SAMSUNG S700D 3.1ch Soundbar w/Wireless Dolby Atmos Audio, Ultra Slim Design, Q-Symphony, SpaceFit Sound Pro, Adaptive Sound, Game Mode Pro with Alexa Built-in, HW-S700D/ZA…

The sound on it is amazing. It’s slim, light and the physical set up was a no brainer. Love the options for sound output and it all sounds good. Now if you are on a normal tv, it should be a breeze. My Roku tv hooked up in seconds, changed the audio output to HDMI ARC and was in business. Decided to hook this up to my main tv which is an Amazon fire tv.. this was a mistake.. For the life of me I could not get this tv to output to HDMI ARC. this is not the sound bar’s fault. This is fully 100% the tv’s fault. I wound up getting it to connect by bluetooth.. which for the most art is fine. but when you have other people around using bluetooth, as is the case with most bluetooth devices, it starts to skip, crackle and fail. Again, not the sound bar’s fault, its a limitation of bluetooth.

TLDR if you have a good tv, works like a dream, if you were dumb enough to buy a fire tv like I did.. I’m so sorry.

As my husband set this soundbar up, the following review is his thoughts. There’s a TLDR at the bottom.

We’ll start with sound – as this is a soundbar and subwoofer, that’s what you care about in the end.

The sound is in between good and excellent, depending on source and exactly what you care about. I care about lots of things:

– Can I hear people talking, clearly?
– Can I hear ambient sounds, as clearly as they should be heard?
– Is the bass appropriate? (Is it properly overwhelming when something dramatically bass-y is happening, and NOT overwhelming when it should not be?)

All good so far on the above.

Another thing I care about, can we set the volume at a level where the half-deaf oldsters can follow the show, while those with most of their hearing intact can avoid being blown out of their chairs and given a headache?

Yet to be determined with authority. Miracles cannot be expected regarding this, but it sure would be nice.

Things I care less about than Samsung and Dolby’s marketing departments:

– 360 degree sound.

Maybe it’s just my imagination (or lack thereof), but the “immersiveness” was somewhere between missing altogether and underwhelming. I loaded up Youtube videos that are specifically to demonstrate ATMOS, on my TV. While the sounds were all great and clear with this soundbar, there was never anything like “oh, that hummingbird sounds like it’s behind my head, off to the left, 12 feet away.” Tried it with my eyes open, to allow my brain to tell me things about the sound that my eyes and brain should put together along with my ears – tried with eyes closed to make it all about the physical reality of where the sound APPEARS to be coming from. Just… not really there.

It should not be hard to test this either – just give me a helicopter gunship flying at 100 feet from somewhere over my right shoulder, going overhead and now it’s in front of me moving left. Doesn’t have to be helicopter gunship either – all those sounds are pretty bass-heavy, I imagine it would be much easier to be “directional” with higher-range sounds. So give me a nice, rumbling Imperial starship of some sort, with some pew-pew-pew as they fire at the “rebel scum.”

Or just give me frogs behind me, birds overhead, a highway with automobiles in front of me. If it can actually DO that, then SHOW me it can do that.

Overall, for basic “Is this good sound?” I’l give 5 stars.

For Immersive whatever-its-supposed-to-do… it’s a solid maybe – so to be generous, 3 stars.

I tested Bluetooth connectivity and streaming some songs from Spotify from my phone. As Spotify does not yet directly support any spiffy ATMOS things, this was simply a test of ease of connectivity, ability to stay connected as one moves about the room, and sound quality.

Pairing was easy, just use the input selector button on the soundbar remote (the unit says aloud which input you are using.) Get into Bluetooth on your phone, Add device, and select “Ultra Slim Soundbar”. Done.

The sound quality was very good on Bluetooth, and I could move a room or two away without breaking the connection.

A note, however… Whenever I changed input from TV-ARC to Bluetooth or back again, the video on my TV froze. I had to change the channel off the one I was watching to get video to unfreeze. So at least with MY setup (Amazon Fire TV, TDS TV on a TDS Android/Tivo based unit, and this soundbar connected via included HDMI cable) this was an annoyance. I’d actually call it a defect – more of those below.

There are exactly three ways this soundbar will connect to anything, and only one of them is a physical connection.

– Wifi
– Bluetooth
– HDMI, via an HDMI-to-MicroHDMI cable that is included with the unit. (Not a standard HDMI-both-ends cable)

There is no optical connection, there are no other ports or any type. So if your TV does not specifically support HDMI-ARC (Audio Return Channel) then do not buy this soundbar, you’ll just have to send it back.

To connect to wifi you’ll have to install yet another specialized, only-good-for-one-thing App on your phone. If you have so much Samsung in your life already that you have their SmartThings app, you’re good to go already. I have enough garbage on my phone already, I’m not doing it.

Now, to the annoyances, of which there are many. Consider this “the airing of the grievances.”

Grievance 1 – In order to avoid having this unit come in two boxes, the way Samsung packages it is simply ridiculous in ways that are hard to explain, but – you’re almost guaranteed to be immediately annoyed. This is trivial, but since first impressions matter…

Grievance 2 – The instructions are, frankly, an abomination. This is 2024, and Samsung is a huge multinational. Samsung has utterly failed to provide concise, helpful instructions for setting up this soundbar. It’s not “Engrish” (for the most part.) It’s a complete waste of the small amount of paper they managed to print and put in the box. It also doesn’t help that they couldn’t manage to package the various sheets of paper in a way that it isn’t crumpled up, right out of the box.

There’s a page (not a great page) on types of walls, for those who will want to wall-mount the soundbar. Useful to some, I guess.

There’s a page on how to use the remote. I’d keep that page handy, because the remote and the lights on the soundbar you’re supposed to look at to see what’s happening are FAR from intuitive, even with the instructions.

And then there’s the main instruction sheet, a large sheet of paper folded twice and printed on both sides. Of the 8 “pages”, over half of them are completely useless nonsense that SHOULD be in a separate “nonsense” book, so you can ignore it better. I’m talking about stuff like “If you use this soundbar on a cart, make sure the cart doesn’t tip over” and “If your remote is smoking, stop using it.” Thanks, Sherlock – that’s very helpful for anyone who has no grasp of reality whatsoever.

Of the remaining information provided, the semi-useful stuff – it is not laid out well, provides little in the way of helping you get the thing connected correctly, provides no useful troubleshooting information, and has a QR code to scan to get to the online manual. The online manual for this unit simply does not exist at all at the time of this writing. The QR code takes you to the page where you can start searching for the manual. Which fails to find one.

Grievance 3 – When (finally) connected correctly, to the exactly one HDMI port where it will work on a brand new TV manufactured last year (of four total HDMI ports), I got sound. Yay. And every 38 seconds without fail, I also got a “never-seen-this-before” pop-up on my TV that tells me that the volume is set at 19. Did I accidentally push a button on one of my several remotes? Did the volume level change? NOPE. It just decided to tell me what the volume level was, every 38 seconds, in a bar that obscures the top quarter of my screen. It’s as if the thing loses connectivity momentarily, on a 38-second schedule, and upon reconnecting feels compelled to tell me the volume level. Try googling that some time, and you’ll find LOTS of Samsung soundbar users have reported similar issues, and none have really been solved. “Update the firmware on the soundbar and your TV and this n’ that” is as close as they get to fixing, and regarding that…

NO. I won’t.

It appears the way to update firmware on this soundbar involves using a (quaint in 2024) micro-USB cable and doing a special I.T. dance, with a sacrifice to the e-Gods. I’m in I.T., I’m a network engineer, I update firmware on lots of things all the time. But this is a fresh-from-the-box Soundbar. Ship it with firmware that works, for God’s sake.

I have apparently resolved this issue, at least for now, by power-cycling EVERYTHING INVOLVED.

Grievance 4 – The remote. Set aside that I REALLY don’t want another remote. This one has buttons that move in non-standard ways, poorly labeled buttons, buttons that apparently do not do anything at all, and in order to determine whether something is happening (apart from things you can determine with your ears), you have to look at unlabeled blinky-lights on the soundbar itself. Then consult your handy remote control page to see if the blinky-lights are doing what you told them to do. Fail. Dumb. And another abomination in 2024.

Stars:

5 for sound quality.
Generous 3 for “special spatial” sound and things like Sound Leveling.
1 for instructions / setup.
2 for wired connectivity.
5 for Bluetooth connectivity.
2 for Value for money. ($500? REALLY? No satellite speakers, and you want $500?)

Since its primary function is to provide good sound, and it does that, I’m rounding up to 4 stars. But lots of soundbars have good sound.