With their huge channel counts, vast amounts of power and peerless knack for creating ultra-immersive three-dimensional surround sound stages from Dolby Atmos and DTS:X soundtracks, Samsung’s flagship soundbars have been firm favourites with AV fans for years now. For the past two or three generations, though, while there have always been improvements, the annual changes have been relatively small. For its 2025 models, though, the brand is ringing in some truly significant changes.
At the very top of Samsung’s 2025 soundbar tree will be the HW-Q990F. This successor to the multi award-winning HW-Q990D marks a major departure from its predecessor by swapping Samsung’s usual hefty, acoustic lens-sporting subwoofer with a single 8-inch driver for a new 300W cubic bass speaker design that carries an 8-inch dual active unit, where the two drivers sit on opposing sides. This new design results, Samsung claims, in reduced unwanted resonance and a frequency response as low as 32Hz from a unit that’s only around half the size of its predecessor.
As well as hopefully improving the Q990F’s low frequency performance, the new subwoofer’s much smaller design obviously makes it easier to tuck its away out of sight in your designer living room. Though if you can’t completely hide it away, it also features a smoother, more refined finish than its predecessors.
The Q990F system benefits, too, from Samsung’s obsession with AI by introducing a number of AI-based sound optimisation features. A Dynamic Bass Control system enhances low frequency clarity by constantly applying non-linear bass management, while an AI-updated version of Samsung’s Active Voice Amplifier Pro system uses real-time content analysis to reduce background noise and make dialogue clearer.
Samsung’s Q-Symphony feature, where the soundbar can share audio duties with the speakers in compatible Samsung TVs, has also been AI-enhanced for Samsung’s 2025 soundbars so that it can take on three additional wireless speakers rather than two, and autodetect the position of those other wireless speakers — such as Samsung’s Music Frames — in order to optimize the sound stage to take account of each speaker’s distance from and relative angle to a Samsung TV.
The latest Q-Symphony system also enables the Q990F to draw on a new Neural Processing Unit in Samsung’s latest TVs to further enhance dialogue and improve synchronisation between the growing number of audio components the soundbar can combine with.
In its “solo” form, the Q990F will continue to deliver an 11.1.4 channel count from its combination of a main soundbar, the new subwoofer, and two multi-channel wireless rears that include up- and side-firing drivers alongside the regular forward-facing driver.
The 2025 HW-QS700F ‘lifestyle’ soundbar, meanwhile, brings new versatility to Samsung’s 2025 range thanks to an all-new “rotatable” design that allows it to be mounted either horizontally or vertically, depending on whether you want to place it under a TV on a piece of furniture, or hang it in a slim vertical profile beneath a wall-mounted TV.
Its sleek design looks elegant in either orientation, with gyro sensor technology in the soundbar enabling it to automatically detect whether it’s hanging vertically or lying horizontally, adjusting the output of its speakers and 3.1.2 channel count accordingly.
The QS700F’s lifestyle design focus means that it doesn’t ship with any rear speakers included, but as I’d expect with a soundbar designed with such a slim profile it does ship with an external wireless subwoofer that uses a similar cubic design to the sub provided with the Q990F.
Both of Samsung’s new premium soundbars will support the new YouTube targeted Eclipsa 3D sound format discussed in this previous story alongside Dolby Atmos and DTS:X, and are expected to launch in the spring, with pricing yet to be confirmed.
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