For years I've been excited by the idea of haphazardly placing your speakers in
your oddly shaped room and then using computational audio to fill in the gaps
and get a great surround experience. But, the last time I tried to deploy it,
the proprietary protocol caused weird connectivity issues that I was never
able to resolve and I ultimately had to abandon it. My hope is that all changes
today. LG sponsored this video sending over their Sound Suite AI family of
products including the first soundbar
that can act as a lead device for Dolby Atmos Flex Connect, which is pretty much
exactly what I just said. Wireless
connectivity between all of your speakers, you kind of put them wherever
you want, you run a calibration and
incredible Dolby Atmos sound that blends right into your living space. Let's
start with one of the key building blocks that'll make up a system like this, the LG Sound Suite AI M7. The big
selling point here is the connectivity. It works with Spotify, it works over
Bluetooth, and of course works with Dolby Atmos Flex Connect. This, because
it has two full-range speakers on top of its upward-firing speaker, can support
spatial audio and Dolby Atmos with just a single unit. LG boasts that between
their various sized speakers, as well as their lead devices, you can have up to
50 different configurations. This is a really important thing, by the way. Both
the M5 and the M7 have a hardware mic
switch, so you can turn those off if you want. Also down here is a USB-C input if
you want to like connect your phone and just play music over it. Simple power
button, bass port, and there you go.
Nice stealthy power down here. They're designed to really just fit into your
room rather than stand out like traditional hi-fi. They've got a
touch-sensitive interface at the front, so you can adjust your volume, play, pause, change your input, and then the
little heart is called my button, so you can just set it to do whatever your
favorite thing is. Now that we've pretty much covered this, it's time to move on
to the big guy. Oh, that's really heavy. >> [laughter]
>> One moment, please. As you would expect from any modern year sound bar, this
thing is absolutely jam-packed full of speakers. They're on the front, they're
on the sides, they're firing upward. Like the smaller sound suite speakers,
it supports pretty much any connectivity you want, so you know, Bluetooth,
AirPlay, Wi-Fi, but it adds of course HDMI via eARC as well as Dolby Atmos
Flex Connect acting as a main [music] device.
That is in no small part thanks to its inclusion of LG's Alpha 11 AI Gen 3
processor, which as far as we can tell is actually the same processing chip
that's going to be in the new LG G6. We've only got a G5 here today, which
also supports Flex Connect, but [music] you can do more speakers with the sound
bar. So, you would have to have the TV, a sub, and three speakers, so a total of
four devices, whereas with this bad boy, we can have four speakers around the
room and a subwoofer, and our sound bar. This is a
disappointing trend. There's only a single HDMI port on this sound bar.
I do understand why they've made this choice. It can simplify things for more
normie TV owners. You just [music] plug this into your eARC and then use your TV
inputs. You don't have to worry about, you know, oh, well, hold on, which
inputs do I have as a pass-through on my sound bar and which ones am I doing through my TV? But the [music] geek in
me is just like, more HDMI ins, I want it. Uh I love
this, though. Another mic switch. We've also got a USB port, power in, and look
at these delightful clicky buttons. Power, volume, input, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi,
and another one of those customizable buttons. You know what I'd like to see
sound bars include? Just a couple little like
>> [music] >> rubber feet, just in case you have a stand in this style, and you don't want
to put it uh right in the front.
LG also does support wall mounting, of course, with an optional accessory, if
you're more into that sort of thing, but we're going to go this route today. [music] Speaking of accessory ideas,
let's have a look at what is included. You get a remote, [music]
power cable, and oh, aforementioned wall bracket, but that's it. Power, [music]
HDMI, and love sound bars or hate them, you got to
admire the simplicity. Look at that. They use the same mold for the remote
for both the TV and the sound bar, but the buttons are slightly different. The
good news is, if I have this remote, I don't need this one. Obviously, we're
going to have to hook up some more devices and play around with their sound follow feature, especially cuz I'm not
sitting directly in front of it. We'll get to that later, but first, just
initial impressions of the sound bar. Actually, I'm going to go centered for that.
We'll do sound follow later. >> [music] >> Did you guys leave the rears on? No, I
unplugged them, didn't I? >> [music]
>> That's uh You know, LG, >> [music]
>> it's not much of a sales pitch for your um
supplementary surround speakers when the surround is that good with just the
sound bar. >> [laughter]
>> Huh. >> [laughter] >> Okay.
Really good, but
there is no substitute for actually putting surround speakers behind you, so
why don't we hook up a few more. Not going to lie, we kind of cheated and
hooked up these M7s on LG's uh little stands beforehand, but the cool thing is
you don't have to. As we saw when we were in their demo booth back at CES,
you can put these on stands, you know, you can put them right behind the
seating position, or you can just
not. One thing I noticed is we weren't using the cable management channel in
the stands though, so we're going to go ahead and do that. Theoretically, this should be as simple as just kind of
Okay, a little uncomfortable, but this is a normal thing to do. Okay, there we
go. That's more like it. And then if you're really smart, then
you would also screw it in. There's a little screw hole on the bottom here,
and there's a little corresponding spot here. But, I think we're just going to yolo
it. Okay. Now we will never drop it off the stand
again. We never did. Yeah, we never dropped it. Glenn wasn't rolling, right? Nope, I
don't think Nice. Now that we've got two of our surround speakers connected, you can see
>> [music] >> our test configuration here with the four surrounds and the sub, and you can
see these ones are green. We're probably going to want to run a recalibration
real quick here. Now we [music] set our distance from the sound bar. Actually, yeah, 2 m sounds about right.
Optimization is beginning.
Oh, and this is a perfect time to point out that sound follow allows you to move
and then set your position. So, I could be over here, you know, maybe I don't have
an optimal living room configuration. I
can go like this.
>> [music] >> And it moves me. Cool, huh? Let's see how that flyover
sounds now.
It's better. It's not as much better as I might have expected. I mean, the sound
bar does such a good job on its own, but
I mean, that's the thing about height channels and rear channels is that most
of the movie is up here. >> [snorts]
>> I love that this guy just makes movies so he can do cool at this point.
>> [laughter] >> Let's do the whole shebang.
Let's put in more speakers on the sides. Let's put in the sub. I think the W7 sub
is probably the most self-explanatory part of this entire setup. It's a
subwoofer. It does subwoofer things. One cool thing
though is [music] you can either stand it up like this or
it includes optional feet so that you can
put it like this. You know, whatever works better for your aesthetic. It's got a single 8-in driver
and makes wubs. I'm going to use these just cuz I can.
>> [music] >> They're cute. I'm expecting utterly better bass.
All right, we got all our speakers set up. Boom, just like that.
Based on my experience kind of going through the various stages of setup that
you can build with this, >> [music] >> I'm going to say something that might
not make LG feel that comfortable in a sponsored video.
>> [music] >> And that's that the best thing you can do to enjoy your sound suite AI setup is
to never try the next level up. Because at every stage I kind of went,
"Oh man, yeah. Like this is totally good enough."
>> [music] >> And then once I went up another level, I was like, "Okay, yeah. Okay. Okay, yeah,
it's better. Yeah. [music] Yeah, of course it's better." But that doesn't mean that just the soundbar or just a
couple of the speakers wouldn't also be pretty outstanding. It's amazing how
much audio they can pack in such a small package these days. [music]
How is it for something more musical though? That's always a big question for
me. I love musicals.
>> [singing and music] >> Dialogue's a little overcooked right now. We might be in the AI upgraded
audio. >> Yeah, I'm going to turn off the AI enhanced audio. It actually did not
bother me at all just watching a movie,
but music, it goes a little hard at the
dialogue enhancement, which is going to be great for a lot of people.
Not my preference. So, So, me play around with this a little bit. I can
already tell that's better.
I don't like to get too far into subjective impressions of sound in a
sponsored video, but what I can say
objectively is that playing around with the sound profiles a little bit, turning
off sort of, you know, AI voice and dialogue enhancement, I would be happy
with the musical performance of this, factoring in the convenience of the
whole thing running wirelessly. So, you're not running speaker wire, and
[music] considering you can put the speakers anywhere you want. It's [laughter]
pretty cool. And I'm legitimately excited to see the Dolby Atmos Flex
Connect ecosystem continue to grow. For now, though, it looks like LG has both
the primo solution for it, and if you just want to go with a pair of M5s or a
pair of M7s, also more accessible
solutions, and you can pair those directly to a supported TV.
>> [music] >> If you guys want to check them out, we'll have them linked down below. Thanks for watching. Thanks LG for
sponsoring this video. Subscribe [music] to ShortCircuit.