This reviewer received promo considerations or sweepstakes entry for writing a review.
Quick Review: The Samsung HW-Q900T is a superb sounding soundbar at a good price point for nicer home theaters. It’s great for watching movies and listening to music but it has a few setup gotcha’s. Specific TV sound settings for ARC/HDMI are required for the recommended HDMI connection to work. The Amazon Alexa implementation is usable but it has a few glitches. After living with it for 3 weeks I’m happy with it and have no buyer’s remorse. It does very well with movie sounds, centering dialogue, expanding movie sounds effects, and giving a clarity to movie soundtracks that will make movies more engaging. The default Adaptive Sound setting produces an incredible sound field. You can set it to this setting and forget it. I recommend this soundbar for people dissatisfied with the flat sound of cheaper models but that cannot or don’t want to do the complex wiring setup of a 7.1 speaker system.
Longer Review: I’ve been putting up with a $250 2.1 Samsung soundbar for many years. It sounded better than TV audio but movie dialogue was hard to hear and music sounded sonically flat at every volume level. So it was time to upgrade.
I went with Samsung again because I have a Samsung TV and I wanted the soundbar to play nice with it. I also wanted a large sound field and the HW-Q900T has a wide 48.5 inch bar – one of the largest on the market. That length is part of the magic of producing a wider sound field – which is perhaps more important with music than with movies. Stereo isn’t really stereo if the speakers are right next to each other.
The other contender at this level is the HW-950T. I listened to this unit at Best Buy but it was not set up to show off the unit at its best. It is almost identical to the 900 with the main difference being the largish rear wireless speakers that come with the Q950 and a few software difference. But the unit on display had the rear speakers setup in the front – so it was impossible to tell how they would enhance surround sound as intended. There was almost no noticeable sound difference between the two units in how they were set up. The HW-Q900T can be had for $999.00 while the 950 is $1699 at a discounted price. If you have money to burn, go right ahead but at this price point you might well consider going all out on a true Atmos receiver / speaker system. The bottom line is I didn’t think the Q950 sounded enough different (actually no difference at all) to warrant the higher cost. Best Buy had a package deal on the Q900T that included a set of Samsung rear surround speakers for an additional $200, and I chose that option but I’ll review them separately.
Physical setup of the 900T is fairly simple. Place the bar under your television, plug it in, connect it to your TV, and you are good to go. It comes with wall mounting brackets if your setup requires them. Ours is placed on a mantel below the wall mounted TV and that works well. Make sure there’s clearance both to the sides and above the soundbar as there are speakers that fire to the top and side to provide some of the spatial effects. If you have a smaller TV (55 inches or smaller) or have it placed in a smaller space this soundbar might not be the best choice due to the length. It will still sound good but it might not take advantage of the sound field characteristics of the 900T, so the Q70T might be a better choice and save you some $$.
The Q900T comes with a large 12 inch subwoofer, the same unit as the 950. My old soundbar had one too but this one is larger and, well blew the old one away. It sounds great. It is wireless (Bluetooth) very simple to set up, and pairs with the soundbar automatically out of the box. Because of the physics of sound you can place it almost anywhere in the same room and it will sound great. We are hearing sound, bass, and music we didn’t know existed.
Connections: The 900T can be connected to sound sources by Bluetooth, HDMI (two inputs), HDMI eArc (one port), by optical cable, and by Wi-Fi. The recommended “best sound” is the through the bi-directional ARC HDMI port. So I connected the bar through this to my TV straight away… and I got no sound. I fussed with settings on the bar and on the TV. Nothing. I hooked the bar up with a digital optical cable (second best option), and got sound, and pretty good sound too. But I really wanted it optimized. The manual that came in the box was frankly not very useful or detailed. There was more help on-line both with the FAQ and help web pages and the PDF manual which had a lot more detail in it than the one in the box. But it took a lot of work to find it. To save you the day or two it cost me here’s the scoop: Set ALL of your TV sound settings to PCM, and turn on Anynet+, and you’ll get good quality digital audio through that ARC HDMI cable. Additionally the Anynet+ will ensure that the two devices talk to each other and play nice. Some of the Q900T options will appear in the TV setting menu when connected by ARC HDMI.
The TV will take sound from whatever source (80% of the time we stream from Samsung Smart APS – Netfllix, Google TV, Disney+ etc), and send it to the Soundbar for processing and amplification. But if your HDMI audio is set to something other than PCM (pulse code mediation) such as bitstream, the HDMI cable will not deliver sound to the soundbar, nor will it drive the optional rear speakers. Depending on your TV and the default settings, yours may work fine out of the box. Mine did not ad it took work to find a solution. The best skill to have solving tech problems is persistence (and Google).
The Q900T offers four sound modes: Standard, Surround, Game Pro, and Adaptive Sound. This is where the magic happens on the soundbar. These settings alter the digital sound processing the bar performs on audio. Standard will basically reproduce whatever sound field it’s given (DTS, 2.1, 5.1, 7.1 etc). Surround mode converts those fields in to 7.1.2 on the bar, and 9.1.2 if you have the rear speaker kit. Game Pro processes all inputs into 7.1.2 or 9.1.2 with the rear speaker kit. Game Pro is intended for use with a gaming console (Xbox) and purports to match location of action on the screen with the sound field. I’m not a gamer so, not sure if it works. Oddly, it seems to have turned on automatically for an NFL game I watched. I am not sure if this was incidental but it did sound quite good. The Adaptive Sound setting is probably where you should set your sound bar and leave it. It is the real magic of this device. It adaptively changes the sound processing based on the content of the sound. It emphasizes central channel dialogue in moves, for example making it crystal clear and much easier to hear. It works quite well with almost any sound source (music, videos, movies). Adaptive Sound sounds really, really good. And it sounds good at all volume levels. This is the heart of the engineering in this unit.
Amazon Alexa: I love the convenience and the huge music catalogue of Alexa and Amazon music. Tell Alexa to queue up a tune and (mostly) she does it. But one of the irritations of my old sound bar was having to manually switch input sources. You had to specify TV or Bluetooth. This would often confuse family members when they switched back to TV from Alexa. I was hoping the Q900T would solve this problem and seamlessly change sources. It does in fact do this. But Alexa on the Q900T is glitchy. Alexa music plays over Wi-Fi. It will stream anything that your Alexa account is set up for (including Spotify and Pandora). But Alexa on the Soundbar is slow to respond to voice commands; much slower than my Echo Dot. When playing music back, it will hiccup every so often with a slight pause. Its very loud if you forget to turn the sound down before speaking to her, and the Alexa volume cannot be set independent of other sounds from the bar. Then I had a problem the first week where the Amazon account associated with the bar simply stopped working, and there was no way to correct it with either the remote or with the SmartThings App. Alexa is set up on the Q900T using the Samsung’s Mobile Smart Things App (more on this below). But there’s no way of changing or fixing an Amazon account on the App once it’s been set. Fixing Alexa required a compete reset of the soundbar which wipes out any other settings you’ve made. But this did restore Alexa to working order. This glitch happened again right in the middle of a playless. And again it required re-initializing the Q900T. Turns out this is a software bug that happens when the Q900T updates it’s own software. Clearly the engineering team did not spend as much effort on implementing Alexa or their own Smart Things app as they did simulating Dolby Atmos in the sound field. But resseting the Q900T does not solve the music hiccup problem. I fear this will continue until Samsung improves the devices firmware with a larger memory buffer for streaming sources.
The Smart Things App is both fun to use and frustrating when you need to actually fix something that’s not working. It will do some basic EQ setting (treble, bass, Subwoofer) and will allow you to quickly change sound modes and volumes. It gives you a quick visual of how your TV / Soundbar are configured. But there are many settings that still require the remote control and awkwardly looking at the small display screen located on the top of the bar. The location of the screen has been a source of contention amongst consumer reviews, but I think the engineers made the right choice in locating up top so that it doesn’t distract while watching your TV. But it is not convenient for setup and if they had put more features into the Smart Things App the display location would not be an issue. For starters give the app the ability to change Wi-Fi and Alexa settings without having to reinitialize the bar.
Bottom line is I am very happy with how this Q900T sounds. It is acoustically well engineered. Recommended.
