Flat TVs almost unanimously have one drawback: they also give flat sound. Whatever you want: only so many speakers fit in a housing a few centimeters thick. Then a soundbar is an excellent solution to get more sound from your TV. Especially now that more and more streaming services are offering their films and series with Dolby Atmos sound, you are really missing out if you watch without a sound system.
A soundbar remains the most accessible way to get in. You don’t have to immediately fill half your living room with speakers, one bar under the TV is enough. Such a soundbar is in most cases quickly a meter wide. But what if you have a somewhat smaller TV, or don’t feel like such a large bar in your living room? Then there’s the LG Eclair.
The name is well chosen, especially in a market that is dominated by vague product names with numbers and letters. This LG also has such a name: QP5, but Eclair is so much better. The LG speaker really resembles the French pastry with its small size and round shapes. The soundbar is just under 27 centimeters wide, so that four to five Eclairs can easily fit in an average soundbar.
Bigger sound than you expect
Okay, so small size – but big sound? In any case, bigger than you’d expect. The Eclair itself is equipped with five speakers. One speaker in the middle fires sounds straight ahead, the left and right speakers are at an angle of 45 degrees and in between are two more speakers that fire almost perpendicularly upwards.
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The wireless subwoofer has two bass speakers and adds clearly audible and tactile bass. With a size of 39 x 31 x 22 centimeters, that woofer is not nearly as compact as the Eclair itself, but luckily you can hide it quite easily.
Together, the Eclair and the woofer provide a pretty rich sound. Yes, even Dolby Atmos is clearly audible from the Eclair. This will mainly be due to the speakers that fire up sound. This reflects off the ceiling back to the listener and that makes the whole sound more spacious.
More spacious, but it remains limited
Does the LG Eclair offer a convincing Dolby Atmos experience? Yes and no. You may know the full experience from the cinema: overwhelming, crystal-clear sound all around you. Like being the center of a ball of sound. The Eclair does not achieve that with its small size and without rear speakers, but it will come a long way. The Eclair forms the front half of that sound ball, as it were: you are surrounded by sound, but the source unmistakably remains that box next to the TV.
That lack of enormous spaciousness will ultimately be the physical limitation of such a small speaker. The Eclair does its best and sounds much better than the speaker of almost every TV. But the sound remains traceable to that small pastry. Many other soundbars sound more spacious purely because of the physical space that sits between the different speakers.
This observation is partly professional deformation: anyone who listens to many sound systems hears such a difference more quickly. For whom the LG Eclair is the first soundbar, a world of sound opens up. Series sound brighter, fuller, more dynamic. For films and series without Atmos, the Alpha 9 chip and artificial intelligence make things more spatial: that sometimes works fine in practice, sometimes not. Fortunately, you can turn it off with the supplied remote control.
Great for the price – but there are alternatives
The biggest disadvantage of the LG Eclair is that it is primarily a soundbar. There is a Bluetooth connection for playing music on your phone, but it is not a full-fledged smart speaker or WiFi speaker à la Sonos. For people looking for that, for example, the equally priced new Sonos Beam a nice option. That Beam also has Dolby Atmos, it does have its own music streaming, but it is larger and there is no subwoofer, and you can hear the difference.
The LG Eclair is available in black and white and now costs about 499 euros.
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