LG Eclair QP5 review

The Eclair is small. Small enough to be dwarfed by some bigger smart home speakers. Although it’s quite dense and heavy so you can’t toss this around for its size. There are a total of five drivers with the front having three drivers (left, centre and right) and the remaining two being top firing drivers to bounce off your ceiling. Through this Eclair can really pull its weight for creating a wider soundstage. It’s impressive, especially when you consider that the speaker barely takes up any space under your telly.

Although, it’s not nuanced as we’d like it to be. The sound, although impressive for the size, lacks clarity. The mids and highs are squished without enough separation between the frequencies. Throw in the bi-directional sub-woofer and action sequences do start to sound thrilling. The vibration dampening subwoofer is impressive. It’s powerful, tight and delivers a cinematic kick to all your action movies. It’s also boomy which may tend to drown out the Eclair’s sound at times. So it will feel a bit too bassy for most situations. The race scene from Ready Player One sounds powerful and meaty but in between the bass-heavy sequences and the mid and high favouring scenes, the Eclair tends to drown out the latter. We immediately rushed to the LG Sound Bar app and dialled the bass down by 1. Even then, it wasn’t enough to avoid listener fatigue. 

No Time for Caution by Han Zimmer during the docking scene in Interstellar is not timed correctly and the Eclair can make a cacophony of Han’s orchestral masterpiece. Even in games like Gran Turismo 7 that have immaculate rumbling car exhaust tones and engine howls get lost on this soundbar.

The AI sound mode is half baked on the LG Eclair and it scrubs the Eclair’s strong points and makes it sound hollow. If you connect the Eclair to an LG telly using the TV Sound Mode Share, it will use the LG TV’s AI processing to put some brains into the AI sound mode. We don’t know how that will work out because we didn’t have an LG TV to test this with but we wouldn’t get our hopes too high. Dolby Atmos is also not the finest sounding on this as well. Truly no soundbar has come close to perfecting Dolby Atmos at this price point so we’ll let that one slide.

However, the soundbar and the subwoofer are connected wirelessly so it makes the whole package appealing to anyone who doesn’t want to deal with cable management. The Eclair is super simple to set up and get things going. The freedom to move the subwoofer around your living room is quite useful in matchbox-sized apartments in Mumbai.

There’s also HDMI 2.1 (HDCP 2.2) out with eARC and HDMI 2.1 (HDCP 2.3) input so in theory you can connect your latest 4K@120 gaming console directly to the LG Eclair but we rather avoid any latency issues for our gaming setup. Although, having the option to do it is quite praiseworthy and important for many folks who want to cut the cable clutter.

There’s Bluetooth 4.0, USB and optical connection as well. Other than that the LG Eclair is really absent on the smarts division. It doesn’t have Apple AirPlay, Spotify Connect or Wi-Fi connections. Heck, in a time where even the smallest piece of tech has everything smart, the LG Eclair doesn’t have any. We’re guessing that LG knows you will connect this to the telly and get your dose of smart features from there which makes sense. 

To make EQ adjustments, you have to pull out the LG Sound Bar app on your phone, connect the soundbar to the smartphone via Bluetooth and then make EQ adjustments through the app. It’s not rocket science but if you’re looking to change your EQ profile from movie to live tele to gaming, it’s better left to the buttons on the LG remote.

The bundled remote comes with four presets i.e. Music, Cinema, Gaming and AI. Cinema mode is the best spot to be because it really drives those top firing speakers to create a room-filling sound. 

We might have nitpicked the LG Eclair QP5 a bit too much but that’s the harsh reality of choosing aesthetics over quality. The Eclair QP5 will sit very nicely under your telly when you have space issues and it will deliver a thunderous sound quality when coupled with the wireless subwoofer but that’s not going to be the most authentic cinema experience in your living room.

If you want the best out of your telly with clear mid and high separation then the LG Eclair QP5 may not be for you. If you’re into Michael Bay movies that boot the dialogues in favour of bombastic action scenes then the QP5 is perfect for you.