Glad to hear you're enjoying it! I'm new to this area and have been eyeing the Q950A as my once-in-a-decade speaker purchase, but I really value good height channels for movie immersion. How would you say the height effects are and their volume compared to the surround channels? Would you (or anyone else in this thread) recommend a setup with dedicated speakers for good height channels instead, or is the Q950A satisfactory in that regard?
Hey! So honestly I would rate the height effect alone 3.5/5 overall, so definitely satisfactory. Even with my less than ideal ceiling setup, I do get a sense of the separation between surround and height, so in that sense I'm quite happy.
Having said that, if you DO have the option to have dedicated ceiling speakers, please go for that. I have tested a few Atmos systems with dedicated ceiling speakers and they definitely sound very impressive. Maybe some of the other folks here can chime in as well.
Having 33% more speakers in the rear boxes and 33% more watts is going to make the rears sound louder, so all else being equal a Q950A rears should be noticeably louder that a Q950T's rears. Which rears btw have always been loud enough for me, and I sit much closer to the bar than to the rears. It was the prior flagship Samsung bar that had low rear volume level, but as I understand it a firmware patch resolved that since.
Surround Mode used to be the best sounding mode on Q950T with music for me, followed by Standard mode. But it no longer does sound the best on that bar, due to changes in firmware in early April 2021 which made the other 9.1.4 modes sound generally better with music. The consensus now is that Adaptive mode is clearly the best with music on Q950T too. So you're confirming the same trend in the Q950A's modes.
Makes total sense, and I still find myself tweaking the rear speakers to bring them down depending on different sources. But that's just me fiddling around, overall I'd say they have been performing very well. I also turned on bass enhancement in SmartThings again to see if it would kill the rears for Atmos, and it absolutely did. Luckily, turning bass enhancement off again brought them back to life. I updated to the new firmware yesterday and the issue still persists, so I'm hoping they address this in the next update.
Overall very pleased with the system after two days! Outside of the bass enhancement bug killing Atmos, there have been zero disconnects of the sub/rears that others faced with the older Q90R/Q950T systems - was frankly quite nervous about that. Still going back and forth between Standard and Adaptive - I think the former is better for movies and general viewing, but agree that the latter sounds good for music.
Currently the only gripe I have is the disparity in volume levels between Atmos/non-Atmos content, and this seems to be consistent across Netflix, Apple TV+, Disney+ etc. The levels are about 15 - 20% higher for Atmos content, so I'm constantly having to bring the overall volume up significantly when viewing non-Atmos content, especially standard 5.1 content.
In all fairness, this also may be an Apple TV source issue. Anyone experienced anything similar?