Samsung wam7500

Greater flexibility in speaker placement as 360-degree feature works well.

Mar 2016

The Samsung WAM7500 represents quite a change from last year’s WAM750 both in terms of design and approach. Whereas last year’s model was an early attempt to get into the multi-room streaming audio segment, the WAM7500 represents a move to step ahead the competition by offering 360-degree audio.

The new WAM7500 also looks drastically different. It now looks like an elongated egg of sorts (some might say a space ship), with a gap at the bottom which houses the radiator ring that’s responsible for dispersing the sound all around. You won’t see any of the drivers on this speaker; those are all housed within the body of the speaker, hidden beneath the resin shell.

There aren’t many buttons visible either, as Samsung has opted to go with just two thin slivers of silver on the body for the volume controls. Everything else (i.e. the power, source and play/pause controls) are available by way of touch areas on the body. For most cases, this works fine, but we must say trying to “hold” buttons down to activate pairing feels rather unintuitive. Half the time, you’re not sure if your finger is over the right spot or not!

That aside, we must say we quite like the design of the WAM7500. It’s solidly built, and the base is sturdy enough so you don’t really worry about it toppling. We’ve seen pictures where the speaker is hung upside down and mounted on a more designer-style stand with long legs, so clearly it’s a design that lends itself well to any modern home environment.

The app interface has also been updated slightly too. The virtual scroll wheel still dominates most of the interface, but now, tapping anywhere beside it reveals a more traditional timeline interface that you can easily scrub back and forth. It seems the quirk we found from testing the WAM750 has also been resolved, as selecting any track to play now replaces the album you’re currently listening to with the album of the new track selected.

However, the app doesn’t quite seem to be the most robust as we found it would lose the pairing if we ran it alongside the apps for other speakers. That wouldn’t be a problem if it just lost the connection, but it lost the pairing completely, leaving us to go through the entire setup process again.

Greater flexibility in speaker placement as 360-degree feature works well.

Lower-mid to bass performance could be more robust.