I know, speakers have a sort of stereotypical design. There are many variations the design – but it’s always a cuboid with one or two diaphragms, maybe angled and a variety of ports. Samsung actually broke this stereotype with the new Music Studio 5 – a piece of beautiful decoration that also doubles as a speaker.
Design
So, this Music Studio 5 has a very unique design that I think looks like a piece of contemporary art at first glance. Even while looking at the speaker from the side, there are no dead giveaways that it is a speaker. Maybe that hole at the center does raise suspicion?
Anyway, this speaker is made this way so that we can just simply put it somewhere around the house or office while disguising as a piece of decoration, yet able to play some good-sounding audio when needed. That’s how I used it through the few weeks of owning it.
The speaker also doesn’t take much space, and the cables are managed nicely since everything plugs in at the bottom, with a cutout for the cables to feed through – keeping everything as tidy as possible.
It does have a few touch-sensitive buttons around the circumference at the top, but I personally wouldn’t be touching this speaker once I’ve set it up. Also, all the settings can also be done via the app – which we’ll talk about later.
Ports and wireless support
And let’s take a look at the ports. We have an optical audio port here as well, which is kinda unexpected. We can hook it up to our PC if we want to, but it is actually meant to be used as an auxiliary speaker for Samsung’s Q-Symphony feature on their own TVs. The Music Studio speaker will be serving as a filler speaker to create an even more immersive surround sound system.
As for that USB-A port, ignore it. That port is meant for servicing only.
The Music Studio 5 though, is actually a wireless speaker that can stream music via Bluetooth or WiFi through various protocols. I personally won’t be using Bluetooth in this case since it’ll be playing all audio from my phone and I don’t want that.
In case of WiFi audio streaming, it supports a bunch of different ways to play music wirelessly – including Apple AirPlay, Chromecast, and Spotify Connect. This is also the world’s first device to feature Spotify Tap over WiFi too. We can just double-tap on the speaker to immediately start playing a playlist tailored to our taste.
Unfortunately, it does not have a microphone – so we cannot tell it to do things like the Apple HomePod or Google Nest. However, we can add this speaker to Samsung SmartThings to do some automation.
Features
The Music Studio 5 will also need its own Samsung Sound app to make full use of it. The app is rather clean, and it has volume selection, the ability to select audio source, and also to reprogram the button at the top and change it from a simple play/pause button to the Spotify Tap.
The equalizer is a bit funky, as we can change it between Standard, with the 7 different levels across different frequencies or use the presets available, change it to Music mode for a simpler bass and treble level selection, or AI Adaptive Sound that automatically changes depending on the music played.
We also have the option to enable SpaceFit Sound Pro. It’s a mouthful of a name for a feature that practically adapts the sound to the space that the speaker is in, so that it sounds better without creating any standing waves.
Other than that, we have some other settings which are pretty self-explanatory. And that’s about it for the app. Honestly, I’ll set it once and forget.
Sound quality
This Music Studio 5 has 3 speakers built inside, and on the specs sheet, it is said to only be a 2.0 speaker system. But throughout our weeks of using this speaker in the studio, I can actually hear a lot of bass. I’m not sure how well it’ll be shown through our microphone – but here’s an audio sample.
To have a listen to all the music played on the Music Studio 5, watch the video at the top of this review.
Should you buy the Samsung Music Studio 5?
All in all, I think this speaker actually sounds really good, looks discreet since it is designed to not look like a speaker, has a bunch of actually useful feature, and I can just set it up and never physically interact with it again since it can be controlled wirelessly.
At the price of RM1,199, I can see people just buying this to listen to music in a room or in the kitchen while cooking or at the workshop while doing some mundane tasks. For me, I actually used it while filming B-rolls for our videos since it can get pretty boring sometimes.
Where to buy? (Affiliate links)
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