Skip to main content

Samsung’s new multi-room speaker pods offer 360 degrees of sound

samsung multi room speakers wam7500 wam6500 new wireless table top
Image used with permission by copyright holder
Samsung’s burgeoning line of multi-room wireless speakers is about to expand — in all directions. Following last year’s premiere of the futuristic M7 and M5 fin-shaped speakers, Samsung today unveiled to new pods of sound to add to the fold, the WAM7500, and the WAM6500, both of which will make their debut next week at CES in Las Vegas.

The WAM series is designed around a growing new trend in wireless audio in which speakers emit audio in all directions to fill the room with sound from any focal point. The new speakers follow other spherical sonic companions like the similarly designed Kickstarter darling, the Archt One speaker.  Samsung’s new speakers achieve their wafting 360-degree radius of sound thanks to a proprietary driver design called “Ring Radiator” technology.

Looking remarkably close to something you’d find on the bridge of a starship in a sci-fi flick, both of Samsung’s new speakers offer an attractive way to get your audio fix without rearranging the room, and are sure to draw attention even in silence. The WAM7500 Table Top speaker is meant to be the centerpiece of your listening room, while the smaller WAM6500 is designed for portability, with a handle and a rechargeable battery on board so you can take the sound with you.

The Ring Radiator driver configuration is promised to provide balanced audio across the bass and treble in all directions. Samsung developed the speakers as the first offering to come out of the company’s shiny new “state-of-the-art” audio lab in Valencia, CA.

The speakers will connect to Samsung’s Multi-room app, a Sonos-like system that allows the user to play audio from multiple sources including smartphones, computers, and Internet services, as well as working in tandem with select Samsung TVs, Blu-ray players, and sound bars.

In addition to its new pods of sound, Samsung has announced a few new curved sound bars designed to match its line of curved LED TVs. Joining Samsung’s curved 7500 model are three new models, including the 6000, the 6500, and the 8500 for an array of sizes from 45 to 78-inches to match up with just about any curved TV in the Samsung fleet.

We’ll have an in-depth look at all of Samsung’s new audio gear from the CES showroom floor in Vegas next week, so stay tuned.

Ryan Waniata
Former Digital Trends Contributor
Ryan Waniata is a multi-year veteran of the digital media industry, a lover of all things tech, audio, and TV, and a…
The Beats Pill is back, baby!
A pair of Beats Pill speakers.

In what's been one of the worst-kept secrets of the year -- mostly because subtly putting a product into the hands of some of the biggest stars on the planet is no way to keep a secret -- the Beats Pill has returned. Just a couple of years after Apple and Beats unceremoniously killed off the stylish Bluetooth speaker, a new one has arrived.

Available for preorder today in either black, red, or gold, the $150 speaker (and speakerphone, for that matter) rounds out a 2024 release cycle for beats that includes the Solo Buds and Solo 4 headphones, and comes nearly a year after the Beats Studio Pro.

Read more
Ifi’s latest DAC is the first to add lossless Bluetooth audio
Ifi Audio Zen Blue 3 DAC (front).

Ifi Audio's new Zen Blue 3 wireless digital-to-analog converter (DAC) will officially be available to buy for $299 on July 9. When it is, it will be the first device of its kind to support a wide variety of Bluetooth codecs, including Qualcomm's aptX Lossless, the only codec that claims to deliver bit-perfect CD quality audio over a Bluetooth connection.

Admittedly, there are very few devices on the market that can receive aptX Lossless (and fewer that can transmit it), so it's a good thing that the Zen Blue 3 also works with the more widely supported aptX Adaptive, LDAC, and LDHC/HWA codecs (all of which are hi-res audio-capable), plus the three most common codecs: AAC, SBC, and aptX.

Read more
The new Beats Pill might replace Sonos on my back porch
The 2024 Beats Pill and an aging Sonos Play:1.

If I were to build an outdoor stereo in 2024, I'd do it with a pair of portable Beats Pills instead of Sonos speakers. Phil Nickinson / Digital Trends

In 2017, after more than a decade in our home, my wife and I added a pool. With it came a covered deck, making what basically was a new outdoor room. Not uncommon at all in Florida, but new to us.

Read more