Can multi-channel audio setup survive an attic room? Tested in mine for a week (Tried Sound Suite and Q990D)
Immersive Suite 5 Comparison and First Impressions
LG invited me to their event in Frankfurt back in March and afterwards sent me the Immersive Suite 5 Pro, asking me to share my impressions. Everything you read below is entirely my own opinion. I've been living with it for a week in an attic room, running a PS5 and an Apple TV into an LG G6, and until now my reference was a Samsung Q990D.
Setting Up a Multi-Channel Home Theater System
My room is an attic and it isn't square, which on paper is the worst possible case for a system that bounces sound off walls and ceiling. Two things mattered more than I expected:
Network: The app setup is easy, but I had to fall back to the 2.4 GHz band because my 5 GHz network runs on a DFS channel and the system won't connect to it. Worth checking your router before you start. Since everything leans on WiFi and my router is on the first floor while the system is upstairs, I expected dropouts, in a week I've had none.
Passthrough: This is the tip I'd give anyone buying this system. At first I was genuinely disappointed by the subwoofer: even at maximum level it was quiet, and I blamed the shape of the room. Then I turned on Passthrough on the TV and it became a different product. For the first time ever with a sound system, I had to turn the subwoofer down. The same applied to Atmos, which was switched off on my Apple TV and was the real reason bass was so thin on some content. Go through every setting on every device before you judge the sound.
Placement: The subwoofer sits behind me instead of next to the TV, because my neighbour lives directly below that part of the room and bass travels through a floor far more easily than through a wall. One M5 is on the nightstand right next to me; the other is on a shelf about four metres away on my left. Then I ran the Dolby Atmos FlexConnect calibration, and this is where the system earns its money as a multi-channel home theater system.
Sound
In Standard mode I never found dialogue too quiet, which is contrary to what several reviews have said. With AI Sound voices become noticeably clearer, and how that clarity sits depends a lot on the mix of whatever you're watching. With some content the voice takes on a bigger, more open character, closer to a real cinema room, and whether I liked that or not changed from title to title. In games I end up switching: Ghost of Yotei works flawlessly with AI Sound, while in Final Fantasy VII Rebirth I preferred Standard for the dialogue. For movies I leave AI Sound on, because I love how wide everything becomes. I think of Standard as the equivalent of Filmmaker Mode on a TV, closer to what the creator intended. If I could ask for one thing in a future update, it would be a finer control over how much AI Sound is applied to the centre channel, so I could tune it per title instead of switching modes.
You can listen to the system in full action with AI Sound here: https://youtu.be/rTwyBcTPWgI?is=AOTxQVPlgEjp-j9s
FlexConnect compensates for the four-meter gap between my two M5s so well that I genuinely don't perceive one side as further away. The sound arrives evenly from both. On every other system I've owned, building that dome depended on me and a manual calibration. Here you set it and forget it. I also tested whether it distinguishes height by putting one M5 on top of a closet, roughly 1.80 m up and three meters away. In my room I couldn't pick out a clear difference from having it lower down, but that was one informal test in one position, so I wouldn't read much into it. I assume It corrects for distance, not elevation.
Even with the subwoofer behind my head, the bass reads as coming from the TV and the soundbar. That's by design and worth clarifying, because I misread it at first. FlexConnect doesn't measure or identify where the subwoofer is. Bass is non-directional, so the sub can go wherever it fits best in your room, and the subwoofer icon you see on the left during the setup only means it's connected, it isn't telling you where it’s placed. In practice the low end feels like it comes from everywhere and anchors to the front, which is exactly what you want.
Despite the room shape, I do get sound from above, not directly overhead, more from the corner. The fireworks in the opening minutes of F1: The Movie were the clearest example.
Combinations
I tried the system in stages, which is also how I'd recommend buying it.
W7 subwoofer + LG TV: If you're building slowly, start here. Connected to a 2025 or 2026 LG TV, the subwoofer lifts the TV's own sound considerably. The one limitation, you can't control subwoofer volume until the H7 soundbar is in the chain.
Stereo Suite 5 (2 × M5): Either the next step or an equally good first one. The M5 is the cheapest speaker in the Sound Suite family and still adds weight to the overall sound. What impressed me is that even when it's physically impossible for sound to reach me from behind, the pair still does a convincing job of placing it there.
Cinema Suite (H7 + W7): The point where bass becomes a real subwoofer. It got powerful enough that the stand under my TV started rattling, which is the second reason the sub ended up behind me. The soundbar widens the front stage noticeably, especially with AI Sound, even in a non-square room.
Full Immersive Suite 5 Pro: For home theater specifically, this is the one. The gap between Cinema Suite and the full system isn't subtle. The rears and the height channels are what turn it from a very good soundbar setup into an actual multichannel room. It's also the first time I've stopped caring whether a film or game is 5.1 or Atmos. I used to think Atmos was mostly marketing, and for years a good 5.1 mix beat a poor Atmos one. That's no longer true here.
Compared to other setups I've used
Samsung Q990D. The Q990D was my reference multi-channel home theater system and I always ran it in Adaptive mode. In pure sound quality the two are very close, expect for the rear speakers on the Q990D, which are worse. Where the LG pulls ahead is bass quality and the rear channels. The subwoofer is tighter and more controlled rather than just louder, and the M5s disappear into the room in a way the Samsung's rears never did. If the M5 already does this, I'd expect the M7 to widen that gap further, though I haven't tested it myself.
M5 vs. HomePod Mini vs. Beats Pill. Out of curiosity I also compared a single M5 against a HomePod Mini and a Beats Pill across three tracks, since those are the small speakers most people will actually have at home.
I recorded the comparison here: https://youtu.be/m8_24Ahuta4?is=zxmARS4rpcuiggHl (worth listening on headphones). It's a useful reference point for what the M5 is doing on its own, before FlexConnect turns it into a surround channel.
A note on latency
In the first hours I noticed a small delay, and after a few hours of use I stopped registering it entirely. Still, I wanted to put a number on it instead of guessing, so I used the calibration tool in Rock Band 4, which exists precisely to compensate for this.
The interesting part is that the result changed with the PS5's audio output. With Atmos it reported 314 ms, switching the PS5 to PCM it dropped to 220 ms.
I wouldn't take either number too literally, though. That calibration is manual, you tap along to a beat, so there's a human factor baked into the result, and it measures the full round trip of the whole chain: the PS5's output, the TV's own picture and audio processing and the wireless link, not the soundbar on its own. The same screen makes that point by itself, it also reports a separate video calibration of 54 ms, which is the TV's picture processing and has nothing to do with the audio system. I heard that LG's internal measurements come out lower than what I got, and given how this is measured at home, that makes sense to me.
The practical impact depends on what you're doing. Games that let you calibrate, rhythm games above all, handle it fine once you've run the setup, and most streaming apps correct lip sync automatically. For everything else, I adapted within a few hours and stopped noticing it. Still, if you play competitively or you're particularly sensitive to sync, switch to PCM and run your own calibration when you set the system up
Verdict
When I ask myself, "Which multi-channel audio setup is best?" this is the answer I keep coming back to. For a first attempt at this technology, LG got the important part right: the multi-channel home theater experience survives a bad room. It is not a plug-and-play system, though, it needs real setting-up, and my worry is that people who skip that step (Passthrough, Atmos, calibration) will end up writing the mixed comments you sometimes see. Get the settings right and this is the best setup I've had at home.
