Samsung - HW-Q900A

UK based here - I bought the 990f from amazon a few months ago when it dropped to £799 and for that price its a really good buy - not sure it's good value at over £1000 though. I have a 4 year old Samsung 900A in my bedroom with the 950 rears - and I am still constantly impressed by it - bought with a cashback deal for around £500 in the good old days. I have a LGSN11RG in another room I picked up used for around £400 about 4 years ago - I've struggled with the LG - but am happy with it now - again for the price paid I'm not complaining. I am disabled and can spend days - sometimes weeks confined to bed - so I enjoy having a nice picture sound in vatious rooms around the house - and the rooms don't allow for a dedicated atmos amp etc - in my opinion it's all about performance and value. If the 990F Drops in price again - then I would absolutely consider it. I personally have no problem with the sub.

Wow.. no love at all for Sonos? Depending on the size of your living room, the Beam 2 is pretty good. I made a hobby of buying lightly used soundbaes, compare it against the Beam 2... Which ever is the better one, I would keep. I've gone through the Samsung 900A, the Klipsch cinema 600 with rears, polk something (can't recall). I did side by side comparisons using both music and movies and the Beam 2 was the preferred device in the household. But for larger rooms the beam felt weakER. I had a Sonos Arc and now have the arc Ultra. The Arc Ultra is pretty good and when you have more budget you can add a sub and rears.

Using the rears as fronts, vastly improves music quality. But if u only want a standalone, maybe look to sonos arc ultra, if thats too much the q900 would be great as well, even the q800.

Standalone or kit/surround? Price range? Adding a sub to any system usually improves midrange clarity a lot by offloading the low end from the main speakers. Room correction is also a good feature to look for to compensate for your environment and remove some echo/distortion. And many models also include dialogue enhancement or dynamic range compression/loudness compensation which helps with hearing words in badly mixed shows and not having background noise drown things out. The Samsung Q990F is probably the best overall at everything, but expensive. The D model if you can find it is just the slightly older one and nearly the same but often much cheaper. If you don't need the surrounds the Q900 is the same bar/sub. Q930/Q800 is one step down from there and still good. Q750 is another step down and has fewer features but was on sale super cheap recently. If you don't want a sub the Sonos Arc Ultra is also good but a little overpriced. The original arc is available refurbished for $399 from their website which is a pretty good deal if nothing else is still on sale. Though note room correction is only available via the iOS app for them.

Q930 Q900 Maybe

My 9.1 sounded amazinf for 1 day, then right detachable speaker started popping and making static sound, at full volume. reset, unplugged, finaly returned. Bought Samsung Q900 (no rears). sounds great.

Yeah Samsung q800 or q900 series are both stellar for dialogue. I hated the older Samsungs for dialogue, but anything b, c, d or newer in those ranges are awesome with dialogue, even when you don’t turn on the voice enhancement. My q990b is fantastic for voice clarity even in action movies at any volume.

I was looking at the q900 but bought the q800 because I do not need/want the rears and it was 300 more than the q800. I might return the q800 for the q930 since I found it 150 more than the q800 but q900.

I’ve got a 5.1 jamo setup, and the HomePods are not even comparable, and a centre channel does make things better, but a good set of bookshelves handle dialogue well enough I don’t miss a centre channel at all. We watch a lot of TV, movies and TV shows, so I don’t know what to tell you. We bought the jamo gear because our 7.1.2 Samsung soundbar sucked hardcore with dialogue, and I constantly had to change sound modes to attempt to hear things. Not worth the bookshelf speakers though. IMO the HomePods are worse than the TV speakers sometimes. Also planar tweeters were a big upgrade for me for dialogue.

The q symphony is hard to notice if I am being honest. Not because it isnt good, it seems decent, but I had a 5.1 Logitech PC system before. The THX was nice but 11 speakers of Atmos is so amazing that adding 4 is like putting chocolate fudge on a chocolate bar after just eating vanilla wafers for years. Its richer and you cant say no, but the chocolate bar would have already been more than enough at this point. And yeah, I pushed to 30 for a bit and it was a lot in most cases. Went to 50 for fun and started getting worried I may blow a speaker out haha.