Samsung HW-S800D review: magical sound from a thin soundbar

The Samsung HW-S800D reminds me of Bose Acoustimass three-part audio system. When I was a kid, I had a friend whose family owned an Acoustimass: two sets of tiny angled cube speakers and a subwoofer. Playing the system at maximum volume, my friend told me the speakers were so good they could be “driven by a local power plant.”

The S800D offers the same “huge sound from tiny boxes” experience as the Bose. Samsung, if you’re reading this, I don’t know what kind of magic this is, but the Ministry of Magic should at least know about it.

With excellent home theater features and respectable music playback, the Samsung HW-S800D 1.5-inch square soundbar is capable of bending physics to its will. The system is currently available for $750, and I think that’s the perfect price for a two-piece soundbar with Dolby Atmos.

Design and features

The HW-S800D is a 3.1.2 channel soundbar that supports Dolby Atmos – both wired and, thanks to its internet connectivity, wireless. Wi-Fi brings additional benefits, including music streaming and Amazon Alexa. Although built-in voice assistants aren’t as popular as they used to be – mainly because standalone speakers are so cheap – Samsung also offers support for Google Cast, Spotify Connect and Apple AirPlay.

The soundbar itself measures 45 inches long by about 1.5 inches high and wide, while the subwoofer is also small at 9.3 inches all around. The soundbar has nine speakers in its small frame: two stereo speakers with tweeters, a center incorporating two other circuits and a tweeter, and two Atmos overheads. Meanwhile, the subwoofer includes a 6.5-inch driver and a passive woofer.

Due to the soundbar’s small surface area, the HW-S800D’s physical inputs are limited. All you get is a micro HDMI ARC port, but since almost no one has a micro-HDMI to HDMI cable on hand, the company has kindly included one in the box.

The soundbar comes with several modes in addition to Atmos: SpaceFit Sound Pro for calibration, Adaptive Sound and Active Voice Analyzer (voice), Game Mode Pro for gaming, and Q-Symphony for use with speakers. speakers of a television.

If you own a Samsung TV, you may be familiar with the company’s compact clickers. The remote feels premium, which is a bonus, and includes access to every conceivable feature you would need.

Facility

The box containing the HW-S800D was huge, but out came a speaker literally as thin as a rake. Seeing the thin bar, I even muttered “Oh no” under my breath. My experience with small speakers, starting with that very first Bose, has been rather difficult. Although this system was indeed loud, it didn’t sound very good. Usually, problems with small systems like this are due to simple physical reasons: when the mains is too small, the subwoofer has to take over some of the mid-frequency load. The end result is that sounds start coming from the sub instead of the TV, which not only kills immersion, but can also make voices sound raspy or lacking in low mids.

Last year I first tried Samsung’s Atmos Wireless, and it didn’t work at all, one of the problems being that even Samsung doesn’t (yet) have an official list of TVs that support it. I used the 900C soundbar, which works, and a TV, which the company told me should work, but didn’t. However, I had no such problems with the 800D and the 65-inch Samsung QN90D: when the TV and soundbar were connected to the network, they found each other. Using the Audio Settings menu, I was able to switch between ARC and Wireless Dolby.

How does it sound?

There aren’t many lifestyle soundbars on the market, barring Sony’s recent inventions, and certainly none that take miniaturization to the extreme like the S800D does. Lacking competition, I compared the Samsung to two soundbars with additional subwoofers: the Bose Smart Soundbar 600 and the Klipsch Flexus Core 200. Of course, these are much larger systems than the Samsung, but at In the end it didn’t matter as much as I imagined.

Even though I had visited the Samsung Audio Labs and knew the setup was capable of doing a good job from my previous testing, surely this soundbar was a bridge too far, physically speaking? Once I started playing Mad Max: Fury Road, my initial fears were allayed. The soundbar’s frequency response was even across the spectrum, with no “gaps” in the low mids that I could easily discern. The explosions were loud, although that’s something most soundbar-subwoofer combos can do, but it was the dialogue that immediately impressed me.

The disembodied voices in the opening scene demonstrated that the soundbar was capable of both clear diction and excellent surround direction – it was better than the Flexus, but not as good as the Bose Soundbar 600. Samsung was particularly talented when it came to Tom Hardy’s voice, and the sub was clearly doing a lot of work here with his deep tenor, but his delivery sounded natural. This subwoofer was tightly integrated, and this was especially noticeable because the competing Flexus was not able to deliver a mix with its subwoofer at all.

Compared to the Bose Soundbar 600 and Bose Bass Module 500, I was pleased to learn that the Samsung was up to the task of delivering deep bass effects. The Samsung combo emitted a bigger “tonk” than the Bose when Jake (Sam Worthington) touches the shell trees in Avatar’s Thanator attack scene. However, the Bose managed to imbue the alien jungle with more life, with insect noises and bird calls bouncing off the walls.

For a soundbar that doesn’t pretend to be a music system, the Samsung HW-S800D will still sound great with your favorite tunes. I played everything from acoustic rock to fuzz rock and found that the speaker sounded much bigger than its dimensions allowed.

While the Hives’ Bogus Operandi guitar sounded fizzy in a way I’d never heard before, the HW-S800D sounded more at home with other, harsher sounds. Shellac’s Dog and Pony Show sounded entertaining on the S800D, but the Flexus 200 (without the sub this time) had more attack and better dynamics.

With acoustic rock, the Klipsch still held court among the three systems tested. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon sounded more solid and had an even better lower-mid response, making it easy to pick out what he was saying in the “pink moon” spoken part.

Final impressions

Is the Samsung HW-S800D, to borrow Apple’s vernacular, “magical”? I can’t make a substantial claim that she has any otherworldly talents, but I really enjoyed using this soundbar. Its small size and excellent cinematic sound more than make up for a slight deficit in music. If you want a system that sounds powerful but can hide away, the HW-S800D’s cinematic sound should impress most buyers looking to install a lifestyle system.