Verdict
The HW-Q990D might not look very different to its highly acclaimed predecessor, but its sound is on a different level – with music as well as movies. Which pretty much by default makes it the best full surround soundbar in town.
Pros
- Powerful and immersive sound stage
- Excellent HDR and gaming support over HDMI loop through
- Good with music too
Cons
- It’s not cheap
- Creates more clutter than a single soundbar option
- Might annoy the neighbours!
Key Features
-
11.1.4 channels of soundGenuine drivers across the array of speaker channels -
Dolby Atmos and DTS:X playback Both object based sound formats used for most movie soundtracks are supported. -
Four component systemAlong with the main soundbar, you get two multi-channel wireless rear speakers and subwoofer
Introduction
Samsung has been the (pretty much) undisputed champion of the full surround sound soundbar world for years now.
The combination of raw power and peerless 360-degree sound stage creation delivered by the brand’s flagship Q990 soundbars has consistently beaten rivals to a mushy, underpowered pulp.
The past 12 months have seen one or two true surround alternatives – most notably JBL’s brutally good 1300 – finally start to seriously challenge Samsung for the home cinema soundbar crown. So can Samsung’s top soundbar for 2024, the HW-Q990D, find another gear?
Availability
The Samsung HW-Q990D is available across most of the world’s territories. Stocks still seem to winding up to full capacity in some areas, but any temporary stocking issues should be resolved by the time you’re reading this article.
In the UK the HW-Q990 sells for £1699, while it goes for $1749 and AU$1999 in the US and Australia respectively. This clearly puts the Q990D in premium territory – though it’s worth pointing out that there are single-bar soundbar solutions and single soundbar plus optional surround and subwoofer extra packages out there that cost significantly more without offering the prodigious channel count the Q990D gives you right out of the box.
Design
- Four-component system
- All components connect wirelessly
- Main soundbar is quite large and heavy
If you’re the sort of person who likes to measure value in terms of physical returns, the Q990D doesn’t let you down. It pushes the concept of a soundbar to the nth degree by shipping with four separate components: the main bar, a wireless subwoofer and a pair of rear speakers.
The main bar and subwoofer are far from shrinking violets, too. The bar extends to just over 1.2m wide, nearly 7cm high, and 13.8cm deep, meaning you’ll probably want to partner it with a pretty large TV if it’s not going to end up looking comically large.
While a significant addition to your AV set up, I should stress that it sits less high than some of Samsung’s previous soundbar designs, and should fit underneath the screens of most of today’s TVs without hiding any of the picture or obstructing any IR receptors.
Despite its size, I’d say the hard plastic grilled finish, sharp edges and angled back corners of the HW-Q990D’s main bar make it a pretty attractive unit in a industrial kind of way.
The subwoofer looks a bit clunky compared with the grilled crispness of the main soundbar, but its hefty size enables Samsung to fit it with both a whopping great side-mounted 8-inch driver, as well as providing lots of room for air to move through the bodywork and out of a large port on its rear edge. Plus, unlike the other speakers you can tuck the subwoofer away almost anywhere in your living room provided nothing’s blocking the main driver outlet.
The HW-Q990D’s dedicated subwoofer also benefits from quite unusual design touch in the shape of an Acoustic Lens attachment. This is essentially a circular cover that sits an inch or so above the driver so that it can both improve the dispersion of low frequency sounds around your room and reduce potential distortions.
The rear speakers are quite compact relative to the other two components in the HW-Q990D system. So much so that it’s hard to believe that they actually each contain three separate drivers capable of mixing in with the sound coming from the rest of the system. They wear the same dark grey grilled hard plastic finish as the main bar, and again adopt a quite industrial, angular stance that I personally didn’t mind at all.
The HW-Q990D ships with a sleek, comfortable to hold remote control with well organised and tactile buttons.
Features
- 11.1.4 channels of sound
- 656W of total audio power
- Dolby Atmos and DTS:X playback
As you might hope with a soundbar that sets you back almost £1700, the Samsung HW-Q990D doesn’t skimp on the features – even adding a couple of significant new ones to the already far-ranging offering of its highly acclaimed Q990C predecessor.
Starting with the most headline grabbing stuff, its 11.1.4 channel count is one of the highest in the soundbar world. These are real channels too, each with its own physical driver, rather than any of them being repeats or virtual ones created by acoustic processing.
The full channel breakdown finds the packed main bar delivering front centre, front left, front right, front side left, front side right, side left, side right and two up-firing height effect drivers, while the rears each provide one up-firer, one forward firer, and one side firer. The subwoofer, of course, just delivers the ‘.1’ bass channel.
The idea behind all these channels is to create as fulsome a representation as possible of the 360-degree hemisphere of sound associated with the object-based (meaning they position sound effects in a 3D soundscape) Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks now provided with most movies.
There’s a total of 656W of power to feed into all these channels, as well as processing options capable of converting limited channel audio sources – even stereo music – into all-singing, all-dancing multi-channel mixes that take advantage of all the power and channels the system has available.
The system now provides an extremely useful and effective Space Fit Pro auto calibration system to help get the balance of all the channels right for your room set up. This now incorporates the subwoofer’s input into its calculations, rather than treating low frequencies somewhat separately as the Q990C predecessor did.
Having mentioned one new feature introduced for the Q990D, lets look at a few more. Starting with Personal Listening, where you can now use the rear speakers by themselves as a smaller stereo system if you want to watch TV without disturbing other people in the house. You can also use the rears in a Party Sound Grouping configuration, so they harmonise with the main bar to deliver a more room-filling music experience.
I’m also happy to report that Samsung has added Chromecast to its supported streaming systems this year, alongside AirPlay 2. There’s been an upgrade to Samsung’s Game Mode Pro soundbar feature that now optimises the sound profile to suit different genres of game, rather than just applying a generic gaming profile as previously.
This new feature takes the gaming genre info from the Gaming Hub found on many Samsung TVs these days (it doesn’t work with other TV brands) and applies special profiles for FPS, Racing, Rhythm, Sports and Fighting games. So with FPS titles, for instance, footsteps and gunfire sounds will be emphasised. For racing games car engine sounds will be enhanced.
For Rhythm games the sound profile will take on a more musical flavour. For sports titles crowd and stadium atmospherics will enjoy more presence and scale. And finally for fighting games, punching and kicking sounds will be given more emphasis to create a more visceral effect.
Perhaps my personal favourite of the upgrades the HW-Q990D introduces over the HW-Q990C is support in the HDMI loopthrough system for 4K/120Hz and variable refresh rate gaming features. This means gamers are no longer dependent on the potentially laggy HDMI Audio Return channel route to enjoy lossless Dolby Atmos or DTS:X sound with 4K/120Hz games.
While the physical design of the soundbar components and speakers inside hasn’t changed for the HW-Q990D, Samsung claims to have significantly tweaked the way those drivers take on the audio signals they’re fed. But you’ll have to wait until the sound quality part of the review to find out how true these claims are.
There remain a few other features I should cover off that while not new for the Q990D are still important to this soundbar’s premium status. Connectivity is solid, with two HDMI inputs (a third might be nice next time round) and one eARC-capable HDMI output, an optical digital audio input, and support for both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless streams.
You can also establish a connection between the soundbar and reasonably recent Samsung mobile phones simply by tapping the phone against the main soundbar’s bodywork, plus there’s direct connectivity with Spotify Connect.
The HDMI loop through supports HDR pass-through in all four of the main HDR formats: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and (even though no Samsung TVs support it) Dolby Vision.
You can control the soundbar using Samsung’s Smart Things app rather than the remote control, and you can also issue it with verbal instructions via built-in Amazon Alexa or ‘works with’ Google Assistant support.
An Adaptive sound option uses AI to tailor the soundbar’s audio profile to the sort of content you’re watching (film, concert, sports event etc), while an Active Voice Amplifier adds more emphasis to vocals if it feels a sudden increase in the noise levels in your room might have made dialogue harder to hear.
Last but not least, the Q990D supports both (lossy) wireless transmission of Dolby Atmos sound from recent premium Samsung TVs, and Samsung’s Q Symphony feature, where the speakers and audio processing in compatible Samsung TVs can join forces with the soundbar’s speakers to create a larger sound stage with more precise height effect and dialogue placement.
Sound Quality
- Uniquely complete Dolby Atmos soundstage
- Excellent power and precision
- Much improved musicality
The Samsung HW-Q990D gets no extra channels compared with its predecessor, and no changes to the physical design of its speakers or drivers. And yet… it sounds better. A lot better.
Particularly impressive is the extra sense of detail the HW-Q990D manages to deliver. Not even the quietest, most subdued, most background effect in a film mix passes the soundbar by, helping it produce maybe the busiest, most sensitive and overall most accurate surround sound performance I’ve ever heard from a soundbar.
It’s not just that the HW-Q990D somehow manages to reveal subtle details that seem to pass the vast majority of its rivals by that makes the upgrade over the Q990C so compelling, either. It’s also what it does with these extra details. Every detail, no matter how faint or pronounced, is placed with remarkable precision within the 360-degree sound stage the HW-Q990D crafts so expertly around your seating position.
Nor does it matter whether a particular sound effect is largely ambient or connected to a specific object or point of emanance; whatever an effect’s purpose in a mix, the HW-Q990D knows where to place it and how to treat it so effectively that you can almost imagine a film’s original audio mix team are sitting there telling the soundbar what to do.
The HW-Q990D’s dedication to producing not just a true surround experience but a 360-degree, three-dimensional hemisphere of ultra-immersive sound plays a key role in this sense of literally every sound element being in exactly the right place. You feel keenly aware of the presence of every one of the soundbar’s 16 channels as sounds pop up all around your room, or noisy objects transition from front to back, back to front, side to side and even (thanks to the four built-in up-firing drivers) over your head.
The precision of the effects placement, especially when it comes to relatively ambient sounds, also makes the HW-Q990D arguably peerlessly good at defining the scale of different film locations and settings.
What most sets the HW-Q990D’s outstanding use of its huge channel count apart, though, is how well each individual channel is integrated and balanced with the others (especially if you’ve run the Space Fit Pro auto-calibration system) to create that all-important Dolby Atmos/DTS:X hemisphere effect around your viewing position without leaving any glaring gaps or holes in it. Everything feels fantastically seamless and joined up.
The HW-Q990D’s understanding of the relative weight of every element in a complex mix is also exemplary. Background effects stay correctly in the background, subtle/quiet effects never gain too much prominence, and the most aggressive, dominant effects are delivered with outstanding clarity, punch and immediacy.
The speed and aggression with which the HW-Q990D responds to hard sounds like punches and gunshots is outstanding, yet the soundbar’s dynamic range and power is good enough to ensure that none of these gruff home cinema staples ever sounds harsh or painful. Even when they emerge from the rear speakers, which actually combine tonally with the much bigger main soundbar remarkably well.
Actually, the rear channels deliver one of the best all round improvements over the Q990C, responding much more effectively and cleanly to sudden demands from an aggressive soundtrack and avoiding the distortions that could very occasionally crop up with that still brilliant predecessor.
All of the HW-Q990D’s new-found precision, balance and sensitivity is delivered, crucially, without any damage being done to the mammoth power and dynamic range that Samsung’s flagship soundbars have long excelled at. Even large rooms will be completely filled by the Q990D’s sound, and there’s a truly visceral feeling to the densest soundtrack moments that precious few other soundbars can compete with.
The subwoofer injects vast amounts of bass into proceedings without ever sounding as if it’s hit a hard low frequency floor, or suffering from drop outs or phutting distortions. On the contrary, its sounds roll out around your room with striking purity and definition.
At the same time, they never draw undue attention to themselves, always attaching to the bottom of the main soundbar’s frequency response without sounding gappy or baggy, and swelling or ebbing back immaculately as and when a soundtrack demands.
While soaking in the improvements the HW-Q990D delivers with film soundtracks, I found myself thinking and hoping that many of them might well have a beneficial impact, too, on the soundbar’s musicality. Happily, the HW-Q990D does indeed prove to be far and away Samsung’s most musical flagship soundbar.
Particularly good to hear is how much more effectively the subwoofer engages with music. No longer do its contributions tend to sound a bit clumsy or arbitrary; now it seems much smarter both about when a bit more bass is needed and when it isn’t, and the relative weight it should be bringing when it does decide to make its presence felt. Basically it seems to be operating under the influence of a much more holistic appreciation for music than previous Samsung soundbar subwoofers have tended to.
Just as importantly, the HW-Q990D finally recognises that music often if not always demands a different, warmer tone overall than the clinical muscularity that typically works so well for film soundtracks. This ability to gently adjust its tone helps music of all sorts sound more natural, balanced and engaging – without sacrificing clarity, timing or dynamic range.
The improvements I’ve just described have no negative impact on the one aspect of music that Samsung soundbars have actually always handled pretty well: vocals. Voices still sound perfectly positioned at the centre of but slightly above the rest of the mix, but now they’re no longer undermined by nearly as many imbalances, inconsistencies, and fuss from the rest of a track’s musical elements.
One last thing to add here is that while I think most serious music fans will prefer to leave the HQ-Q990D in its stereo mode for most music playback, it also sounds brilliant if you can feed it native Dolby Atmos music mixes, and can create a surprisingly convincing virtual surround sound mix out of stereo tracks if you switch to its surround sound expansion mode.
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
If you want full immersion
You want the most all-round immersive, detailed and powerful soundbar around.
You don’t have enough space
You don’t want the clutter of a four-piece soundbar system.
Final Thoughts
Samsung has achieved the seemingly impossible with the HW-Q990D, delivering a compelling step up from its predecessor without changing any of its physical specifications. The result is the most powerful and precise full surround sound experience for films in the soundbar world, accompanied for arguably the first time with a Samsung flagship soundbar by an accomplished (and flexible) music performance.
The increased competition at the quality end of the soundbar world in recent times has been great to see. On the evidence of the HW-Q990D, though, maybe the best result of all this extra competition has been the pressure it’s put on Samsung to make what were already the best soundbars on the market even better.
How we test
We test every soundbar we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Find out more about how we test in our ethics policy.
Tested across several weeks
Tested with real world use
FAQs
These are the current best quality sound systems you will find provided with most recent film and TV shows released on 4K Blu-ray, Blu-ray or streaming services.
This is a raised deflector that sits above a (usually bass) driver to help dissipate its sound more widely and cleanly.
Dolby Atmos soundtracks feature height effects that are supposed to come from above your head. The up-firing drivers are used to deliver these by bouncing the height effects off your ceiling.
Jargon buster
Dolby Atmos
Dolby Atmos is an object-based audio format. It expands on 5.1 and 7.1 soundtracks by adding overhead channels. Sounds are referred to as “audio objects”, of which there can be up to 128 audio channels, and these ‘objects’ can be accurately positioned within a 3D soundscape. This allows soundtracks that support the technology to place sounds above and around the listener with compatible kit.
DTS:X
DTS:X is an object-based audio format created in 2015 for the home. The premise is similar to Dolby Atmos in that it creates a hemisphere of sound that’s more lifelike and natural in its presentation.
Verdict
The HW-Q990D might not look very different to its highly acclaimed predecessor, but its sound is on a different level – with music as well as movies. Which pretty much by default makes it the best full surround soundbar in town.
Pros
- Powerful and immersive sound stage
- Excellent HDR and gaming support over HDMI loop through
- Good with music too
Cons
- It’s not cheap
- Creates more clutter than a single soundbar option
- Might annoy the neighbours!
Key Features
-
11.1.4 channels of soundGenuine drivers across the array of speaker channels -
Dolby Atmos and DTS:X playback Both object based sound formats used for most movie soundtracks are supported. -
Four component systemAlong with the main soundbar, you get two multi-channel wireless rear speakers and subwoofer
Introduction
Samsung has been the (pretty much) undisputed champion of the full surround sound soundbar world for years now.
The combination of raw power and peerless 360-degree sound stage creation delivered by the brand’s flagship Q990 soundbars has consistently beaten rivals to a mushy, underpowered pulp.
The past 12 months have seen one or two true surround alternatives – most notably JBL’s brutally good 1300 – finally start to seriously challenge Samsung for the home cinema soundbar crown. So can Samsung’s top soundbar for 2024, the HW-Q990D, find another gear?
Availability
The Samsung HW-Q990D is available across most of the world’s territories. Stocks still seem to winding up to full capacity in some areas, but any temporary stocking issues should be resolved by the time you’re reading this article.
In the UK the HW-Q990 sells for £1699, while it goes for $1749 and AU$1999 in the US and Australia respectively. This clearly puts the Q990D in premium territory – though it’s worth pointing out that there are single-bar soundbar solutions and single soundbar plus optional surround and subwoofer extra packages out there that cost significantly more without offering the prodigious channel count the Q990D gives you right out of the box.
Design
- Four-component system
- All components connect wirelessly
- Main soundbar is quite large and heavy
If you’re the sort of person who likes to measure value in terms of physical returns, the Q990D doesn’t let you down. It pushes the concept of a soundbar to the nth degree by shipping with four separate components: the main bar, a wireless subwoofer and a pair of rear speakers.
The main bar and subwoofer are far from shrinking violets, too. The bar extends to just over 1.2m wide, nearly 7cm high, and 13.8cm deep, meaning you’ll probably want to partner it with a pretty large TV if it’s not going to end up looking comically large.
While a significant addition to your AV set up, I should stress that it sits less high than some of Samsung’s previous soundbar designs, and should fit underneath the screens of most of today’s TVs without hiding any of the picture or obstructing any IR receptors.
Despite its size, I’d say the hard plastic grilled finish, sharp edges and angled back corners of the HW-Q990D’s main bar make it a pretty attractive unit in a industrial kind of way.
The subwoofer looks a bit clunky compared with the grilled crispness of the main soundbar, but its hefty size enables Samsung to fit it with both a whopping great side-mounted 8-inch driver, as well as providing lots of room for air to move through the bodywork and out of a large port on its rear edge. Plus, unlike the other speakers you can tuck the subwoofer away almost anywhere in your living room provided nothing’s blocking the main driver outlet.
The HW-Q990D’s dedicated subwoofer also benefits from quite unusual design touch in the shape of an Acoustic Lens attachment. This is essentially a circular cover that sits an inch or so above the driver so that it can both improve the dispersion of low frequency sounds around your room and reduce potential distortions.
The rear speakers are quite compact relative to the other two components in the HW-Q990D system. So much so that it’s hard to believe that they actually each contain three separate drivers capable of mixing in with the sound coming from the rest of the system. They wear the same dark grey grilled hard plastic finish as the main bar, and again adopt a quite industrial, angular stance that I personally didn’t mind at all.
The HW-Q990D ships with a sleek, comfortable to hold remote control with well organised and tactile buttons.
Features
- 11.1.4 channels of sound
- 656W of total audio power
- Dolby Atmos and DTS:X playback
As you might hope with a soundbar that sets you back almost £1700, the Samsung HW-Q990D doesn’t skimp on the features – even adding a couple of significant new ones to the already far-ranging offering of its highly acclaimed Q990C predecessor.
Starting with the most headline grabbing stuff, its 11.1.4 channel count is one of the highest in the soundbar world. These are real channels too, each with its own physical driver, rather than any of them being repeats or virtual ones created by acoustic processing.
The full channel breakdown finds the packed main bar delivering front centre, front left, front right, front side left, front side right, side left, side right and two up-firing height effect drivers, while the rears each provide one up-firer, one forward firer, and one side firer. The subwoofer, of course, just delivers the ‘.1’ bass channel.
The idea behind all these channels is to create as fulsome a representation as possible of the 360-degree hemisphere of sound associated with the object-based (meaning they position sound effects in a 3D soundscape) Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks now provided with most movies.
There’s a total of 656W of power to feed into all these channels, as well as processing options capable of converting limited channel audio sources – even stereo music – into all-singing, all-dancing multi-channel mixes that take advantage of all the power and channels the system has available.
The system now provides an extremely useful and effective Space Fit Pro auto calibration system to help get the balance of all the channels right for your room set up. This now incorporates the subwoofer’s input into its calculations, rather than treating low frequencies somewhat separately as the Q990C predecessor did.
Having mentioned one new feature introduced for the Q990D, lets look at a few more. Starting with Personal Listening, where you can now use the rear speakers by themselves as a smaller stereo system if you want to watch TV without disturbing other people in the house. You can also use the rears in a Party Sound Grouping configuration, so they harmonise with the main bar to deliver a more room-filling music experience.
I’m also happy to report that Samsung has added Chromecast to its supported streaming systems this year, alongside AirPlay 2. There’s been an upgrade to Samsung’s Game Mode Pro soundbar feature that now optimises the sound profile to suit different genres of game, rather than just applying a generic gaming profile as previously.
This new feature takes the gaming genre info from the Gaming Hub found on many Samsung TVs these days (it doesn’t work with other TV brands) and applies special profiles for FPS, Racing, Rhythm, Sports and Fighting games. So with FPS titles, for instance, footsteps and gunfire sounds will be emphasised. For racing games car engine sounds will be enhanced.
For Rhythm games the sound profile will take on a more musical flavour. For sports titles crowd and stadium atmospherics will enjoy more presence and scale. And finally for fighting games, punching and kicking sounds will be given more emphasis to create a more visceral effect.
Perhaps my personal favourite of the upgrades the HW-Q990D introduces over the HW-Q990C is support in the HDMI loopthrough system for 4K/120Hz and variable refresh rate gaming features. This means gamers are no longer dependent on the potentially laggy HDMI Audio Return channel route to enjoy lossless Dolby Atmos or DTS:X sound with 4K/120Hz games.
While the physical design of the soundbar components and speakers inside hasn’t changed for the HW-Q990D, Samsung claims to have significantly tweaked the way those drivers take on the audio signals they’re fed. But you’ll have to wait until the sound quality part of the review to find out how true these claims are.
There remain a few other features I should cover off that while not new for the Q990D are still important to this soundbar’s premium status. Connectivity is solid, with two HDMI inputs (a third might be nice next time round) and one eARC-capable HDMI output, an optical digital audio input, and support for both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 5.2 wireless streams.
You can also establish a connection between the soundbar and reasonably recent Samsung mobile phones simply by tapping the phone against the main soundbar’s bodywork, plus there’s direct connectivity with Spotify Connect.
The HDMI loop through supports HDR pass-through in all four of the main HDR formats: HDR10, HLG, HDR10+ and (even though no Samsung TVs support it) Dolby Vision.
You can control the soundbar using Samsung’s Smart Things app rather than the remote control, and you can also issue it with verbal instructions via built-in Amazon Alexa or ‘works with’ Google Assistant support.
An Adaptive sound option uses AI to tailor the soundbar’s audio profile to the sort of content you’re watching (film, concert, sports event etc), while an Active Voice Amplifier adds more emphasis to vocals if it feels a sudden increase in the noise levels in your room might have made dialogue harder to hear.
Last but not least, the Q990D supports both (lossy) wireless transmission of Dolby Atmos sound from recent premium Samsung TVs, and Samsung’s Q Symphony feature, where the speakers and audio processing in compatible Samsung TVs can join forces with the soundbar’s speakers to create a larger sound stage with more precise height effect and dialogue placement.
Sound Quality
- Uniquely complete Dolby Atmos soundstage
- Excellent power and precision
- Much improved musicality
The Samsung HW-Q990D gets no extra channels compared with its predecessor, and no changes to the physical design of its speakers or drivers. And yet… it sounds better. A lot better.
Particularly impressive is the extra sense of detail the HW-Q990D manages to deliver. Not even the quietest, most subdued, most background effect in a film mix passes the soundbar by, helping it produce maybe the busiest, most sensitive and overall most accurate surround sound performance I’ve ever heard from a soundbar.
It’s not just that the HW-Q990D somehow manages to reveal subtle details that seem to pass the vast majority of its rivals by that makes the upgrade over the Q990C so compelling, either. It’s also what it does with these extra details. Every detail, no matter how faint or pronounced, is placed with remarkable precision within the 360-degree sound stage the HW-Q990D crafts so expertly around your seating position.
Nor does it matter whether a particular sound effect is largely ambient or connected to a specific object or point of emanance; whatever an effect’s purpose in a mix, the HW-Q990D knows where to place it and how to treat it so effectively that you can almost imagine a film’s original audio mix team are sitting there telling the soundbar what to do.
The HW-Q990D’s dedication to producing not just a true surround experience but a 360-degree, three-dimensional hemisphere of ultra-immersive sound plays a key role in this sense of literally every sound element being in exactly the right place. You feel keenly aware of the presence of every one of the soundbar’s 16 channels as sounds pop up all around your room, or noisy objects transition from front to back, back to front, side to side and even (thanks to the four built-in up-firing drivers) over your head.
The precision of the effects placement, especially when it comes to relatively ambient sounds, also makes the HW-Q990D arguably peerlessly good at defining the scale of different film locations and settings.
What most sets the HW-Q990D’s outstanding use of its huge channel count apart, though, is how well each individual channel is integrated and balanced with the others (especially if you’ve run the Space Fit Pro auto-calibration system) to create that all-important Dolby Atmos/DTS:X hemisphere effect around your viewing position without leaving any glaring gaps or holes in it. Everything feels fantastically seamless and joined up.
The HW-Q990D’s understanding of the relative weight of every element in a complex mix is also exemplary. Background effects stay correctly in the background, subtle/quiet effects never gain too much prominence, and the most aggressive, dominant effects are delivered with outstanding clarity, punch and immediacy.
The speed and aggression with which the HW-Q990D responds to hard sounds like punches and gunshots is outstanding, yet the soundbar’s dynamic range and power is good enough to ensure that none of these gruff home cinema staples ever sounds harsh or painful. Even when they emerge from the rear speakers, which actually combine tonally with the much bigger main soundbar remarkably well.
Actually, the rear channels deliver one of the best all round improvements over the Q990C, responding much more effectively and cleanly to sudden demands from an aggressive soundtrack and avoiding the distortions that could very occasionally crop up with that still brilliant predecessor.
All of the HW-Q990D’s new-found precision, balance and sensitivity is delivered, crucially, without any damage being done to the mammoth power and dynamic range that Samsung’s flagship soundbars have long excelled at. Even large rooms will be completely filled by the Q990D’s sound, and there’s a truly visceral feeling to the densest soundtrack moments that precious few other soundbars can compete with.
The subwoofer injects vast amounts of bass into proceedings without ever sounding as if it’s hit a hard low frequency floor, or suffering from drop outs or phutting distortions. On the contrary, its sounds roll out around your room with striking purity and definition.
At the same time, they never draw undue attention to themselves, always attaching to the bottom of the main soundbar’s frequency response without sounding gappy or baggy, and swelling or ebbing back immaculately as and when a soundtrack demands.
While soaking in the improvements the HW-Q990D delivers with film soundtracks, I found myself thinking and hoping that many of them might well have a beneficial impact, too, on the soundbar’s musicality. Happily, the HW-Q990D does indeed prove to be far and away Samsung’s most musical flagship soundbar.
Particularly good to hear is how much more effectively the subwoofer engages with music. No longer do its contributions tend to sound a bit clumsy or arbitrary; now it seems much smarter both about when a bit more bass is needed and when it isn’t, and the relative weight it should be bringing when it does decide to make its presence felt. Basically it seems to be operating under the influence of a much more holistic appreciation for music than previous Samsung soundbar subwoofers have tended to.
Just as importantly, the HW-Q990D finally recognises that music often if not always demands a different, warmer tone overall than the clinical muscularity that typically works so well for film soundtracks. This ability to gently adjust its tone helps music of all sorts sound more natural, balanced and engaging – without sacrificing clarity, timing or dynamic range.
The improvements I’ve just described have no negative impact on the one aspect of music that Samsung soundbars have actually always handled pretty well: vocals. Voices still sound perfectly positioned at the centre of but slightly above the rest of the mix, but now they’re no longer undermined by nearly as many imbalances, inconsistencies, and fuss from the rest of a track’s musical elements.
One last thing to add here is that while I think most serious music fans will prefer to leave the HQ-Q990D in its stereo mode for most music playback, it also sounds brilliant if you can feed it native Dolby Atmos music mixes, and can create a surprisingly convincing virtual surround sound mix out of stereo tracks if you switch to its surround sound expansion mode.
Latest deals
Should you buy it?
If you want full immersion
You want the most all-round immersive, detailed and powerful soundbar around.
You don’t have enough space
You don’t want the clutter of a four-piece soundbar system.
Final Thoughts
Samsung has achieved the seemingly impossible with the HW-Q990D, delivering a compelling step up from its predecessor without changing any of its physical specifications. The result is the most powerful and precise full surround sound experience for films in the soundbar world, accompanied for arguably the first time with a Samsung flagship soundbar by an accomplished (and flexible) music performance.
The increased competition at the quality end of the soundbar world in recent times has been great to see. On the evidence of the HW-Q990D, though, maybe the best result of all this extra competition has been the pressure it’s put on Samsung to make what were already the best soundbars on the market even better.
How we test
We test every soundbar we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
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Tested across several weeks
Tested with real world use
FAQs
These are the current best quality sound systems you will find provided with most recent film and TV shows released on 4K Blu-ray, Blu-ray or streaming services.
This is a raised deflector that sits above a (usually bass) driver to help dissipate its sound more widely and cleanly.
Dolby Atmos soundtracks feature height effects that are supposed to come from above your head. The up-firing drivers are used to deliver these by bouncing the height effects off your ceiling.
Jargon buster
Dolby Atmos
Dolby Atmos is an object-based audio format. It expands on 5.1 and 7.1 soundtracks by adding overhead channels. Sounds are referred to as “audio objects”, of which there can be up to 128 audio channels, and these ‘objects’ can be accurately positioned within a 3D soundscape. This allows soundtracks that support the technology to place sounds above and around the listener with compatible kit.
DTS:X
DTS:X is an object-based audio format created in 2015 for the home. The premise is similar to Dolby Atmos in that it creates a hemisphere of sound that’s more lifelike and natural in its presentation.
