Customer Ratings & Reviews

As cheap it is it’s a good sound bar so far not too loud

Hardly any wires and sound is just a good as a receiver

At the outset of this review I should say that the HW-N650 sound bar's most unique and touted feature, Acoustic Beam Technology, is something that I could not test because I do not have a modern game console. Acoustic Beam Technology is designed to give the impression that sounds from characters in a game are coming precisely from the their location on the screen. I've read that the technology works well but cannot write about it directly from experience. In trying out the features of the HW-N650, I actually learned more than I wanted to know about how Samsung Smart TVs handle audio. You would think that a Samsung sound bar would automatically play nicely with a Samsung Smart TV. I found that to be true to some extent, but I also learned about some of the limitations of the audio on Samsung TVs that I think everyone should know about. I also found that my Windows 10 Dell Inspiron 3050 micro desktop had some very strange interactions with the sound bar that you might want to watch out for if you want to use a Windows 10 PC with the HW-N650. First, let me explain my setup and what I expected from the HW-N650 sound bar. My living room home theater, which has included just about every audio and video component known to humankind at some point already has an A/V receiver and a nice Axiom 5.1 speaker set, so this was my baseline for good-sounding audio. In my basement I scrabbled together some cheap but decent A/V components mostly for background music for yoga and weight-lifting: a Samsung UN40J5200 Smart TV, a Samsung DVD player, and the Dell micro desktop. The TV speakers in the system got the job done, but I wondered if I could improve the system's audio by adding the HW-N650 sound bar. Setting up the HW-N650 looked so obvious that I did not even consult the manual before beginning to plug in cables, but this was a mistake. I mean, it was obvious where to plug in the power cord and optical cable, the subwoofer connected immediately, and sound started coming out of the bar from the TV. But I oriented the bar incorrectly and the display was facing up instead of forward as it should be. That was easily corrected. I do recommend reading the user manual. One important recommendation I learned from the manual was to change the digital output of your TV to Dolby Digital if it was set to PCM. So I went to the sound settings on my Samsung TV and found that the digital output was set to PCM. However, the Dolby Digital option was grayed out, indicating it was not available. After much research, I learned from a Samsung support page that the Dolby setting was available only under three conditions: (1) when the TV is receiving a signal with a digital soundtrack (2) when the TV is using a streaming service with a digital soundtrack, and (3) when the TV is accessing a file on your network with a supported digital track. Therefore, do not expect to see the Dolby option on your Samsung TV if you are connecting something like a DVD player or game console to the TV with HDMI. This is true of all TVs, by the way: they can only generate Dolby Digital from their own internal tuner and not from an external HDMI source. However, there are other options for better sound quality. The sound setting options on my Samsung TV did include DTS Neo 2:5. I tried this and the audio was much clearer than the PCM option. I played a song that I consider to be masterfully produced for gorgeousness (Sean's Song by Honeychurch) and it sounded beautiful with the DTS Neo 2:5 setting—much better than through the TV speakers and comparable to the sound in my A/V receiver-based living room home theater. Another option is to plug your HDMI component directly into the sound bar and then run a cable from the sound bar's HDMI out to your TV. But if you have more than one HDMI-based components you'll have to get yourself some sort of HDMI splitter. I tried plugging my DVD player into the sound bar with pass-through to the TV and it worked fine. At least the first time. Because the DVD player is a Samsung Anynet+ device (that is, HDMI-CEC), the added advantage of this setup was being able to control the TV, sound bar, and DVD player with just the TV remote. And this did work perfectly the first time, without any special setup steps. But then some wacky things happened after the TV and sound bar were joined by HDMI. My PC, which was plugged into the HDMI 2 port of the TV and played audio just fine when the sound bar was connected only with the optical cable, apparently detected the presence of the Samsung sound bar when I connected it to the HDMI 1 port of the TV, because the PC quickly "installed" the device with downloaded software before I knew what was happening. This might have been fine, except now I could not play any kind of audio from the computer. Attempts to play any video from YouTube resulted in an error message. Trying to play an mp3 produced a message from Windows, "Can't play—another app is controlling your sound right now." After trying many things, I found that I could restore sound on the PC only after removing the HDMI connection between the TV and sound bar and resetting the TV's audio options back to defaults. Of course I had to plug the DVD player directly into the TV again, and I lost the ability to control the TV and sound bar with just the TV remote. I don't give up easily, though, so the next day I tried the HDMI connection between the sound bar and TV again. Oddly, though, this time sound from the PC worked perfectly, but the TV could not "see" the DVD player with the sound bar pass-through. Maybe I will try this again some other day, but for now I will stick to a setup without the sound-bar-to-TV HDMI connection. It's not bad, and I rather like the sound bar remote control anyway. But let this be a warning to prospective buyers, that the HDMI connection could be tricky. It would have been nice if the user's manual went into more detail about the advantages and disadvantages of an HDMI connection over a simple optical cable connection. I tested the Bluetooth capability of the sound bar by connection my Samsung phone to it. No problems there. The procedure was simple and the music on my phone played nicely through the sound bar. Overall, I would say that the HW-N650 sound bar works very well. It is easy to set up and control, for the most part. The sound quality is very nice. The bass from the subwoofer was not terribly loud, but there was a good balance between the bar and subwoofer. The only area where you might experience some hitches is with HDMI connections, although my sense is that these can be ironed out with some patience.

We were very pleased with the quality of this soundbar.

Works great easy to connect and use. Wish it was louder.

wonderful sound from low to high (there's a woofer with it)

Goes great with the Samsung 65" Q8 TV that we bought.

You can hear the clear voices , great sub woofer !

This product provides a measure of sound that is enjoyable.

It's need it to make the difference for the Smart tv

Love this system. Would definitely recommend. A+++

Sound system is so loud it shakes the house! Awesome!

This sound bar was the best gift ever for my husband.

Do not know how to attach surround sound speaker to TV

Great sound bar for gaming especially playing fortnite

I would recommend this sound bar to everyone I know

Great surround sound system. Easy to connect and use.

Love the sound but would like to have a bit more bass out of it

This is the greatest sound bar since sliced bread!

Works well and just what I wanted. Would recommend to a friend.