LG USG10TY review: Great with the G4 OLED, not so good on its own

LG has made no secret of the fact that it wants more people who buy one of its TVs to partner that TV with an LG soundbar. The LG USG10TY is the brand’s latest attempt to make this happen. 

Its startling design perfectly matches the width and depth of a wall-hung 65in LG G4 OLED, and it can join forces with that TV’s speakers thanks to LG’s WOW Orchestra. You can use the USG10TY with any wall-hung TV, but it’s at its best with a G4 in tow.

LG USG10TY review: What you need to know

There aren’t many soundbars that look like the LG USG10TY. Where most are deeper than they are high, the USG10TY’s bar is incredibly thin. It’s too slim to stand on a table top, but its ultra-skinny profile is perfect for hanging on a wall underneath a TV.

LG has a specific TV partner in mind: the 65in LG G4. Partnering the soundbar with this TV also unlocks LG’s WOW Orchestra feature, where the TV speakers can join forces with those in the soundbar. 

Not surprisingly for a soundbar with so little depth, the USG10TY ships with a wireless subwoofer to inject more bass into proceedings. You can also add an optional rear speaker kit, but the default package delivers a claimed 410W of sound in a 3.1-channel configuration.

LG USG10TY review: Price and competition

The LG USG10TY costs £1,000, making it one of LG’s most premium soundbar models. That’s a lot but not necessarily excessive, especially when you consider the engineering challenges associated with delivering powerful audio with so little main speaker depth to play with. It’s also worth remembering that the TV it’s designed to partner with is one of LG’s premium models.

There is some pretty serious competition at this price point. Samsung’s new 9.1.4-channel Q930D typically retails for £1,149 but can be picked up much cheaper if you shop around. Meanwhile, Sony’s HT-A7000 is a powerful soundbar-only alternative that’s widely available for £1,000.

LG USG10TY review: Design and features

The USG10TY’s design starting point is LG’s desire to make it the ideal partner for its 65in LG G4 OLED. It’s exactly the same width (1,446mm) and its design feel is in keeping with that TV. The soundbar also manages to match the 32.5mm depth of that TV in recognition of the fact that its ‘Gallery’ design has been crafted with wall-hanging in mind.

Ultra-thin speakers famously struggle to deliver much bass. To make up for this, the USG10TY comes with a wireless subwoofer. This is much chunkier than the soundbar but compact enough to tuck down the side of a sofa without cluttering up your room. The driver is placed at the front rather than on its side, too, meaning that it has plenty of depth behind it to move air through to a port on the rear. 

As you might guess from its design, the USG10TY only delivers a 3.1 channel configuration. There are no height speakers to deliver real (rather than virtual) Dolby Atmos height channel sound effects, and if you want a full surround system you’ll need to add LG’s SPT8-S rear speakers.

The soundbar’s AI Sound Pro audio processor is capable of creating a virtual height effect, however, and it has LG’s WOW Orchestra technology up its sleeve. If partnered with the LG G4 (or any reasonably premium LG TV), the bar works in tandem with the TV speakers, which are able to add a greater sense of height.

There are a couple of other LG-exclusive WOW features available, too. WOW Interface lets you control the soundbar’s functionality through the TV’s remote and on-screen menus, while WOW Cast permits wireless transmission of lossless Dolby Atmos between LG TVs and soundbars.

The USG10TY supports both DTS:X and Atmos, with both bolstered by LG’s Triple Level Spatial Sound system. This adds a virtual mid layer to the sound to create a more convincing sense of space and scale. Its processor also has the wherewithal to convert simple stereo sources into multi-channel mixes able to make use of the soundbar’s higher channel count.

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LG USG10TY review: Connections and control

The USG10TY’s connectivity is a little limited, with only an optical digital input, single HDMI input and single HDMI output joining Wi-Fi and Bluetooth wireless options. Having any HDMI passthrough is better than nothing, but an additional input would have been nice. The HDMI passthrough supports HDR10, Dolby Vision and 4K/120Hz game graphics but not HDR10+. 

HDMI’s audio return channel feature is on hand to enable lossless Atmos audio to be passed from your TV to the soundbar if your TV supports this. This worked particularly well during my tests, suffering with seemingly no lag, and only the very occasional momentary drop out.

The USG10TY can be controlled in four different ways. Likely to get the most use is the included remote. This is a little plasticky and lightweight, but its layout is reasonably logical and ergonomic. 

A row of control buttons runs down the soundbar’s right-hand side, while the WOW Interface feature lets you use an LG TV remote to control the USG10TY too. Last but not least, you can control the soundbar via the LG Soundbar app. If you’re not using the app, you’ll be pleased to hear that the soundbar carries an LED display to help you monitor settings, selected inputs and so on.

LG USG10TY review: Sound quality

How good the LG USG10TY sounds depends heavily on whether you’re using it on its own or in conjunction with an LG TV. The best way to demonstrate this is by first assessing its solo performance without any TV speakers in use. 

As a standalone soundbar, the big questions for the USG10TY are: can such a thin soundbar produce plenty of volume and dynamic range without distorting, and can such thin speakers harmonise with a much chunkier subwoofer? The USG10TY’s answers to both are more ‘just about’ rather than a whole-hearted ‘yes’.

Dialogue usually emerges cleanly and energetically, while also sounding contextualised within the mix. Also better than expected is how rounded and substantial the general presentation is. Sound is pushed forward into the room with surprising impact and expands both vertically and horizontally as it emerges from the soundbar’s front.

The USG10TY’s bar typically ties in nicely with the subwoofer, too. Listen to the soundbar without the subwoofer active and it sounds quite thin and unimposing. With the subwoofer in play, the soundstage changes profoundly. It gains enough bass gravitas to put the USG10TY in the mix with plenty of similarly priced but more traditionally designed soundbar-plus-subwoofer combinations.

Most of the time, the reasonably meaty bass coming out of the sub sounds like it’s attached quite well to the lower reaches of the soundbar’s dynamic range. The sound swells aggressively during action scenes with the sub in play too – aided by the impact of LG’s Triple Layer Spatial Sound effect. Suddenly things sound quite epic, even with an ultra-challenging scene like the main Jenny Lind performance in The Greatest Showman, to a degree I’d worried wouldn’t be possible from such a uniquely designed soundbar.

The USG10TY’s push to deliver an expansive soundstage doesn’t stop it from producing an impressive amount of fine detail. Ambient effects like wind and background music are always present and correct on the periphery of a mix, while specific placement effects are positioned accurately and tracked well.

One final strength is how much volume the system can produce without succumbing to distortions – despite how little room for manoeuvre the main soundbar’s speakers have.

The USG10TY can’t completely escape issues raised by its design, though. Male voices can sound a little hummy and voices generally struggle to sound like they’re coming from the action on screen rather than from the soundbar beneath it.  

The subwoofer, meanwhile, sometimes succumbs to chuffing and phutting when playing extended bass rumbles, while the lack of any up-firing speakers means you get a fairly limited and slightly inconsistent sense of height with Atmos mixes. Some mid-treble sounds can be a touch harsh, and the difference in impact between the hefty bass from the sub and the sometimes slightly trapped trebles of the main bar can be a bit too obvious in dynamic soundtracks.

On its own, the USG10TY warrants a three-star rating; were we to award half stars, that would rise to three and a half given what it achieves from its remarkable design. Cue the addition of a 65in G4 OLED…

Attaching the soundbar to the TV via HDMI and activating the WOW Orchestra feature instantly improves the sound in three ways. First, dialogue goes from sounding rather detached from the on-screen action to sounding like it’s coming from exactly the right place. 

Second, the whole central part of the soundstage sounds busier. You get much more impact from Atmos height effects as the TV’s speakers inject more verticality to the soundstage. 

The third way relates to how successfully the TV’s speakers blend with those of the USG10TY. Only during the occasional really dense action scene do you notice a distracting amount of tonal variation between the TV and soundbar. The G4’s integrated speakers deliver a decent step up from those of its G3 predecessor, but I didn’t anticipate it would sound quite as assured in the USG10TY’s company as it does.

Adding the G4 OLED to the USG10TY makes so much difference that it elevates the soundbar to an overall score of four and makes the price tag look significantly fairer.

While the USG10TY is designed for films and TV shows, it sounds better than expected with music provided you’re careful how you set it up. The best setup for me was to have the Music playback preset selected and WOW Orchestra active. Without using WOW Orchestra, vocals sounded a bit swallowed by the rest of a mix, and the multiple layers of dense rock and classical tracks tended to meld into each other, leading to an overall sound that verged on dirty at times. 

Adding the TV speakers eased the pressure on the soundbar, creating a more dynamic, clean and detailed sound, as well as making vocals sound clearer and better positioned. The extra detail you get in WOW Orchestra Music mode enhances your connection with music tracks too, without making anything too bright or clinical.

The sense of stereo separation is also greatly enhanced with WOW Orchestra and Music mode engaged. Some may feel this becomes a bit too pronounced, but I found the effect too much fun to be without once I’d experienced it. 

The one fly in the ointment is the subwoofer, which isn’t consistent enough to make the USG10TY a true hi-fi hero. With some tracks, its input can sound a little coarse compared to the finesse of the main bar, and it’s sometimes uncertain about when and how aggressively to kick in. 

As well as leaving some tracks lacking in low frequency authority and commitment, the subwoofer’s uncertainty prevents you from settling into a listening session as you’re always waiting for it to do something distracting.

LG USG10TY review: Verdict

The LG USG10TY had me torn between feeling disappointed that it never sounds quite as tight and consistent as some more straightforward rivals, and thinking it sounds way better than I’d have considered possible from such an ultra-thin, design-led soundbar. 

In the end, though, both positions are valid when you add in context. LG makes no bones about the fact that it designed the USG10TY with a specific user case in mind, so it’s not surprising that trying to use it in a different scenario comes with performance strings attached. 

Provided you understand what it’s for and have the secondary kit (a premium LG TV, ideally the G4 OLED) to unlock its full potential, the USG10TY not only sounds better in this configuration than I’d have thought possible, but sounds pretty handy by general soundbar standards too.