Earlier in the year, Samsung gave us a taste of a high end sound system, the HT-F9750W, which brandishes power like a weapon. Featuring an intense 1330 watts, this is the system if you love movies and love them loud, and we’ve spent some time with it ahead of its release in Australia.
Setup for us in a room at Sydney’s quirky QT Hotel in the old Gowings Building is a speaker system unlike many that we normally see. There is no dedicated heavy boxy amplifier, and while there are several speakers, it uses materials to the likes of which aren’t common in today’s speaker market, at least not from this journalist’s perspective.
Designed to work side by side with Samsung’s premium TV – the ultra-thin F8000 LED TV – the F9750W is a shiny metallic thing of beauty that brings with it some lovely materials, several channels of sound, and the freedom to throw in whatever media you want – Blu-ray, DVD, and CD – and have it send out sheer aural pleasure.
Like that television, there’s a look of brushed metal across the front of every component, with shiny chrome-like speakers inside each box, all of which connects to a black and silver piece of kit that also happens to feature a small circle cut out revealing two tiny tubes that glow deep orange and feel warm to the touch.
Inside, the amplifier is made with Gallium Nitride as well as those glowing vacuum tubes, and according to Samsung’s people, all of this helps to stop fuzz and noise when high volumes are hit, meaning you should be able to turn the sound up without any intense peaking.
Samsung hasn’t just packed in audio tech galore in the main section, as there’s also a Blu-ray drive capable of reading 3D Blu-ray discs, and decode the audio using a DTS Neo Fusion codec.
Smart apps are possible in this section, too, with the integration of Samsung’s Smart Hub, in case you don’t have one of the company’s TVs.
Over in the speakers, there’s more behind the guise of brushed aluminium – a façade that appears to exist to blend in with the designs of Samsung’s high-end TVs – with a heart that’s as high tech as it can possibly be, with a neat speaker design made from a “Ceramic Polypropylene Injection Diaphragm” which is expected to enhance acoustics while making the speaker cone more rigid.
And the front speakers all feature a swivel speaker at the top of each of the two front floor-standing models, which you can reposition with a push of the finger.
Price-wise, Samsung has set the F9750W to come in at $1499 RRP, with the units hitting stores in the next couple week or two, but before you go out and audition it with your own ears, here’s our take on Samsung’s watt-packing theatre system.
First, we dove into movies, and grabbed two for the occasion: Pixar’s “Wall-E” and the recent Bond flick “Skyfall,” two movies which have excellent sound across the board, from the soundtrack to the effects used.
The moment you pop a movie in, you’re taking advantage of every speaker in the Samsung system, from the two floor standers at the front with their extra swivel speakers up front, to the centre, the sub, and yes, the rear speakers, too.
That’s a 7.1 system for your movie with some high-end surround sound decoding happening inside the Blu-ray section, which is also where the glowing vacuum tubes are, which give off the impression that you’re going to get a warmer sound.
In both films, are rear speakers provided background ambience, adding a hint of punch when major things happened on screen, so it was really the front speakers that pushed out the awesomeness in our experience.
Sitting in the middle of the sound, we could hear the proper directionality for on-screen action, with the acceleration of cars in Skyfall, and the zipping of Wall-E and Eve from each direction, showing that there was a decent amount of sound work happening in these speakers.
At points in our reviewing career, we’ve often felt that some sound systems didn’t do a fantastic job of balancing the sound, often blowing some levels well out of proportion, turning us into fanatics that couldn’t let the remote out of our hands for fear the sound was randomly too loud for everyone.
This, however, was one instance where that wasn’t the case, and while the F9750W is designed to push out such an explosive amount of wattage, balance always seemed to be maintained.
This cannot be described as a “high end” home theatre audio system. I’d describe it as upper low end. My own HT audio system cost me over $9,000 and it is only a “medium” grade system.