🏆 Review score: 4 out of 5
🏅 Editor’s Choice Award
Pros
✅ 🔊 Loud, room-filling sound
✅ 🗣️ Pronounced center channel for dialogue and vocals
✅ 🎥 Strong stereo separation and height audio
✅ 🩴 Unique multi-position design
✅ 📐 Clean industrial design in a thinner package
✅ 🔌 HDMI 2.1 passthrough for consoles and optical audio for external devices
Cons
❌ 🧗🏻♂️ Soundmix suffers while this soundbar is vertically oriented
❌ 🥁 Lackluster bass and clarity for music listening
❌ 📺 Q-Symphony, auto-calibration, and most features require a connected Samsung TV
❌ 📣 Voice Enhance Mode isn’t very strong
The Shortcut Review
The Samsung HW-QS700F is more than another 3.1.2-channel Dolby Atmos soundbar. It features a slim and adaptable design that lets it easily slip under any TV or hang flat against a wall. Despite being so thin soundbar still puts out plenty of decibels and is loud enough to be heard even across a big studio apartment or living room. You get fantastic stereo sound, height audio, and loud dialogue out of this soundbar, making it superb for watching movies and shows.
Of course, it’s not fantastic at everything. I found the bass to be too weak for a truly room-shaking experience, and the lack of clarity makes this soundbar good for background music listening at best. You’ll also need a Samsung TV to take full advantage of its dialogue boosting, auto-calibrating, and other features.
The Samsung HW-QS700F is also more expensive than its competiton at $699. That’s quite a bit more than the $499 Sonos Beam Gen 2 and also consider the $649 Sony Bravia Theater Bar 6. The Sonos Beam Gen 2 offers better music listening and impressive Dolby Atmos sound for its size, but lacks an included subwoofer. The Sony Bravia Theater Bar 6 features a significantly stronger subwoofer and better audio quality at a slightly lower price.
Full Review
🔊 Small size, big sound. The Samsung HW-QS700F projects surprisingly big sound from such a thin package. Even at just 20% volume, the HW-QS700F is loud enough for me to hear from the other side of my 12 x 8-foot light-controlled studio space. Along with the power, this soundbar delivers plenty of detailed directional audio, which allowed me to hear distinctly incoming waves from the left and right of the screen during the ending of Roma. This loudness doesn’t come with any distortion either, even when watching action movies and playing games full of gunfire.
📣 Loud and clear vocals. Dialogue sounds especially loud and clear from the HW-QS700F. The center channel makes voices sound much more prominent than I could ever hear from just TV speakers alone. That’s without kicking in Voice Enhancement either. If you want to hear clearer dialogue and skip turning on subtitles, this is the soundbar you need.
🥁 Baby bass. The subwoofer might be a cute 9.8-inch cube, but it also produces a surprising amount of bass. It’s enough low-end sound to make explosions and bass in songs more oomph. However, if you’re looking for room-shaking bass, the Samsung HW-QS700F doesn’t fully provide that – at least in a large room. This compact subwoofer will likely perform better if your TV setup is in a smaller space.
📻 Strong stereo separation. As only a 3.1.2-channel speaker, the Samsung HW-QS700F can’t produce a complete surround sound experience on its own. However, the stereo separation and height simulation of this soundbar are excellent. I was immersed in the lightcycle battles in Tron; it sounded like I was right in the scene myself while I watched one bike hit a ramp and jump over me, passing from right to left.
🎮 Game Pro. If you’re playing games, the Game Pro sound mode will amp up the multi-channel directionality of the surround sound. The effect isn’t dramatically immersive, but I could tell if enemies in Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 were running in from the left, right, or above me.
🩴 Vertical or horizontal. The Samsung HW-QS700F’s special party trick is that it can sit horizontally on a TV stand or be mounted vertically on a wall. An accelerometer inside the soundbar detects its orientation and rebalances the sound channels to work effectively in either orientation. In its vertical orientation, the HW-QS700F repurposes its upfiring speakers to act as front channels and vice versa.
🧗🏻♂️ Wall mounting problems. Unfortunately, the Samsung HW-QS700F soundmix doesn’t work as well in vertical orientation. The dialogue sounds more pronounced with the soundbar vertically oriented, but the height audio and general stereo separation seem more constrained. I hoped this soundbar would sound identical in either orientation, but that’s almost impossible with how these tweeters and woofers have been designed.
🎼 Background music. The Samsung HW-QS700F is average at best for music listening. It delivers powerful vocals for songs like Johnny Cash’s Hurt and enough detail to let me enjoy all the instrumentation in The Polish Ambassador’s New Day. However, the lack of clarity makes complex songs like Short Change Hero sound like a mess. It also struggles to handle songs with extreme amounts of bass, such as Easy Goodbye by Emma Louise and Flume, which sounds like a mix of harsh highs and distorted bass. Overall, I would use the Samsung HW-QS700F for listening to background music rather than my main player.
Features
🎶 Q-Symphony. Samsung’s Q-Symphony feature is exclusive to Samsung TVs, but it’s essential if you want to max out the sound quality of your devices together. It enables TV speakers to work in tandem with the soundbar, providing you with more sound channels. This not only helps the HW-QS700F and your Samsung TV sound louder, but it’s also fuller and more precise because the TV speakers can take more load off the soundbar, allowing it to deliver more bass and make dialogue sound as if it’s coming directly from the screen.
🧰 Hardware required. Q-Symphony isn’t the only exclusive feature that requires a Samsung TV. To enable the SpaceFit Sound Pro to self-calibrate the soundbar to your room, it requires the microphone on your Samsung TV. Even Dolby Atmos is exclusive to 2022-2025 Samsung TVs, so unless you have one of the company’s newer TVs, you won’t be able to enjoy the spatial audio out of this soundbar. Lastly, SpaceFit Sound Pro, which calibrates the soundbar to your room, requires a Samsung 2025 QLED TV, Frame, or Frame Pro.
🗣️ Dialogue boost. Want to hear louder dialogue? This soundbar’s included Voice Enhance Mode helps, but it's not nearly as strong as Active Voice Amplifier Pro on Samsung’s more expensive soundbars. Annoyingly, you can’t stack Samsung’s AI-powered Voice Amplifier Pro on top of the HW-QS700F’s Voice Enhance. So you’re actually stuck with a less powerful version of dialogue boost with the soundbar connected. At least, the HW-QS700F has a powerful center speaker, so you’ll be less reliant on voice boosting features.
Design
🗜️ Compact size. All of the Samsung HW-QS700F’s feats are even more impressive when you look at how much thinner it is than its predecessor, the Samsung HW-Q700D. The Samsung HW-QS700F effectively shrank the power of a 43.7 x 4.7 x 2.4-inch soundbar into a slimmer, but wider 45.67 x 4.72 x 2-inch package. That thinner profile allows it to sit easily on top of the center-mounted stands on TVs like the Samsung S95F QD-OLED or Samsung QN90F Neo QLED. Alternatively, if you’re wall-mounting your TV, this soundbar practically sits flush against the wall, just like any flat-screen TV.
🤖 Industrial design. The Samsung HW-QS700F is one sleek-looking soundbar. Its slatted top and perforated metal grill give it an industrial appearance. Whether you have this soundbar sitting on top of your TV stand or attached vertically to the wall, the Samsung HW-QS700F will look great in your living room.
Should you buy the Samsung HW-QS700F?
Yes, if…
✅ 📢 You want a louder sound than your TV speakers can provide
✅ 📺 You own a Samsung TV to take advantage of Q-Symphony
✅ 😇 Hearing height audio with Dolby Atmos is essential
No, if…
❌ 🫨 You want room-shaking bass (get the Sony Theater Bar 6 instead)
❌ 🎶 You want a soundbar to be your main music speaker (get the Sonos Beam Gen 2 instead)
❌ ꩜ You want rear surround sound (get the Sony Bravia System 6 instead)
Kevin Lee is The Shortcut’s Creative Director. Follow him on Twitter @baggingspam.