Sound and Image have their review up of the Music Studio 7, Samsung's first proper streaming speaker, and the backstory is more interesting than the usual launch. This came out of the California Audio Lab in Valencia, the operation Allan Devantier set up in 2014 after Samsung bought Harman, built on the room and measurement thinking he took from Floyd Toole and the NRC work in Canada. Devantier has since left. He described the Music Studio 7 as a fitting swan song and said it carries two technologies invented at that lab, though Samsung's own publicity never says which two and would rather talk about the Bouroullec brothers designing the enclosure.
Verdict is strong: big stereo sound for the money, good streaming options, and it handles Atmos music and movies over HDMI, which is the part that makes it interesting to anyone in this section. A single box that takes an HDMI feed off the TV and does more than a soundbar does with stereo music is a category that barely exists.
The complaints are the ones that stick with you though. No remote control on a device you park in a living room and use for TV audio is a genuinely odd omission, phone app or not. Limited Bluetooth codecs matters less if you are streaming over the network anyway.
What I actually want to know is what happens to Samsung audio now the person who dragged their soundbars up from awful to good has walked out the door. Anyone heard one of these in a shop yet?
Verdict is strong: big stereo sound for the money, good streaming options, and it handles Atmos music and movies over HDMI, which is the part that makes it interesting to anyone in this section. A single box that takes an HDMI feed off the TV and does more than a soundbar does with stereo music is a category that barely exists.
The complaints are the ones that stick with you though. No remote control on a device you park in a living room and use for TV audio is a genuinely odd omission, phone app or not. Limited Bluetooth codecs matters less if you are streaming over the network anyway.
What I actually want to know is what happens to Samsung audio now the person who dragged their soundbars up from awful to good has walked out the door. Anyone heard one of these in a shop yet?
