Samsung HW-A550  Soundbar Review

The bar has a simple design. It's mostly made of plastic, and there's a metal grille around the front of the bar.

The sub is mostly made of melamine. There's fabric covering the front side.

This setup doesn't come with satellites. However, you can purchase the Wireless Rear Speaker kit from Samsung separately.

The Samsung HW-A550 isn't very wide, so it may be able to fit between the legs of some 55" TVs. Also, it isn't very tall, so it shouldn't block your TV screen unless your TV sits flush on your table.

The sub is about the size of an average desktop computer. It connects to the bar wirelessly, so you have a lot of flexibility when placing it in your room.

The back of the bar has two openings for the power cable and the inputs. There are also universal holes on the underside, so you can wall-mount it.

The back of the sub has a plastic port, as well as the input for the power cable and a pairing button.

The Samsung HW-A550 has a good build quality. The bar itself is mostly plastic, which feels solid and durable, and the metal grille on the front helps protect its drivers. The sub is mostly melamine. Unfortunately, the fabric on the sub seems like it could easily rip or get dirty.

• Manual
• Remote with batteries (2xAA)
• Mounting brackets with screws and template
• Optical cable
• 2x power cable
• Power adapter for soundbar

The Samsung HW-A550 has a very good stereo frequency response. It performs similarly to the Samsung HW-B550, with a pretty neutral sound profile out-of-the-box. There's a little extra punch in the bass range that can please fans of bass-heavy music like EDM. However, it lacks a bit of low-bass, so you may not feel the deep rumble in action-packed movie scenes. It comes with a graphic EQ and presets as well as bass and treble adjustments to help you customize its sound to your liking.

The Samsung HW-A550 has a great stereo frequency response with calibration. With its bass set to '-3' and its treble set to '3', it has a very neutral, balanced sound profile that's suitable for listening to lots of different types of audio content. However, it still lacks some low-bass, which can be disappointing if you like to feel low thump and rumble.

The Samsung HW-A550 has a decent stereo soundstage performance. Its soundstage is perceived to be about as wide as the bar itself, but it doesn't have any tricks to make it seem wider than that. It also has good focus for a 2.1 soundbar. Objects like voices and footsteps seem to come from an accurate region, though it isn't always easy to pinpoint their exact location.

The Samsung HW-A550 has a great dynamics performance. It can get loud without a lot of compression at max volume, making it suitable for listening to audio during parties and in large rooms.

The Samsung HW-A550 has a mediocre THD performance. At normal listening volumes, there's a bit of distortion in the mid and bass ranges. When you push the bar to max volume, there's a jump in THD across the range. While it can be hard to hear with real-life content, you may still notice it.

The Samsung HW-A550 has a disappointing center channel performance. It's a 2.1 setup, so it has to use its left and right channels to simulate a sound in the center, which doesn't sound as clear or real compared to a discrete center channel. However, voices still sound fairly accurate since there isn't much bass reproduced on center channel tracks.

The Samsung HW-A550 has poor surrounds performance. This 2.1 bar has to downmix surround content into stereo to play it. As a result, surround objects like voices and footsteps aren't as accurately or clearly represented in the soundstage. Sound seems like it's coming from in front of you rather than from speakers placed all around you. For a soundbar with a better surrounds performance, check out the Vizio V Series V21x-J8 or the Hisense HS218.

The Samsung HW-A550 has a lot of sound enhancement features. Unlike the Samsung HW-T550, it comes with a graphic EQ for sound customization. It also comes with many EQ presets, including 'Standard', 'Surround Sound', 'Bass Boost', 'Game', 'Adaptive Sound', and 'DTS Virtual X'. The 'Adaptive Sound' feature doubles as a dialogue enhancement mode, which helps make voices sound more clear and crisp. You can also press and hold the 'SOUND MODE' button on the remote when the bar is off to turn Dynamic Range Control on and off, which helps balance the volume level across different programs.

The Samsung HW-A550 comes with some physical inputs. There's a Full HDMI In port, so you can use the bar as a hub between different devices. However, there isn't an AUX port, so you can't wire older devices to the bar to playback audio.

The Samsung HW-A550 has decent audio format support via ARC. It supports both Dolby Digital and DTS, commonly found on Blu-ray discs and streaming platforms. However, it can't decode lossless or object-based surround formats like Dolby Atmos.

The Samsung HW-A550 supports Dolby Digital content via Full HDMI In. Dolby Digital is the most common surround sound format, and you can often find it on Blu-ray discs and streaming platforms. However, you can't playback lossless or object-based surround formats over this input.

The Samsung HW-A550 supports both Dolby Digital and DTS content over Optical, which is useful for those who like to watch Blu-ray discs and content from streaming platforms.

The Samsung HW-A550 has a decent latency performance. Its latency is a bit high over its ARC, Full HDMI In, and Optical ports, so you may notice a bit of a delay between your audio and your video. As a result, it may not be very suitable for watching videos over these connections. That said, some apps and some TVs compensate for latency differently, so your real-world experience can vary.

The Samsung HW-A550 lets you wirelessly stream audio from your mobile device to the bar via Bluetooth. However, you aren't able to stream audio over other wireless connections.

The bar can't passthrough some of the highest-quality bandwidth signals, so you can't use it for Dolby Vision Passthrough. At most, it can passthrough 4k @ 4:4:4 30Hz.

The sub connects to the bar wirelessly. You just need to plug it into an outlet to use it.

In the middle of the bar, there's a small three-character display. It displays the volume mode and the sound mode when you adjust these settings. However, it isn't visible when you aren't adjusting a setting. Since it's only three characters, you may need to wait for it to scroll through longer messages.

On top of the bar, there are some controls. You can power the bar on/off, adjust the volume, and change the input source.

The remote is simple and lets you control the bar's functions. It's advertised to support Samsung OneRemote, which lets you use your TV remote to control the bar, but we don't test for this.

The Samsung HW-A550 has an auto-off function that shuts the bar off after a certain period of time without an audio signal. Also, it supports HDMI CEC, so you can use your TV remote to control the bar.