Compact, customer-installable, easy to use, multi-room speaker systems are proliferating at the moment. Samsung was of course not to be left behind in this field, and so released its own multi-room ecosystem. Stephen Dawson investigates.

For this review, Samsung provided an extremely minimal system: one M7 speaker (model WAM750) and the Hub (WAM250), so I was unable to assess the validity of the product tag: ‘My Music Follows Me’. Apparently if you have multiple speakers in the system, you can easily switch from one to another as you wander through your home. Obviously I couldn’t test this, but it seems that you label in the app each speaker in your system for the room that it’s in, and then you can drag the music from one room to another using the app.

As this suggests, the use of the system is heavily dependent upon using an app.

The full range consists of three speakers (six if you include the black and white variants), a wireless hub and a linking device allowing other speaker systems to be used.

The M7 is the top of the line of the three speakers. The M5 and M3 are lower cost and more compact. If you simply want to feed the signal to your own audio system then you can use the Link Mate. You should be able to mix and match according to the space available in each room.

The M7 has five drivers within its fairly substantial wedge-shaped body. The connections and controls for connecting to the network are at the back, largely hidden by a choice of two back panels. On the top are a set of touch controls: a round volume control that operates like that on an iPod classic – you swipe your finger around the indicated circle. There are three spots you touch for different sources – Bluetooth, internet radio presets or, if you have a Samsung smart TV, TV Sound Connect. The ‘Mute’ touch spot is slightly indented, allowing it to be easily found by touch. There’s also a marker for near field communications (NFC) pairing. All other control is via the app, including selecting the analogue input.

Normally you’d just put it on a horizontal surface, but there are a wide range of options. The second back plate doubles as a stand, allowing the unit to sit more or less vertically. Fun fact: the system seems to auto-detect its vertical or horizontal positioning and tailor its sound accordingly. If you swing it from one to the other position while it’s playing, there’s a brief pause as it switches over.

There are a couple of sturdy mounting points near the connections. With an optional wall mount it will also go either vertically or horizontally, allowing it to be swivelled in the latter case.

The unit supports the playback of WAV, MP3, WMA, OGG, FLAC and AAC, plus whatever apps are provided by the Samsung Wireless Multi-room app. As I write, this is very extensive with TuneIn (internet radio), Pandora, Spotify, Deezer, 8tracks, Rdio and Murfie.

Setting up
If you are using just one speaker you don’t require the hub. With multiple speakers it is required because it’s a kind of management system.

Setting up is as easy as Samsung claims. Just don’t be misled by the slim ‘Getting Started’ document in the box. It has no information about getting started. Go straight to the ‘User Manual – 1’ sheet of paper. There’s also a ‘Web manual’, which proved to be a 77-page PDF. Ignore the instructions provided. It’s actually towards the bottom of the Samsung M7 product page at the Samsung site. If you want to get the most out of your system, it’s worth downloading.

But you don’t need it to get going. Just follow the instructions in the supplied User Manual. It even has QR codes for downloading the Android or Google apps, and an NFC tag for the former. I used a Samsung Tab 3 and an LG Optimus G phone with NFC for the testing. It took only five minutes to get going using the hub (which must be physically wired into your router). I also tried the M7 with both wired and wireless connection to my network, sans hub. You can join the network using the WPS connection key, so this was just as fast.

Supplying Music
As far as wireless music goes, Samsung seems to be using its own protocols rather than DLNA. Sort of. It happily supports music served up by DLNA applications (from both my Windows computer and my NAS). But it doesn’t look to the network like a DLNA renderer (that is, a playback device). It was invisible even to Samsung’s own AllShare DLNA implementation on a Samsung Galaxy Tab 3. So if you prefer some other DLNA playback app, then you’re going to have to play it from your device and use Bluetooth to feed it to one of the speakers in your system, which means leaving the device reasonably close to the speaker.

Likewise you can’t just pipe music from your favourite app except via Bluetooth, so you may be limited in your ability to roam with your music throughout your home (unless it’s so small a Bluetooth connection can be maintained).

That said, internet music service support is rather good, as I’ve outlined. Many of these services are accessible from within the Samsung app. Spotify is notoriously protective of its protocols, so when you select Spotify from within the app, it takes you to the Spotify app. From within that you can use the speaker connect icon to choose the room that you want your Spotify music to go to. This seems to work in the same way as Spotify Connect: once you send the Spotify music to the speaker, it takes over the connection and streams directly from Spotify rather than via your portable device. (I powered down the tablet and the music kept going.) Presumably you must have a paid subscription (as I do) for this to work.

Samsung says that the unit only supports FLAC up to 16 bits, 44.1 kHz. But in fact it happily played 24 bit, 192kHz tracks. Not that I’d expect to appreciate the higher resolution, but it does mean that you aren’t going to have to purchase different versions, or convert your high res stuff to standard resolution to enjoy it.

Samsung M7 hub

Sound
Super high fidelity this system most definitely is not. Nor does it deliver anything in the way of stereo imaging if you’re more than a few inches away. That said, the M7 delivers punchy sound, with a solid, effective tonal balance and reasonable volume levels.

I gave the speaker a fair workout with everything from Joanna Newsom’s delightful harp-based songs, through to Rage Against the Machine, and it all sounded pretty good. Newsome’s vocals were as sweet as always, while the driving rhythm section of Rage was surprisingly full.

It turned out that the unit was able to deliver a reasonably smooth frequency response from around 52Hz up to 18,000Hz, which is pretty impressive really, especially at the bottom end. The enclosure is sealed, and the roll-off below 50Hz is relatively mild, so it’s down by 9dB at 35Hz.

I ran a 96kHz FLAC test signal through the speaker as well, just to see what would happen, and the result was the same. The output fell away rapidly above 18,000Hz to be 42dB down at 25,000Hz.

Conclusion
Samsung has come up with a surprisingly easy to use, stylish and decent sounding multi-room audio system. And it’s all at a reasonable price. It’s well worth a look if you want music throughout your home.