Samsung Music Studio 7 review

We had been anticipating this Music Studio 7 since last year, when we had reviewed a Samsung soundbar which turned out to be one of the last products to emerge from the company’s California Audio Lab under Allan Devantier. The Lab continues; Mr Devantier has moved on to a company intending to revolutionise magnets in loudspeakers by avoiding rare-earth metals and other cunning stuff.

It was Devantier who almost singlehandedly revolutionised Samsung’s soundbar performance after creating the Audio Lab in 2014. For its test facilities he incorporated ideas from the legendary National Research Council of Canada audio rooms created by his guru and collaborator Floyd Toole at Harman, from where Devantier had been headhunted not long prior to Samsung’s purchase of the entire company and all its audio brands.

We had exchanged a few questions with Mr Devantier for the soundbar review, but we had not known he was shortly to leave Samsung; we found out only after publication, when he linked to our review on his LinkedIn account.

“The last interview with me as the Audio R&D Leader at Samsung is part of the review of the HW-QS700F SoundBar that the Audio Lab in Valencia California and I were heavily involved in,” he wrote. “Fitting that they decided to mention my decades-long collaboration with Floyd Toole.”

And then he added: “Be on the look-out for reviews of the Music Studio 7 which features 2 technologies invented at the Audio Lab in Valencia California. I first proposed the concept to management a L O N G time ago. I am so happy we were finally able to bring it to the market. It’s a fitting swan song. Thanks to the entire team at the Valencia [California] Audio lab and especially Felix Kochendörfer, Matthew McDuffee and Yuan Li.”

So we made an early request, and finally we have the Music Studio 7 in for review. Samsung’s publicity for the speaker doesn’t clarify which are the two new invented technologies mentioned by Devantier, though the heavily plugged “patented Immersive Waveguide technology” might be a frontrunner for one of them.

Nor is there any mention in despatches of those three names from Devantier’s Audio Lab. Samsung’s press releases instead emphasise “renowned industrial design studio Erwan & Ronan Bouroullec” from Paris, and indeed we were asked if we would like to interview Erwan Bouroullec.

Not really, we replied; while we're sure M. Bouroullec is très magnifique et accompli and all that, the industrial designers oversee the outside of products, by and large, while we’re far more interested in the inside. They also speak nebulous design language (“I consider sound to be like air and light: fundamental elements of a room's atmosphere”, says Erwan), and several of our previous interviews with industrial designers have been, well, disastrous; we recall a slightly furious debate with a pair working for Bang & Olufsen who had decorated a waterproof loudspeaker with materials that weren’t waterproof, so you couldn’t then get it wet. They thought this very cool; we thought it idiotic, and the antithesis of good design.

But we digress. Mr Devantier whetted our appetite for the Music Studio 7. What has Samsung delivered here?

Build & drivers

In brief, this is a wireless streaming speaker. It has only two physical inputs (optical and HDMI eARC; the USB-A slot is for service only), plus a variety of streaming options. At the price (currently RRP A$749 each in Australia, though we've seen it at A$599 during promotional periods), it might be considered Samsung’s equivalent of Apple’s HomePod, or the Sonos Era 300.

You can buy just one, which might well be enough for a bedroom or study scenario with streaming. But we found that the HDMI input proves essential to their best performance, and if you’re using them for TV sound, we’re not sure how you’d put just one of these chunky speakers in front of your TV.

So this points towards their use as a stereo pair; they link wirelessly, so you can pop them either side of your TV, making a full music and movie system.

It is an unusual streaming speaker in a number of ways, and we certainly won’t diss the quality of work by Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec (fraternal designers who over nearly 30 years have designed everything from jewellery to architecture), because we like the exterior very much, including the way that a small light behind the front ‘Dot’ moves clockwise as you increase volume and anticlockwise when you reduce it.

“Their goal was to move away from the traditional, aggressive look of high-tech audio gear (which usually features exposed black cones and foam surrounds) and instead turn acoustic physics into modern art,” says Samsung. Job done.

The Bouroullec design input is perhaps more obvious on the smaller Music Studio 5, with its almost triangular base and curious stand-up circular frontage rather like a ‘Napoleon's hat’ tambour mantle clock (so suitably French-influenced!).

The Studio 7, however, is a far more conventional speaker shape, but again with no drivers visible at all. It presents as a minimalist rectangular box with nicely-radiused corners; the height-to-width measurements are 268 x 184mm, a pleasing 16:11 ratio though rather lower than the golden one, so that they appear slightly squat.

We were shocked at the packaging in which they arrived. There almost wasn’t any; the cardboard box was only slightly larger than the speaker, leaving the front baffle protected by a mere centimetre of sculptured cardboard padding, covered by a thin sheet of cardboard.

No damage? No damage, indeed nothing that can be damaged, because that larger circle on the front is not an exposed driver: it’s solid as a rock, a flush-mounted waveguide, presumably, moulded directly into the front matte-finished baffle. The baffle looks impervious but is actually a tightly punched grille that is both audibly transparent and visually so, if you hold a torch up to it. We tried breathing through it; no problem.

Our torch revealed a tweeter at the bottom behind the flat section; indeed this is described elsewhere as a Super Tweeter which “can capture ultra-high frequencies up to 35kHz” (though we assume it’s actually delivering rather than ‘capturing’, unless it’s listening for bats).

Also at the front, behind that Dot, our torch revealed a deeply-coned woofer, about four inches in diameter when measured across its wide roll surrounds; these and the cone profile indicate this is a long-throw design designed to move a lot of air for its size.

The centre of this driver lies directly behind the ‘Dot’, though what you actually see through the ‘Dot’ seems as solid to an inquiring tap as is the depression around it; we could not ascertain how it integrates directly into the baffle structure.

We think it fires from a tuned acoustic chamber, projecting sound forward. But it was confirmed by Samsung that the ‘Dot’ structure in front of this driver is NOT the aforementioned “patented Immersive Waveguide technology”. That is actually used on the supertweeter below: “Samsung's proprietary 'Immersive Waveguide (Patented)' delivers uniform directivity, spanning from 1kHz up to an ultra high-frequency of 35kHz,” they confirmed. The waveguide shapes and directs the sound waves – like a lens on a camera, but for sound instead of focusing light, as Samsung neatly puts it. One of its key goals is the delivery of a wide sweet spot for listening.

But the ‘Dot’ above is not mere industrial design. Samsung adds that the ‘Dot’ is meant to “visually represent the physical ‘origin of sound’ while quietly doing the heavy lifting of audio dispersion behind a calm, minimal facade.”

It is also apparently signature stuff from Erwan Bouroullec: “From the Pico and Punto coverings for Mutina to Cappellini's Cloud bookcase and the Maap lamp for Flos, he has explored the expressive potential of the dot and its repetition for years,” reported Archiproducts when the Music Studios were announced.

All this from a little circle; oh, the brilliance of industrial design.

But what we really wanted to know was where all the rest of the drivers are, and what they’re doing.

The Music Studio 7 is advertised as a Dolby Atmos-compatible speaker, and a graphic on Samsung’s product page shows sound emerging not only from the speaker frontage but also flooding sideways from each side, and upwards from the top. In one of the graphics, these sound beams then magically veer towards the listening position, though we presume they are really intended to bounce off ceilings and possibly side-walls (Samsung’s images are marked as AI and for illustrative purposes only).

Such side-bouncing can be a problem in Australian architecture because often the listening rooms are wide and simply don’t have side walls, being either open-plan or open to outdoor spaces. But as we’ll find, the Music 7 did manage this task well.

They can receive Dolby Atmos signals via Tidal Connect or Amazon's top music tier, or via any number of sources piped via HDMI.

The Music Studio 7s are also marked as able to play Eclipsa Audio, an open-source spatial audio format developed by Google and Samsung; this ability has also been integrated into some recent Samsung TVs. There seem no movies or commercial video yet available in Eclipsa, though there is some YouTube content and "select Samsung TV Plus content", and we note that Miami’s Classic Master USA mastering facility is also doing Eclipsa music masters. It’s early days, but if Eclipsa does eventually take off properly, the Music Studio 7 is ready to handle it.

As for the rest of the drivers, Samsung’s literature talks about “five advanced speakers delivering true surround sound”, stating that each Studio 7 alone delivers 3.1.1-channel sound.

Yet there are clearly seven drivers here. Using our torch-technique we peered beneath the side and top surfaces, seemingly aluminium, again punctured through with a fine grille pattern.

On top there is a single driver angled slightly forward, presumably bouncing off the ceiling; the angle looks like it would bounce off a normal ceiling height to serve a listening position some three metres distant. The driver is a little 40mm diameter cone with a large and prominent 20mm dustcap; we considered whether this might actually be a coaxially-situated tweeter dome, but Samsung confirms it as a single driver.

On each side of the Studio 7 there is a similar 40mm driver in the bottom section of each side, apparently firing directly sideways rather than angled to attempt the side bounce.

So that’s five drivers already, yet the top section of each side hosts a large curved-rectangle (racetrack) driver, some 95mm x 60mm, which must therefore be passive.

The centre driver behind the Dot seems to be considered the ‘subwoofer’ (it fired when we sent through an LFE signal only), augmented by the passive racetracks.

So there’s genuine LCR plus height plus bass, and the 3.1.1 claim is justified, though it’s not a direct signal they’re playing. Samsung shared with us engineers’ comments explaining that phase control signals based on the left, right and top channels are added to the front channel, to prevent the directivity of each channel from spreading unnecessarily.

We have no idea about either the amplification type, the DACs used or the materials from which the drivers are made.

Streaming and other tricks

Streaming is supported in a number of ways. With Spotify Connect and Tidal Connect, you simply use those native apps and select the Studio 7 as the output, sending music direct from the internet to the speakers at the best quality for which you are paying.

Other music can be streamed via AirPlay 2 or Google Cast; Apple currently throttles AirPlay 2 to a fairly meagre 256k AAC (despite endless ongoing rumours this may soon be raised), whereas Google Cast can go to CD quality and above, generally to 24-bit/96kHz depending on implementation, making it the preferable system here.

There is also Roon, the paid music organisational software which supposedly delivers best possible quality from a file-based music collection and from some streaming services to devices around the home. (Samsung benefits here by owning Harman, which now owns Roon!)

If you use a Samsung smartphone, DLNA casting is also integrated directly into the Samsung Music app, and should yield full-quality file replay, depending on your settings.

And there’s Bluetooth, version 6.0, but including only the basic SBC codec plus Samsung's own Galaxy-ecosystem SSC codec. So Bluetooth might be best kept for occasional convenience only, rather than regular use. There's no provision here for the new Bluetooth LE using the LC3 codec or Auracast broadcasting.

With the rear USB-A slot turning out to be for service only, the only physical inputs are the optical digital and HDMI eARC; both are likely considered as inputs for your TV audio, though only the HDMI connection will bring Dolby Atmos across from your TV.

The TV connection can do rather more if you’re pairing the Studio 7, or preferably two of them, with an actual Samsung TV – though we would say, after testing, that they’re good to go with any TV brand/model that offers HDMI ARC or eARC; don’t reject them just because you don’t have a Samsung TV.

But if you do have a suitably recent and compatible Samsung TV, then you can connect that wirelessly to the Studio 7s using Samsung’s Q-Symphony technology, which then integrates the TV’s own speakers into the overall sound, for better or for worse; it wasn’t something we could check. Indeed you can apparently connect four (or five?) speakers and the TV using Q-Symphony, Samsung then claiming a 15.0.5-channel layout (which we’re not going to begin trying to work out!).

There’s also talk of wireless Dolby Atmos being possible from a compatible TV, but there’s enough compression on Atmos signals already; we’d very much recommend using a cable.

Pairing two Studio 7s without Q-Symphony was our main listening configuration, and we think it probably a purer path than adding in the TV drivers. Allan Devantier once confirmed to us that audio purists (“like us”, he said, including himself) should not consider using Q-Symphony with its soundbars, advice surely doubly true here with the even more hi-fi Studio 7s.

With the speakers linked together and set up either side of our TV, how did this affect their driver use? It seemed, with both stereo and Atmos material, that both Studio 7s then shut down their inner facing side tweeter, though the passive side radiator kept pumping. This makes sense; in our scenario the inner tweeters were now firing uselessly behind the screen of the 75-inch Samsung TV, so turning them off and rebalancing the output is an excellent idea.

Both outer drivers, both top drivers and both forward tweeters continue firing with both stereo and Atmos material. From playing Atmos test channels through them, the front Super Tweeters, once the speakers were paired, seemed to take on both a share of the centre signal and their respective left or right signal as well, while the side speakers were also taking a share of left and right signals while handling all surround information. So clearly some cunning algorithms are overseeing job-sharing for the drivers to achieve the best effect.

There are a few technologies on top of this. Samsung’s ‘Sound’ app has a slider to invoke ‘SpaceFit Sound Pro’, which it says adapts the sound to the room, though at first we couldn’t imagine how, as there are no test tones, no microphone waving process involved, and Samsung has no mike position out in the room. But after reading up we gather it uses far-field microphone arrays within the speakers to measure (continuously) how the audio bounces off your walls, ceiling, and furniture, then using EQ to compensate accordingly. We try it out below.

There’s also Active Voice Amplifier (AVA) Pro, which adjusts voices to overcome specific background noises, and ‘Auto Volume’ which both keeps different sources at similar levels, and works within sources to avoid spikes. The first is useful input matching; the second likely involves dynamic range compression, so is again ‘not for the purist’.

Plus there are a few listening modes and on-the-fly EQ adjustments available, which we’ll encounter during our listening.

The speakers are listed as allowing Alexa control, but we think the day for Alexa control of audio gear has passed, at least in Australia. More interestingly when we opened Samsung’s SmartThings app (we were looking for a way to DLNA-cast to the speakers), it immediately found and registered the speakers within SmartThings in addition to the ‘Sound’ app we’d used to set them up, yet SmartThings seemed to maintain our ‘Sound’ settings, even clearly pointing us back to that app as a more convenient and dedicated method of control. Good work.

Listening sessions

Set-up was as simple as any wireless speaker we’ve reviewed, and easier than many of them. Although weighty enough at 5.6kg each, the composite back panel includes a handgrip which makes them easy to carry around, and little possibility of damage given all the drivers are hidden away.

The power cord plugs upward underneath from the back, and in nice attention to detail, the black speaker has a black mains cable and the white speaker a white one! Samsung had sent us two Music 7s – one black (LS70H), one white (LS71H).

Getting the first unit online required no hunting for pairing buttons on the back: the speaker was instantly visible in Samsung’s Sound app as soon as we powered it up. There was even a sticker on the top telling us to hold down two buttons for a built-in demo – it sounded great, and should impress people in-store!

There are five rectangular press buttons on top: + and – for volume, then a music note in the middle (play/pause/next track, but also can be set to Spotify Tap, launching Spotify Connect without need for the app), and finally a circle on the left (multifunction) and a circle with a line through it on the right (mic on/off).

Hang on, what microphone? Turns out this is the one used for ‘SpaceFit Sound Pro’ and AVA Pro. These are continuous functions, requiring continuous microphone monitoring of the room. If you’re nervous about privacy, this button allows you to turn the mike off. We see this more often on products where there’s a voice assistant, and we often do turn it off, since this doesn’t much affect other functionality. But as we’ll see, we ended up very much wanting the SpaceFit on, and mike muting would disable this useful function.

Once we’d got the first speaker online, we whipped out a phone and started throwing tunes, initially via AirPlay. Out flowed Olivia Dean sounding lively, friendly and punchy, good bass support. But we were later to hear this playing through the same speaker, transformed. How? Read on.

Paired up

We really wanted to use these speakers as a stereo pair. It’s easy, almost encouraged indeed, to link them together within the Samsung Sound app (above). Once done you can access their settings together in the app, including a ‘Device Control’ option which we set to be our left speaker, as that would receive the HDMI cable.

We then opened up Spotify and later Deezer to throw some tunes to the paired stereo set. We expected to find them offered as a pair, and under the ‘Connect’ list it listed the left speaker, showing an icon of two linked speakers.

But it also listed each individual speaker alone as a Google Cast option (third screengrab above), which is a bit confusing.

We chose the two speaker option and started to play. It didn’t begin well. Stevie Wonder’s Superstitious emerged just all broken apart, bass faux, horns thin like sandpaper at short range, softening only as we sat back further away.

Carpenters, it’s hard to go wrong with Carpenters, but here there was no depth to it, no silence behind the soundstaging, and none of your classic warmth. Judy Blue Eyes from CS&N: soft and dull, though with a full bass.

We punched the sound mode to ‘AI Adaptive Sound’, tried ‘Standard’, preferred being back on ‘Music’. ‘Standard’ is in fact the purer choice, playing the stereo through left, right and centre direct, while ‘Music’ additionally fed the sound to the height driver. But this extra spread seemed non-destructive in sonic terms, and we preferred it, though things were still often sounding thin.

We experimented with speaker positioning, not forgetting that there’s that ‘Space Fit Pro’ option still to try. Pushing the speakers back to within 20cm of the wall certainly strengthened the bass, and things picked up with Long Train Runnin’ from The Doobie Brothers, supercrunchy guitar opening, now a fuller bass, but still becoming sufficiently unpleasant to play much higher than the lower side of enjoyable critical listening. We wondered if there might even be a timing mismatch between the speakers.

But we thought – perhaps we’re feeding it less than optimal source material. The casting, the streaming, the network: too many variables, even if Spotify Connect or Deezer via Google Cast should play well enough.

So we took it straight to the good stuff, supplied via the HDMI cable. Since these are Dolby Atmos speakers, we loaded Dolby Atmos music discs into a Blu-ray player, which was attached via HDMI to a Samsung TV which was attached via HDMI to the black Studio 7, so that it emerged playing across them both.

The first disc in the tray was the recently-released Atmos mix of Jeff Buckley’s ‘Grace’. And this was immediately magnificent. No longer any need to restrain volume levels: we could nudge it stop after stop using the TV remote, and what a wide and wonderful world of sound opened up. Buckley’s vocal was held completely pure and isolated at the front, with swirling perfection all around, the bass now entirely unfettered in its ability to dive deeper towards what we might consider subwoofer territory for any other speaker this size.

The stereo combination had an unerring ability to handle the highest dynamic peaks at the end of Grace without any hint of congestion, banging out the climax like a well-resourced power amp and speaker combination, yet also having the low-level detail to allow a thrillingly delicate handling of the quick-silver sliding guitar that opens Last Goodbye, and to overlay upon that an astoundingly weighty and real kick drum. Judging as a fine hi-fi system, we might have said the bass could perhaps have a tad more definition, but heck, these are AU$749 speakers.

Leaning back in the chair, allowing the mind to wander and accept the cues being thrown out by the Music 7s, we had a genuinely immersive experience, even hearing stuff from behind, when there was nothing there. If they’re doing sidebouncing stuff, they’re lucky it was winter so there was a side wall at all. But the effect was not only effective, but unobtrusive, non-artificial. And normally we have to work with a system like this to get the effect happening: here it just happened.

They were equally hi-fi if a little less successful in the room-spreading stuff with the Atmos mix of Bowie’s ‘Ziggy Stardust’. Then we loaded the ultimate Dolby Atmos music disc: The Flaming Lips’ ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’. Track 10, All We Have Is Now, starts in the surround channels: Wayne’s vocal back right, electric piano back left. And Wayne really did come from a semi-rear right position, and elements panned wide on both sides, even if most of the rest was still coming from the front. The Lip’s effusive bass content poured out, and the full picture was musically enjoyable, very impressive from two speakers at this price, if not as magnificently open and wide as a full Atmos system can deliver. Very impressive stuff.

And of course this bodes well for movie Atmos soundtracks. From Blu-ray we played ‘A Star is Born’, which we’ve heard many times on large systems. The Atmos soundtrack did seem to genuinely push crowd sound around us in the opening live number Black Eyes, which emerged absolutely massive, the guitar solo clearly panned left, and bass content rather too much, even if loaded up for effect on this opening. We were encouraged to try the AI Adaptive mode again: it may be the go for movies, adding enthusiasm and size.

We also looked to notch back the bass delivery: there are two options: straight bass and treble EQ sliders, or a separate control for woofer. Taking either bass slider down to -3 sorted out the excess, and it’s easy to tweak on the fly since these controls are available reasonably easily within the Sound app – just three taps from the home screen to get to the Woofer slider, once you’ve learnt the way. Having to drop the bass on speakers this size is remarkable, and shows how effective Samsung’s team has made the combination of solid and effective speaker design in concert with algorithmic control of driver travel and the like, something which played a key part in the success of those first Californian-designed soundbars. Something similar is surely again in evidence here.

Back then, in 2017, we had interviewed Mr Devantier and he told us about “distortion-cancelling technology” developed by the team's Pascal Brunet, a software-based amplifier-distortion cancellation. And later, when we thought to Google those names which Mr Devantier had thrown out on his LinkedIn post, we found that two of them, Yuan Li and Felix Kochendörfer, had co-authored with Pascal Brunet in 2022 a paper revealing results of using trained time-delayed neural networks to create an AI control algorithm for driver behaviour, instead of the previous model-based control. There was also consideration of Long Short-term Memory and a fascinating Nonlinear Autoregressive Network with exogenous inputs (‘NARX’), but the neural networks won out in the end.

Presumably something similar is used here, an AI-style feedback system inverting errant loudspeaker driver behaviour at higher volumes; indeed this is most likely what Samsung calls 'AI Dynamic Bass Control'. This is not an effect to switch on and off with a slider in the app; it’s the inherent control system behind at least that big Dot-fronted woofer. The effect is a bit like Bjørn Erik Edvardsen’s soft clipping used in NAD amps in the 1980s: you can push beyond the natural limits, pulling back just before distortion occurs, thereby achieving maximum air-shifting and a remarkable sense of power even from relatively small enclosures and drivers. Remember that all the active bass here is coming from a single driver in each Studio 7, the driver behind that Dot, with only passive radiators in support. It’s an amazing result.

If the driver tech/bass control is the speciality of Ms Li and Mr Kochendörfer at the Samsung Audio Lab in California, what of the other name, Matthew McDuffee, the Lab’s Principal Audio Engineer? We find him coauthoring papers on implementation of simultaneous deconvolution, which relates to in-room speaker system equalisation. That fits in with the goals of 'SpaceFit Sound Pro', which we are about to encounter below.

Putting all this together, we might place our bet that the two new technologies from the Lab, which Allan Devantier mentioned in concert with those three names, are AI Dynamic Bass Control, and SpaceFit Sound Pro. So perhaps not that ‘Immersive Waveguide’ acoustic lens after all, given that waveguides have been around since the 1990s since Geddes differentiated them from horns in 1989 (and they’re all ‘immersive’, really, by dint of operating in a 3D world).

So, technical discussion aside, we were loving everything coming through HDMI. But was all the streaming stereo stuff still sounding not so impressive? The relative quantities of the two media types would not weigh well for the Studio 7 in that case.

We played from other sources, including stereo from the Blu-ray player (Atmos discs have high-res stereo too), and this maintained the quality, at the expense of course of much of the immersion. Back on streaming, we played from Apple Music and our own phone collection via AirPlay 2 (the Apple app usefully provided a volume control, see below); it was OK, but male vocals seemed a bit thin, lacking in mid-bass, and the bass itself less rounded than we’d hope for the material playing.

On a whim, we unpaired the two speakers and sent the same tunes to a single Studio 7. Smaller, similar. When we went back to pair the speakers again, we found we could ‘group’ them, rather than ‘pair’ them, so that both speakers played in stereo. This actually gave a rather nicer bass response, though it caused some issues with stereo staging, since the inward speakers were now firing sound behind the television and creating all kinds of slightly phasey interactions as the left moved right and the right moved left. Having said that, for a real party, this is how we’d run them.

Through all this, we had been trying all the sonic tweaks available – happily not a crazy number of them compared with some competitors, which is a credit to Samsung.

We kept on with 'Music' mode for music, sometimes AI mode for movies. Initially we didn’t get any useful result from ‘Space Fit Pro’, and we had left it off.

Later, however, we realised that its effects take a while to appear: it’s not a simple switch flick to hear the difference. Once it had taken a minute to adjust, flicking the switch to remove it most certainly revealed the difference. It had filled in exactly the midbass we had been missing from vocals and presented all that material with a warmer heart. We are impressed, then; well done Mr McDuffee! We recommend you at least try this.

There are also Channel Level adjustments to push the side and top channels higher (or lower) as you might like. This option is also handy for hearing exactly what is going on from the various drivers.

Advanced Sound Settings include bass enhancement (not generally required), and ‘virtual’ on top of AI (not generally pleasant).

We moved our streaming sessions to using music apps playing on an AppleTV media player through the TV, and comparing them with streaming from the phone. Spotify: not much difference, since Connect was already playing direct; it was just slightly smoother via the AppleTV. Deezer seemed clearer this way, perhaps higher-res or less squeezed coming from the media player through HDMI that it had been from the phone, even though we had thought that was via data-friendly Google Cast.

We then rather tardily realised that the Samsung TV itself can host these apps, removing a link in the chain. We loaded Deezer as an app on the TV, and just played from there. Just as good! It’s a reminder that our televisions can now be used as hubs for music playback via their digital outputs, as well as for mere TV and movie fare (and here also extended smart-home operations via Samsung’s SmartThings).

While the better paths for playback certainly edged up the streaming quality, the main thing which overcame our initial uncertainty with the sound was that ‘Space Fit Pro’ correction; we are much impressed with that, especially with on-the-fly adjustments for bass easily to hand. But the ultimate playback experience came with high-quality files and very particularly with real Atmos material, whether music or movies. For the money, this is an astounding big and relatively hi-fi sound compared with the normal compressed sound of most rivals. It’s well superior, in some cases.

Right at the end, we went back to one speaker, and plonked it right in front of the TV, part blocking the screen. We re-ran Black Eyes from 'A Star Is Born', and its single-box drivers still managed to spread the crowd into an almost immersive presentation, although the left-right cues were inevitably reduced; the guitar solo, for example, panned less left than with speakers either side of the TV.

But we also played Olivia Dean again, and instead of AirPlaying from our phone, we ran it in Atmos from Apple Music on our AppleTV 4K through the TV into the Music 7 by HDMI. And this was the transformation we mentioned earlier: from friendly and punchy to clear, wide and wonderfully hi-fi – the lesson being that while the Music Studio 7 (or two of them) can do great things with compressed streaming signals, the better the source signal you give them, the better they sound. Which sounds like a ‘duh’, yet we fear very few people do take the trouble.

General issues

Problems? We’d really like a remote control; it would much improve the music listening experience when streaming from the phone. If you’re Google-Casting your music across from your phone, as we were from Deezer, then the TV remote no longer controls the Samsung volume; indeed if you try to use it, it may instantly return you to the HDMI input and cut off your music.

While Spotify and Apple include volume sliders in their apps, these can be quite coarse, and the volume buttons on the side of the phone (an iPhone, sorry Samsung) were extremely coarse: each tap jumped 10 full steps of the resolution available within the Samsung Sound app’s slider. And of course most of the time we were choosing music in the Deezer app, with no volume control at all, so we had to keep popping back to the Samsung Sound app, or else make do with the coarse control via our phone buttons. Or, of course, walk over and press the buttons on the speakers themselves.

We’d suggest investing in a programmable remote to overcome this, but does the Studio 7 even have an IR receiver built in? We think not.

Oh, and by default the speakers talk to you, in a synthesised female voice which interrupts every time you change a sound mode, talking over your music, and sometimes quite loud. Awful. Can you turn this off? Yes, thank heavens, under the ‘Voice Guide’ option in the Sound app.

As a final thought, we’d love to hear how the Studio 7 would sound without all the grilles. Grilles like this are not 100% audibly transparent, and very solid grilles cover every driver here. Without these things, might sound be more open and airy? (Though the speaker would then also fall into pieces and probably destroy its acoustic design.) We just wonder.

Verdict

Returning to the industrial designers Erwan and Ronan Bouroullec, Ronan was once quoted in an Institut Français Exhibition feature saying: “I find perfection extremely boring… The charm is the balance between the perfect and the imperfect.”

He should mention this to his brother Erwan, because the industrial design work on the Music Studio 7 has no imperfections we can see to weigh against its apparent perfection. The Samsung Audio Lab team has taken everything they’ve learned about soundbars since 2014 – rigid grille construction, speaker distortion cancelling, room acoustics – and applied it to a pair of rock-solid streaming speakers which we suspect that few companies other than Samsung could bring to market at such a low price. They’re a tribute to the Lab, to Devantier and his team.

No doubt they’ll find some way to tweak them up for a Mk.2 in a year or two, just as they’ll upgrade those neural networks controlling the big woofer and improve the sound processing. But aside from wanting a remote control, we wouldn’t change a thing here: the Music Studio 7 is a near-perfect product in a perhaps perfect form.

Devantier says he proposed this concept to management “a L O N G time ago”. Hopefully they’re quicker to recognise its success and will commission more along the same principles. This could be Year Dot for a new breed of Samsung hi-fi.

• See all our Australian reviews from Sound+Image and Australian Hi-Fi magazines