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Samsung HW-S800D reminds me of three-piece Bose Acoustimass sound system. When I was a kid, I had a friend whose family owned an Acoustimass — two sets of small corner cube speakers and a subwoofer. Playing the system at maximum volume, my friend told me the speakers were so good they could be “powered by a local power station”.

The S800D offers the same “big sound from small boxes” experience as Bose. Samsung, if you’re reading this, I don’t know what kind of witchcraft was involved, but the Ministry of Magic should at least be informed.

With excellent home theater settings and respectable music playback, the Samsung HW-S800D 1.5-inch square soundbar is able to tune physics to its will. The system is currently on sale for $750, which I believe is 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 includes support for Dolby Atmos – both wired and, thanks to its Internet connection, wireless. Wi-Fi brings additional benefits, including music streaming and Amazon Alexa. While 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 is 45 inches long by roughly 1.5 inches in height and width, while the subwoofer is also small at 9.3 inches across. The soundbar boasts nine drivers in its small frame – two racetrack stereo drivers with tweeters, a center that includes two more racetracks and one tweeter, and two Atmos heads. Meanwhile, the subwoofer includes a 6.5-inch driver and a passive speaker.

Due to the small soundbar 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 handy, the company has kindly included one in the box.

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

If you have 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 possible feature you could need.

I’m setting up

The box that contained the HW-S800D was huge, but what came out of it was a speaker that was literally as thin as a paddle. Seeing the stick-thin strip, I even muttered “Oh no” under my breath. My experience with small speakers, starting with this first Bose, has been mostly rough. While this system was really loud, it didn’t sound that good. Usually the problems with small systems like this are caused by simple physics: when the mains is too small, the subwoofer has to take some of the mid-frequency load. The end result is that the sounds start coming from the sub instead of the TV, and this not only kills the immersion, but it can also make voices sound harsh or lack low-mids.

Last year I tried Samsung’s wireless Atmos for the first time and it failed to work at all, one of the problems being that even Samsung doesn’t (yet) have an official list of TVs that support it. I’ve used the 900C soundbar that does it and a TV that the company told me should work but then 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 too many lifestyle soundbars on the market, barring recent Sony inventions, and certainly none that take miniaturization to the extreme like the S800D does. For lack of competition, I compared the Samsung to two soundbars that have additional subwoofers instead — the Bose Smart Soundbar 600 and the Klipsch Flexus Core 200. Granted, these are much larger systems than the Samsung, but in the end, it wasn’t that big. importance than I imagined.

Although I had visited Samsung Audio Labs and knew the rig could work well from my previous tests, surely this soundbar was a bridge too far in terms of physics? As soon as I started playing Mad Max: Fury Road, my initial fears were allayed. The frequency response of the soundbar was even across the spectrum, with no “hole” in the lower mids that I could easily discern. The explosions were loud, although that’s something most soundbar-sub combos can do, but it was the dialogue that immediately impressed me.

The disembodied voices on the opening scene showed that the soundbar was capable of both clear diction and excellent surround control – it was better at this than the Flexus, though not as good as the Bose Soundbar 600. Samsung was extremely talented when came to Tom Hardy’s voice, and the sub obviously put a lot of work in here with his deep tenor, but his speech sounded natural. This subwoofer was tightly integrated, and this was especially noticeable because the competing Flexus failed to provide a combination with its subwoofer at all.

Compared to the Bose Soundbar 600 and the Bose Bass Module 500, I was pleased to hear that the Samsung was up to the task of providing deep bass effects. The Samsung combo sounds louder than the Bose when Jake (Sam Worthington) taps the shell trees in the Thanator attack scene from Avatar. However, Bose managed to bring more life to the alien jungle, with the sounds of insects and screeching birds bouncing off the walls.

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

While Hives’ Bogus Operandi guitar sounded loud in a way I’d never heard before, the HW-S800D sounded more comfortable with other harder sounds. Shellac’s dog and pony show sounded fun on the S800D, but the Flexus 200 (without the sub this time) had more attack and better dynamics.

With acoustic rock, the Klipsch still had luck among the three systems tested. Nick Drake’s Pink Moon sounded more solid and had even better response in the lower mids, making it possible to understand what he was saying in the spoken “pink moon” part.

Final impressions

Is the Samsung HW-S800D ‘magic’, to borrow Apple’s parlance? I can’t make any major claims of unearthly talent, but I thoroughly enjoyed using this soundbar. Its small size and great cinematic sound more than make up for the slight deficit when it comes to music. If you want a big-sounding system that’s still hideable, the HW-S800D’s cinematic sound should impress most buyers looking to install a lifestyle system.