SAMSUNG HW-MS750 soundbar
Despite having no supplied subwoofer and some curious upfiring tweeters, this soundbar proved a delight.
You can add a subwoofer, and rears if you like, but the MS750 also aims to deliver as a bar alone.
As recently as two years ago we wouldn’t have recommended or even been keen to review a Samsung soundbar; our regard for its audio products wasn’t high. That changed last year, with the release of Samsung’s Sound+ range, designed and/or tuned in the company’s new California Audio Lab, helmed by ex-Harman Allan Devantier, who had joined the company with the remit to transform its audio products only to have Samsung then buy the whole of his former company Harman for a great many billions of dollars. The acquisition seemed particularly prompted by Harman’s automotive technologies, but netted all its audio brands in the process — so that’s JBL, Harman Kardon, Mark Levinson, AKG, Lexicon, Infinity, and Revel.
One of the first mainstream products out of California was the MS650 soundbar, which impressed us so much last year that we made it our Sound+Image 2018 Soundbar of the Year under $1000. This MS750 is similar but larger, adding two additional upward-firing drivers on top. So, were we equally impressed with this larger model?
Equipment
The MS750 is a 115cm-wide bar, near-perfectly matching the width of a 55-inch TV, and it’s fairly chunky compared with slimline designs like the other bars in this issue; it rises 8cm from the desktop and is 13cm deep. This may disqualify it from sitting in front of many TVs, including Samsung’s own (the Series 8 65-incher just clears it, but the Series 7 65-incher doesn’t), while TV stands that stick out may also provide issues — the legs of the Sony TV reviewed this issue, say, already protrude 10cm forward of the TV, so with the MS750 in front of those, total required bench depth is a generous 40cm.
But balancing that inconvenience is the fact that the MS750 is sold without an accompanying subwoofer. You can add one, if you wish (see overleaf) — the wireless subwoofer from Samsung’s Sound+ range is priced at $799, is also developed in California, and a fine performer, as we found out. A wireless surround kit is also available, adding two rear channels (wirelessly connected, but requiring mains cables) — though if you’re adding both, you might prefer to consider Samsung’s pricer Atmos-equipped K950 system, another Sound+Image award-winner, or the replacement (but as yet unreviewed) N950 model (see News p8).
But keeping the bar solo avoids both the potential splitting of frequency response, as we heard on other bars this issue, and the obvious décor bonus of no big subwoofer to put nearby. Without a subwoofer, then, the Samsung brings a total of five tweeters and six woofers
to the sonic party. Their arrangement and size is not immediately apparent, but given the two tweeters firing up, we inferred (and Samsung confirmed) that the forward-firing drivers comprise left, centre and right channels, each with one tweeter and a pair of ‘racetrack’-shaped woofers, which from our measurements are around 12 × 5cm in size. Yet the bar is described as “five channels”, and we gather Samsung is using those top tweeters to deliver not height channels but rear channels, where available from Dolby Digital and DTS soundtracks.
Connections include two HDMI inputs and one HDMI output with ARC, all capable of passing through 4K signals to your TV, and the ARC playing audio from your TV back down the HDMI output cable to the bar. There’s an optical digital input and a minijack analogue one, and a small ‘wireless’ socket — odd since there is built-in Wi-Fi here anyway, and Bluetooth as well. It’s there, we found, for a dongle to connect with the subwoofer.
Finally there is a power out socket as well as power in — if you wallmount your TV and bar, this can be used to forward power on neatly to the TV.
You can use Samsung’s Multiroom app to connect the bar with your home Wi-Fi, and connectivity is thus much enhanced, enabling network Wi-Fi streaming of audio up to high-res, along with access to online music services such as Tidal, Deezer, TuneIn and others. Spotify is also in the app, but not, it seemed, Spotify Connect, since selecting this service opened the Spotify app and left us with Bluetooth as the only option for streaming across. In a similar way we used Roon to play to our iPad Pro and then Bluetoothed that to the Samsung bar.
Performance
Switching to this system from one of the bars with a wireless subwoofer, it’s true that by direct comparison we immediately missed the bottom octave of movie soundtracks, while music similarly received less of a low-end kick than the subs had provided. But on the plus side, we had a properly integrated and musical sound, with none of the midrange hole in the response, and with none of the annoying deep bass pumping during incidental ads and trailers. And once you get accustomed to the balance, the Samsung MS750 without sub is far better for general viewing — TV, drama, and even movies for everything except the lowest bass. At prices under $1000, we’ve yet to find a bar with a sub that can integrate cleanly with bass that is fast and solid; we
prefer Samsung’s delivery of accurate performance without that deepest octave.
It also proved smart at switching automatically to an active input; the missus much appreciated this gift of reduced complexity of remote control selection over the other bars in this issue.
How about those upfiring speakers? They have nothing to do with Dolby Atmos or other height-enabled soundtracks, and we have that from Mr Devantier himself, who corrected an implication at their launch that the speakers were angled backwards.
“Actually they’re straight up,” he told us. “Basically you can turn on or off the algorithm, so if you really want to listen to stereo music, they’re not on. But if there’s material that’s appropriate for it, it can improve the sense of height and spaciousness and envelopment. For music, turn them off.”
You would select the music option via the remote control, which was familiar to us from other Samsung products — small and pleasingly minimal, with rocker switches at the bottom for volume and bass adjustment; these pivot to adjust, or press to mute. Otherwise it’s just power, settings and info buttons, a very subtle four-way and select ring, and then three buttons for different sound modes.
Regular readers will know what we tend to think about sound modes, especially on soundbars, which don’t generally need anything extra in the way of their already compromised clarity. And we didn’t much use the first two — surround on/off, then ‘mode’ which shuttles through ‘Standard’, ‘Music’, ‘Clear’, ‘Sport’ and ‘Movie’.
We’d disagree with Mr Devantier about choosing the ‘Music’ sound mode for music; it stripped out useful bass and peaked the mids a little insistently. Rather go ‘Movie’, or ‘Standard’, or use the third button which turns ‘Smart Mode’ on, this seemingly taking a best guess at what will work best, so largely making the other options redundant. Very rarely did we find we preferred something other than the Smart button was doing already, not that you get much clue exactly what it is doing. For video, whether TV or movies, the preferential choice was clearly down to ‘Movie’ or ‘Smart’, and ‘Smart’ may have often been ‘Movie’ anyway.
So we kept those upwards tweeters engaged throughout. They were certainly effective with movie soundtracks, though not for genuine height. Playing the UHD Blu-ray of Star Trek:
Beyond, there’s a shore-leave scene 10 minutes in during which an Atmos system places background ‘Tannoy’ announcements high overhead — here they were delivered in Dolby TrueHD, kept at TV height, but with a soundfield that was notably extended outward and upward (even if it seems odd to fire rear surround information upwards at the front). The voiceover opening Mad Max:
Fury Road, which is delivered from a voice of God position in Atmos, was here dead centre front when fed to the MS750 in DTS Surround.
And here we started cranking things up. There’s plenty of level here, and once you’re up in the 80s (100 is the maximum) it’s remarkable how much bass does come from this subwoofer-less bar. The Mad Max soundtrack throbbed down low, while the whole remained balanced and astoundingly low on audible distortion, even into the 90s. Samsung points to the use of ‘distortion cancelling’ to achieve this. In the California Lab they use anechoic chamber measurements of how the bar responds to each frequency to measure the bar’s inherent distortions, and then DSP is used to correct for these in real time with real content. In action it sounds both impressively linear and unflappable, since the DSP prevents it ever being overloaded. And it works.
We ran some music Blu-rays nice and loud to see if it did music equally well at high levels. Black Country Communion is a band underpinned by the weight of Jason Bonham’s drums and the enormous and agile bass of Glenn Hughes, while Joe Bonamassa’s guitar and Derek Sherinian’s keyboards add complexity that is challenging when all going full tilt in a live recording. We doubt anyone hearing this in our system would believe it was coming from the soundbar rather than from the large German standmount speakers alongside. The bass was solid down to its bottom E, Bonham’s kick drum tight, and only at the highest levels was clarity beginning to suffer, and by then we were hitting 90dB at a metre distant. Streaming music was equally well handled at any reasonable level. This is that rarest of beasts — a genuinely musical soundbar.
Conclusion
As with the slightly smaller MS650, we were astonished by what Samsung has achieved in a soundbar, most notably the ability to deliver music without the usual soundbar compromises in clarity. This is partly because it is not as teeny as a mini bar, nor as slimline as a thin bar, though we think its design to be elegant enough, and unobtrusive when sensibly positioned. Musical accuracy is equally important in movies, and the MS750 achieves a powerful and clean movie delivery on its own, without the annoying doof-doof a subwoofer brings to more casual TV viewing. But you can add the Sound+ subwoofer to deepen the response for real home cinema quality if you choose.
Add to this the abilities of Samsung’s multiroom app to bring additional streaming from network Wi-Fi or Bluetooth (and the musicality to make these useful sources), and we must gasp all over again at a soundbar which is capable, powerful and — the hardest thing of all to find in a soundbar — also musical. Jez Ford