LG Link: LG SN7CY Soundbar Review: Harsh

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On paper, at least, LG’s SN7CY seems to offer serious bang for its buck. Despite costing just £399 in the UK, its compact and attractive design carries Dolby Atmos and DTS:X decoding and a 3.0.2 speaker configuration capable of pumping out a healthy 160W of audio power.

What’s more, as with many recent LG soundbars, it’s been designed in conjunction with famed British audio brand Meridian, and boasts a variant of the LG AI Sound Pro processing that delivers such great results on LG’s latest OLED TVs.

A variant of the SN7CY, the SN7Y, that ships with an extra external subwoofer, is available in the UK for £469. The SN7Y appears to be the only version of the SN7 that LG is going to be selling in the US - as if LG figures us Brits aren’t as bothered about bass as our friends across the pond!

The LG SN7CY is an all-in-one Dolby Atmos soundbar.
Photo: LG SN7CY (LG Electronics)

Or maybe, more charitably, LG believes us Brits to be more circumspect about filling our typically relatively small living rooms with AV gear. If this is indeed the thinking behind the subwooferless SN7CY, then even a bass lover like myself can’t deny that there’s certainly something very elegant about the way this soundbar fits so much multi-channel audio potential into a single, compact box.

At just 890mm wide and 119mm deep, the SN7CY is narrow enough to sit beneath TVs as small as 40 inches across. Its 65mm height means it sits slightly taller than some soundbars, and so there’s marginally more potential for it to jut into the picture or block the IR receivers of some low-sitting TVs. I wouldn’t expect this to be a widespread issue, though. Especially as TVs are increasingly being designed with external soundbars in mind.

The SN7CY feels a little lighter than I might have expected from its extensive collection of built-in drivers. It looks pretty high end, though, thanks in particular to the brushed metal appearance of its top edge, and the flush fit of its two up-firing drivers. Even its rear is more striking than usual, thanks to the presence there of two large rectangular passive bass radiators that will hopefully provide enough rumble to make the lack of an external bass speaker academic.

The LG SN7CY soundbar in a fancy apartment.
Photo: The LG SN7CY Soundbar (LG Electronics)

One final strength of the SN7CY’s design is its decently large and easy to read LED. This provides handy information on which input you’ve got selected, which sound format the bar is receiving, and the volumes of each channel during set up.

You can if you wish add optional wireless rear speakers to the SN7CY/SN7Y. The recommended SPK8-S models sell for $179.99/£149.

Connectivity is limited to one HDMI input, one HDMI output, an optical audio port, a USB port and the usual Bluetooth and Wi-Fi network options. A second HDMI input might have been nice, and while the HDMI output supports HDMI’s Audio Return Channel (ARC) functionality, it doesn’t support the higher bandwidth eARC option. This means that while it can receive Dolby Atmos from TVs that support Dolby Atmos over ARC, that Dolby Atmos can only be delivered in the compressed ‘DD+’ format, rather than the lossless True HD format supported by eARC.

Note that there’s no support on the SN7CY for DTS:X over ARC. That can only be played directly into the soundbar’s dedicated HDMI input from an external source, such as a 4K Blu-ray player.

The USB port supports the MP3 (80 to 320kbps), WMA (56 to128kbps), OGG (64 to 500kbps), FLAC (192kHz/24 bits) and WAV (192kHz/24 bits) audio formats.

When the SN7CY receives a Dolby Atmos or DTS:X soundtrack, it always defaults to that playback format - and you can’t toggle it into any other mode. With other sources, though, as well as Standard, Movie and Music presets you can choose an AI Sound Pro option that analyses incoming sound and uses proprietary processing to optimise the way the soundbar plays it.

There’s also a ‘Surround’ option which typically reconfigures non Dolby Atmos/DTS:X sources so that they use all the speakers available to the system. So, for instance, a two-channel stereo music feed will be converted to use the left, right, centre and two up-firing channels provided by the SN7CY. And if you add the optional rear speakers, the Surround option will mix the sound into those too.

Not that I think many people will feel very compelled to use the SN7CY’s Surround mode once they’ve listened to it, though. I didn’t have an SPK8-S kit to try with the SN7CY, but playing stereo music upmixed to the soundbar’s core 3.0.2-channel configuration isn’t a very pleasant experience. Yes, all of the available channels are used. But the resulting sound is harsh and brittle compared with the system’s basic stereo playback.

This doesn’t mean that basic stereo playback sounds right either, though. Female voices, for instance, typically sound too shrill - quite painfully so at times - while other upper register sounds such as snare drums and and high strings often sound too pronounced in the mix, throwing music out of balance.

You also have to turn the volume up quite high before the SN7CY’s bass really starts to kick in too. To be fair, when you are running the soundbar loud enough to for bass to emerge from its shell, it really can sound quite full and potent with pop and rock music. The problem is, at these sorts of bass-friendly volumes, the shrillness problem can become even more pronounced.

Since classical music typically doesn’t need lots of bass, you can play it more quietly on the SN7CY and thus reduce the hard-edged treble issues. The higher-pitched instruments in an orchestra still sound unnaturally bright, though. Plus, of course, a lot of classical music sounds best when it’s LOUD.

Unfortunately, the issues that plague the SN7CY’s musical performance are if anything exaggerated with movie soundtracks. Vocals, for instance, tend to sound rather brittle and ‘boxed in’. Vocals also tend to lack context, meaning that they sound kind of dubbed over the rest of the sound mix, rather than a natural part of it.

It doesn’t help that vocals emerge slightly narrowly from the SN7CY’s centre speaker, meaning that speech sounds like it’s coming from below the picture. This issue reduces if your screen is fairly small or you’re sat a long way from it. It’s tempting, too, to solve the problem by slightly angling the soundbar up. But this, of course, messes up the way the height channel speakers reflect sound off your ceiling.

The SN7CY’s soundstage isn’t particularly wide by today’s mid-range soundbar standards. Though this might be a blessing in disguise, actually, as trying to push its sound further might have made the SN7CY’s flaws become even more pronounced.

Also, while its soundstage might not be especially wide, it is pretty high. Those up-firing speakers prove to be both sensitive and very good at bringing out even subtle height effects in an ‘object-based’ Dolby Atmos or DTS:X mix. In fact, they’re arguably a bit too good, placing too much emphasis on effects that are supposed to be fairly gentle or ‘background’.

The best example of this during my tests came while trying out the awesome Dolby Atmos soundtrack of Blade Runner 2049. During the scene where K first returns to his apartment, there’s a Frank Sinatra track playing in the background. Except that on the SN7CY it doesn’t sound like it’s in the background. Instead it’s so prominent in the mix that you can make out every lyric.

This might sound like a good thing, and I guess it is in the sense that the soundbar is sensitive enough to deliver what’s more or less an ambient effect more clearly and prominently than I’ve ever heard it before from a Dolby Atmos soundbar. The thing is, though, that the way the SN7CY’s sound is balanced meant that I noticed the clarity of the Sinatra tune to the detriment of the dialogue I was supposed to be listening to.

The massive dynamics of the Blade Runner 2049 mix also cause some low-end distortion and drop out from the SN7CY’s unusual oblong bass radiators. Though to be fair, the SN7CY is far from the first sound system to struggle with the BR2049 soundtrack’s huge dynamic range, and it won’t be the last.

With the Dolby Atmos mix of 1917, meanwhile, the sound of the actors breathing is much more pronounced than it should be; the highest parts of the score can become unpleasantly piercing at times; and if you push volumes to anything more than the soundbar’s 25 audio level, the banter between the film’s two main protagonists can start to sound seriously harsh. Even a little distorted at times.

Yet if you keep the volume down to a level that suits the SN7CY’s vocal handling with 1917, the explosions during, say, the climactic charge across a heavily bombed battlefield sound rather flat and lifeless. It’s only when you push the volume higher than 30 that the soundbar’s bass really starts to make its presence felt to the point where the explosions start to sound impactful and convincing. Yet at this volume level, you’ve got the issues with harsh trebles and vocals to worry about.

It’s worth adding here that LG’s AI Sound feature can produce a slightly more rounded sound with non Atmos/DTS:X soundtracks and music. But it’s not the ‘magic bullet’ that it can be with the sound systems built into LG’s latest TVs.

In fact, I couldn’t find any combination of settings that made the SN7CY’s sound gel into a consistently enjoyable, balanced and immersive experience. Regardless of whether I was listening to a Dolby Atmos/DTS:X mix, a regular Dolby Digital/DTS mix, an old Pro-Logic mix, or plain old stereo.

Verdict

There’s no denying that the LG SN7CY soundbar can a more direct, impactful and ‘big’ sound than pretty much any built-in TV sound system. It’s just a shame that the balance and tone of that sound just isn’t convincing at all.

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The Link Lonk

July 25, 2020 at 09:10PM
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LG SN7CY Soundbar Review: Harsh - Forbes

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