Listening to the gentle rock track "Our Love" by Sharon Van Etten, the Samsung sounded more natural, with more "air" around instruments. Next we compared the SJ9's music rendition with the Samsung HW-K950.
However, we did find the subwoofer to be quite directional and had to move it next to the speaker for better integration. When we settled back down and just listened to the SJ9 on its own - scene after scene of mass destruction with "Transformers: Age of Extinction" - the SJ9 successfully pummeled our eardrums without sounding like it was working very hard.Īs for music, the SJ9 sounded decent enough with the acoustic tunes from Jason Isbell's new "The Nashville Sound" album, with sound more or less on par with the HT-ST5000. That's the benefit of a bona-fide 5.1 channel system - it really did produce a more immersive soundscape with movies than the SJ9 or HT-ST5000. The sense of being in the forest, with the sounds of birds and insects coming from all around, was better on the HW-K950 than on the SJ9. When we played quieter scenes with Mei in the bamboo forest with the Samsung HW-K950, that one had the advantage of featuring a pair of wireless surround speakers that we placed behind us in the CNET listening room. The SJ9 was potent, but nowhere as precise. Frankly, we were amazed by the way the HT-ST5000 reproduced the drums' bass transients, they were clean, fast, and powerful. The $1,500 Sony HT-ST5000 system was clearer overall, and its bass definition handily trumped the SJ9's. When blind dancer Mei (Zhang Ziyi) jumps and kicks the drums, the bass notes she produced were satisfyingly deep and powerful. We started we used one of our favorite old demo discs, "The House of Flying Daggers" and went straight to the circle of drums scene, and put the SJ9 through its paces.