PDF manual more accurately describes: “When turned On, the subwoofer is muted and bass will be output through the soundbar.”

So this might work as a ‘night mode’, then, disabling the subwoofer? But there’s also a specific ‘night mode’ which can be selected, which “optimizes the listening experience at night by lowering the volume while keeping spoken dialog clear.” Not to be confused with ‘voice enhancement;’ which “Improves the dialog quality in videos and TV shows, making it easier to hear.”

So these options each slightly step on top of each other… but you can play with them, or keep them for emergencies with difficult material, or do as we did and just leave them all well alone, sticking with the ‘woofer’ level as your main bass adjustment.

Music and Atmos

We had already been playing some music in stereo: that aforementioned Philly soul, over which the voice prompt couldn’t be heard; it had been sounding great even in stereo, with The Spinners’ I’m All Around pumping forth with bass that was full right down its range, and easily tweaked in intensity by the dedicated ‘woofer’ volume on the soundbar’s remote control.

We reckon that dedicated remote control for the soundbar is likely to sit unused most of the time, as your TV remote will almost certainly control the volume anyway. But it comes into its own for this bass adjustment when playing music especially, very handy across different genres, filling out a slightly thin folk recording, or getting just the right amount of room-thrumming depth for Lily Allen’s Ruminating so that it underpins nicely without interfering with the devastating vocal.

And we’re pleased to see that Samsung’s soundbars do now include a firm focus on music. Here there’s Spotify Connect, Tidal Connect, Google Cast, AirPlay and even Roon – this last paid software option might seem rather an extravagant inclusion for a A$999 (RRP) soundbar, but its inclusion may be facilitated by the fact that Harman bought Roon a few years ago (and Samsung owns Harman, so Samsung owns Roon).

“We know from our own data that a lot of customers with Samsung TVs and soundbars are using them to listen to music,” says Allan Devantier. “No one would have thought this would happen just 10 years ago.”

That last line is not entirely true, we’d say: people have used soundbars for music ever since they arrived, and we were pointing out very early on in Sound+Image reviews that the generally appalling performance of soundbars with music was one of their main problems as an entertainment solution. Indeed musicality was one reason we praised those first Californian bars from Samsung. Most early soundbars simply didn’t sound neutral, which you might ignore for explosions and dialogue, but not with the tougher test of music. Over the years many soundbar brands have added networking and Bluetooth and music streaming, making them ever more the music machines; thankfully, many brands have also now developed more musical soundbar sound.

As a former hi-fi speaker designer, Devantier certainly knows what’s needed.

“The growing popularity of Lossless Audio and Immersive Music streaming has me really excited,” he says. “This year Samsung and Google announced Eclipsa, and Spotify introduced lossless streaming. To me, these things are huge.”

And with Atmos available on the QS700F, we turned to the growing catalogues of Atmos-mixed music, both from disc, and playing from Apple Music out of an AppleTV 4K plugged into the bar’s HDMI input. This was the first true Atmos we were playing into the bar – it can be sensible to test Atmos with music first, as it’s so much easier to assess.

But how to know that a true Atmos soundtrack is reaching the bar? There’s no useful display on the bar (no bad thing; it would be distracting), but there is an ‘info’ key on the remote which prompts an LED on the bar’s right side to flash. If receiving Atmos, this flashes blue three times. It can be quite hard to know when your TV or source is sending genuine Atmos, so this is a handy confirmation. Our AppleTV’s Atmos music feed produced the required blue flashes, so we were all good to go.

The first surprise was the wide difference between sound modes. Often Atmos will simply override such sound modes, but not here. While a table in the manual indicates that each of ‘Standard’, ‘Surround’ and ‘Adaptive’ will deliver the full 3.1.2 channels from an Atmos source, each selection changed the sound significantly. ‘Surround’ thinned it out, removing central oomph essential to supporting, say, the 2025 Atmos mix of Foreigner’s ‘4’ which was pumping forth rather pleasingly as we warmed things through. ‘Adaptive’ was less destructive but also slightly changed the sound with a shift in the higher frequencies; we think this comes from moving more sound into the bar’s upper drivers, which causes just a slight loss of clarity to midrange and above.

Another change we noticed only now: the EQ offered in the app is usually just simple bass and treble sliders, but when you’re in ‘Standard’ mode this becomes a seven-band graphic EQ, which could be useful in further tweaking the performance. We also made sure the ‘bass enhancement’ was turned off.

The other sound modes – Game Pro and DTS Virtual:X – both sounded dreadful with music (the DTS a particular phasey fail), and these should certainly be avoided for true Atmos playback.

Conclusion here then: while the ‘Standard’ sound mode sounds weak with stereo signals (because it doesn’t use all the drivers), it seems to be the best selection for keeping Atmos soundtracks accurate. This will be important to remember if you want the best from this bar.

Because its best was remarkably good. While many soundbars these days have improved on the early musical failings of the genre, this soundbar was genuinely musical. We found ourselves keeping a finger on the woofer level to get the right level of underpinning across different material, but otherwise there was none of the vocal pinching or boxiness which often marks out soundbar music. The Foreigner Atmos mix rocked powerfully from the subwoofer and soundbar combo, the guitars edgy and crunchy, the bass guitar solidly portrayed.

The thickness of the bass work through Lily Allen’s 'West End Girl' certainly needed some riding of that woofer control as it thrummed out under Ruminating, now arriving in Atmos, but her vocal tone was smooth and impressively pure throughout, so we weren’t missing a word of her extraordinary tale. The bar’s musical presentation certainly lacks the wide stereo imaging of a traditional stereo pair of hi-fi loudspeakers, and with no rears there’s not the immersion that this Atmos mix achieves on a true multispeaker surround system. But such are the usual compromises of a soundbar. What impresses here is that tonally this soundbar is musical, while in bass terms the small subwoofer brings a solid low-end to the party, whether you like your bass accurately full or positively pumping.

For stereo music, ‘Standard’ remained the best in terms of purity, though not always most impressive overall; it kept things still more constrained physically, though tonally accurate. The switch to ‘Adaptive’ was now dramatic, a level boost expanding the size of the sound field, and often highly entertaining, so that only in clear acoustic moments did we notice the way a pure vocal could sound a little boxy among all this bounciness.

Atmos TV & movies

So this soundbar is a decent music machine, if lacking the ultimate width and clarity of true hi-fi. This inevitably translates to clarity with movies: both 5.1 and Atmos soundtracks allowed the QS700F to show off its chops.

The helicopter which opens Straight Outta Compton clearly arrived from high right and passed impressively across the front soundstage; full bass immediately pumped out, to remarkable depth indeed, given the compact size of the subwoofer here.

We enjoyed some Black Mirror from Netflix in both Dolby Vision and Dolby Atmos; the Trekkie ‘USS Callister’ episode from season 4 was so impressively handled that it slipped seamlessly in sonic terms from real-world apartment scenes to the virtual space world, from subtle background effects to warp-speed sci-fi bass drops.

The best Atmos on Netflix is surely Formula 1 Drive To Survive (especially series 4 and 5): even the background music is full Atmos, mixed into discrete channels so that if you stick your head between, say, front right and front right height you’ll hear completely different channel information for music, effects, everything. This is no ‘upscale’: the sound mixes are extraordinary, and we never watch this show without a full and genuine surround speaker complement. The limitations of a soundbar, even a good one like this, are very obvious: the soundtrack is still exciting, but there’s only a small percentage of the immersion that is available from a full-size surround system.

It is important to make that point: soundbars remain a surround-sound compromise even when they do come with wireless rears, and Atmos without rears is obviously far less immersive. Ultimately there are limits from the bar’s position; when we played Straight Outta Compton later on a full-speaker 5.1.2 system, the advantages of having large rear speakers and genuine height speakers on the ceiling put the apparent spaciousness of the QS700F in the shade.

But within its limitations, this is a soundbar and subwoofer combo that makes a lot of noise, and keeps it all under control. The additional drivers and smarts expand a soundtrack well, while the subwoofer underpins a real movie experience. We ran Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein and the QS700F delivered both impact and subtlety, sometimes simultaneously – on the ice pack at the start, with wind effects and the crunches of men breaking ice. Or later as he climbs the tower, the brass-heavy soundtrack competes with the surrounding thunder and lightning, yet there’s no sense of masking or any lack of clarity, and that little subwoofer continued its remarkably powerful underpinning, so that there was a real movie feel to soundtracks:
an expansive spread around the front stage, and solid bass below. To expand still further, there are also those optional rears available if you wanted to add them – though as a package you might be better upgrading to the discounted flagship, since that would come in at a similar price to the expanded QS700F.

Verdict

The HW-QS700F certainly proves that Samsung hasn’t neglected its lower soundbar ranges while we’ve been playing with their flagship products. We couldn’t say that this bar radically improves on the performance of those earlier Californian bars that impressed us so much, but it certainly maintains the magic, and provides this full and strong performance across movies and music in a now smaller package: a relatively compact bar sitting lower to the table surface, and a very impressive compact little subwoofer.

What has changed is Atmos compatibility (including wireless Atmos where you can provide it) and the spaciousness of sound that can bring, along with greatly improved networking and music service provision. Plus that neat ability to flip the bar for more compact wall-mounting. Also far more comprehensive app control from SmartThings, which makes the bar extremely easy to use, and to tweak on the fly to deliver its very best. The Toole*-Devantier principles of speaker and soundbar design can claim another great success here.

* If you want to catch up on some of the ideas from Dr. Floyd Toole that made this soundbar possible, his recent presentation to the Toronto Audio Engineering Society can be viewed on YouTube here

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