Review: LG S95TR 9.1.5 Soundbar System

If you consult Reddit’s crowd of home theater enthusiasts, no soundbar systems are worth the money or can compare to an entry-level wired home theater. Find a basic wired speaker for $200 on Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, and you can get easily better sound than any $1,500 soundbar can supply. That soundbar is likely to be dead or unsupported long before your receiver dies, anyway.

To that, I point to high-end systems like the new LG S95TR. This hugely powerful 810-watt, 9.1.5 system can fill medium-size rooms with truly cinematic sound, and it sets up and pairs with late-model TVs (LG OLEDs especially) in seconds.

With no cables except for power and a single HDMI connection, it’s about as easy and cheap—for this number of drivers—as you’ll find in the Dolby Atmos-sphere. Sure, you could buy a mid-tier home theater setup with a receiver, tons of cables, and speakers, but it really just doesn’t sound that much better for this amount of money anymore, and it’s so much more of a pain in most other ways. If I were outfitting my fancy new living room, especially if I was a renter, I’d probably start here.

Easy Install

Photograph: Parker Hall

Most audio brands don’t want to admit it to you, but creating anything that resembles cinematic sound requires a lot of speakers. If possible, you want dedicated drivers for every single channel that the sound mixer of the film or TV show used to create the mix, so that your system isn’t having to blend things together unnaturally. The S95TR has a massive array of 14 drivers aimed at both your ears and your walls and ceiling, plus a large 16-inch wireless subwoofer to fill out the low end.

Despite this huge array of speakers, the bar itself is only about 3 inches tall and 49 inches long, which makes it easy to place on most modern TV stands (it also has mounting holes for wall mounting, if that’s your thing). The rear speakers are large and triangular at the front, with grilles on top for ceiling-firing Atmos speakers (they bounce sound off to simulate ceiling-mounted speakers that are hugely annoying to mount). You’ll want to mount these or place them on cabinets or stands, depending on how your room is laid out. I put them on speaker stands behind my couch, aiming them toward the center of the room. The subwoofer is also fairly easy to place, just find a spot in your room with an outlet where you like the bass response and plug it in.

Photograph: Parker Hall

Plugging in the soundbar through HDMI (it features eARC) to any modern TV means that you can immediately use the TV remote to control audio volume, but you will want to use the remote on the soundbar itself (unless you own an LG TV), to change settings. It does also support things like Tidal Connect Dolby Vision pass-through, which makes it a great bar to stream music to, or plug your disc player in for full-bitrate video (and audio).

Pressing Play

I had the pleasure of reviewing this system alongside LG’s new C4 OLED, which can add even more channels to the mix, contributing its own TV speakers to boost the center channel and make it sound a bit more like the voices are coming directly from the image.

The huge array of speakers and the volume they can produce means you really get a sense of scale when scenes change, or when you go from one type of thing to another. When playing modern classics like Dune and Mad Max: Fury Road, you feel the immensity of the scenes in the audio profile that the bar, subwoofer, and satellite speakers convey. When my wife switches back over to RuPaul’s Drag Race, I’m immediately sucked back into what’s happening onscreen, with more traditional three-channel TV audio that’s absorbing and dynamic, but much smaller-feeling in your space.

Photograph: Parker Hall

You can adjust sound modes on the bar, but I tend to err on the side of standard settings except when watching a film, where I experimented (and occasionally settled on) the Cinema mode, which passes a bit more sound to the surround and height channels, near as I can tell.

Standard mode essentially listens to whatever the TV is telling it to do, which makes it play super nice with LG’s AI processing inside late-model TVs. With this and the C4, it’s essentially a “turn on and forget it’s there” vibe, which is what I prefer in my home theater systems. There is nothing worse than having to open cabinets and hit buttons and wait for things to turn on and see each other. It really can’t be overstated how well it worked (and how rare an experience this is, oddly, in A/V land).

The direct competitor to this model is Samsung’s Q990D ($1,700), which, I have to admit, I prefer in some ways. The audio profile of the LG can be a bit thinner and more bright than Samsung’s, and I find that Samsung’s model bounces sound off the walls a bit better for a wider soundstage. That said, given how well the S95TR integrates with late-model LG TVs, I’d probably choose this over the Samsung bar if I was buying the LG TV, and likewise buy the Samsung bar if I was buying a Samsung TV.

As far as simple (and, let’s be honest, not heinously expensive) ways to outfit a room with a pretty solid approximation of what they’d experience in an A/V nerd’s cave, I think LG has really nailed it here. If I was buying a C4 and didn’t have a proper sound system to pair it with, I’d really be looking at this.