Samsung HW-S800D Review: Magical Sound From A Skinny Soundbar

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

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

With excellent home theater chops and respectable music replay, the 1.5-inch square Samsung HW-S800D soundbar is able to bend physics to its will. The system is currently available for $750 on sale, and I believe this is the ideal 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 connectivity, wireless. Wi-Fi brings additional benefits, including music streaming and Amazon Alexa. While onboard 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 high and wide, while the subwoofer is also diminutive at 9.3 inches all around. The soundbar boasts nine drivers in its tiny frame — two stereo racetrack drivers with tweeters, a center incorporating two more racetracks and a tweeter and two Atmos overheads. Meanwhile, the subwoofer includes a 6.5-inch driver and a passive woofer.

Due to the soundbar’s small surface area, the HW-S800D’s physical inputs are limited. All you get is a micro HDMI ARC port, but as 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 a TV’s 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 all of the conceivable features you would need.

Setup

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

Last year, I first tried Samsung’s wireless Atmos, and it failed to work at all, with one of the problems being that even Samsung (still) doesn’t have an official list of TVs that support it. I used the 900C soundbar, which does, and a TV, which the company told me should work but then didn’t. However, I had no such issues with the 800D and the 65-inch Samsung QN90D — when both the TV and soundbar were connected to the network, they found each other. Using the Audio Settings menu, I was able to toggle between ARC and Wireless Dolby.

How does it sound?

There aren’t too many lifestyle soundbars on the market, bar any recent Sony inventions, and certainly none that take miniaturization to the extreme that the S800D does. With a lack of competition, I compared the Samsung to two soundbars that have add-on subwoofers instead — the Bose Smart Soundbar 600 and the Klipsch Flexus Core 200. Of course, these are much larger systems than the Samsung, but in the end it didn’t matter as much as I imagined.

Even though I’d visited the Samsung Audio Labs, and knowing that the facility was capable of good work from my previous testing, surely this soundbar was a bridge too far, physics-wise? As soon as I hit play on Mad Max: Fury Road, my initial fears were allayed. The soundbar’s frequency response was even-handed throughout the spectrum, with no “hole” in the lower mids that I could easily discern. Explosions were forceful, even though that’s something most soundbar-subwoofer combos can do, but it was dialogue that immediately impressed me. 

The disembodied voices of the opening scene demonstrated that the soundbar was capable of both clear diction and excellent surround steering — it was better at this than the Flexus, though not as good as the Bose Soundbar 600. The Samsung was notably talented when it came to Tom Hardy’s voice, and the sub was clearly doing a lot of work here with his deep tenor, but his speech sounded natural. That subwoofer was tightly integrated, and this was especially noticeable because the competing Flexus wasn’t able to provide a blend with its sub at all.

Compared with the Bose Soundbar 600 and the Bose Bass Module 500, I was delighted to hear the Samsung was up to the task of providing deep bass effects. The Samsung combo gave a bigger “thonk” than the Bose when Jake (Sam Worthington) touches the shell trees in the Thanator attack scene from Avatar. However, the Bose was able to imbue the alien jungle with more life, with insect sounds and bird calls bouncing around the walls. 

For a soundbar that does not 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 rock fuzz and found that the speaker sounded much bigger than its dimensions allowed.

While the Hives’ Bogus Operandi guitar sounded fizzy 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 entertaining on S800D, but the Flexus 200 (without the sub this time) had more attack and better dynamics.

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

Final impressions

Is the Samsung HW-S800D, to borrow the Apple vernacular, “magical?” I can make no substantive claims about it having other-worldly talents, but I thoroughly enjoyed using this soundbar. Its small size and great cinematic sound more than make up for a slight deficit when it comes to music. If you want a big-sounding system, but yet one that can hide itself away, the cinematic sound of the HW-S800D should impress most buyers looking to install a lifestyle system.