LG reveals new soundbars that play nice with its TVs

We may have lost a brother in arms when LG announced it’s dropping its smartphone business altogether, but we can still rely on decent audio and visual kit from the company. Now it’s officially announced a range of soundbars featuring impressive audio hardware and software tricks. 

The eight soundbars were first revealed back in January, along with its new OLED Evo and QNED TVs slated for 2021. The range is completed by the SP11RA — a flagship soundbar equipped with a whopping 7.1.4 channels and some fancy up-firing drivers in its rear speakers.

Meet LG’s sound-blasters

The whole updated range includes improved integration with LG TVs — which makes sense. All of ‘em are compatible with the AI Sound Pro feature found on its TVs, which pushes audio from the TV through to the soundbar using something called ‘TV Sound Mode Share’. As you’d expect, other TVs won’t use this feature. Supporting this, is the fact that these soundbars come with the same sound modes you’ll find on the company’s TVs.

Expect to see a familiar audio name in the mix — British hi-fi specialist Meridian Audio makes an appearance. Again. All of LGs 2021 soundbars include Meridian Audio tuning along with something called Meridian Horizon technology. According to LG, this will ‘up-mix’ two-channel stereo content into multi-channel audio for more immersive audio — obviously, we’d have to test this to believe it.

They all support Dolby Atmos and DTS:X and a few of the new models are Hi-Res Audio certified, and fitted with HDMI eARC support. You’ll still have good old USB playback and Bluetooth streaming if you’re looking for additional connection options. And if you’re in any kind of AI assistant ecosystem (Google, Alexa, Siri), you’ll be happy to know any one of them can reside within the bar and help you out. 

South Africa will get the SP11RA, SP9YA, SP8YA, SP7Y and SPD7Y from October 2021. Pricing isn’t confirmed yet.