Ok, I need an honest, no BS assessment on how a Samsung q990d system will compare to a cheap 5.1 (or 7.1 etc) system.
I can get a q990d for $1400aud which includes rear speakers and a sub. Will connest with the samsung tv and its all just ready to go out of the box.
Surround sound setups range from free to $40,000… of course a well thought out setup will be better but I just want to hear the cars overtaking me when I watch Ford Vs Ferarri.
For the “sub 2k” price bracket. As a novice, how much am I leaving on the table really?
I would put sound bar vs speakers as a “once you know you can’t un-see/hear/taste/feel/smell it” camp for two reasons: general sound quality as well as imaging.
General sound quality means “reasonably flat, pleasant, and unmolested” sound. There are a few things at play here like quality of the drivers, crossover design, DSP tuning, etc. “Taste” is also a thing here and many brands have their own tuning profiles. This actually helps make some people more brand loyal simply because they like, or have gotten used to, “their” brand’d tuning.
Loudspeakers have always struggled against Hoffman’s Iron Law which says choose two of the following: Efficiency, Low Frequency Extension, and Enclosure Volume. Smaller things are usually perceived as more aesthetically pleasing and speaker cabinets have been getting smaller for decades. This used to come at the cost of low frequency extension, but for the past 10-15 years the industry has started shifting to throwing watts at the problem. The problem with this is two fold: the physical requirements of the drivers become somewhat nuts (very long excursions) and the electrical requirements of the amplifier can result in distorted output as the volume increases (rates watts != clean watts).
The advent of cheap/easy to integrate DSP has resulted in tons of its use, including increasing low end or at least perceived low end. That’s not to say that all DSP is bad. It can compensate for other defencies in a speaker’s design and can also make them more exciting to listen to (more bass at low volumes for example). DSP also offers the option of different tunings at different volume levels. In the olden days you were trading BOM cost against frequency response and distortion curves. Now DSP can massively help.
Soo…
Soundbars generally trade enclosure volume for efficiency, which means they use a mix of DSP and amplifier power to try to build out their low end. The situation is better with a sub, but sound bar subs tend to be physically small which just shifts the bottleneck from the sound bar to its sub.
Soundbars are also basically guaranteed to use DSP, with all the positives and negatives that brings.
Some who take this super seriouslytm will claim you’re better off spending your $$ on two good speakers, and maybe a sub, vs five speakers and a sub. They would likely skoff at sound bars.
I generally suspect that discrete speakers, with somewhat larger enclosure volumes, will sound better than soundbars. It’s going to take up some space and you’re going to have to figure out that tradeoff yourself.
I would personally say that home built is much better bang for your buck option than commercial offerings.
For imaging, it’s all about speaker placement. For a 5.1 setup you want your front left/right speakers to be 22-30 degrees away from you. If you’re 1.5 meters from them they’ll need to be between 1.2 and 1.7 meters apart from one another. Odds are you’re probably sitting further back than that, which means your sound bar would need to be multiple meters long for “good” imaging.
In conclusion: