Growing up in a household full of people is always fun, whether it’s flatmates or family. One thing about living in close quarters is everyone has their own taste – in clothes, cars and of course, music. With Samsung’s new Multiroom speaker setup, you can have one central system where everyone can enjoy their own music, or have the same music streamed to all speakers – the choice is complete your own.
So let’s look at how easy it is to connect these speakers to make your multiroom system work in 3 easy steps. First, you’ll need the Multiroom hub – this is sold separately to the speakers. Connect the Multiroom hub to power, then connect an ethernet cable from the hub to your router. So effectively the hub needs to be placed next to your router. Now, you will be able to connect to each multiroom speaker.
So once you have set up each speaker in each room according to your needs, plug them into a wall socket as they each need power. Thirdly, download the wireless audio multiroom app from either Google play for android smartphones or the itunes app store.
So before we move on to the next bit let’s talk quickly about the speakers. There are two types to choose from. The M5 is a 2 way stereo speaker combining 1 woofer and 2 full range drivers The M7 is a larger more powerful 5 way speaker with 1 woofer, 2 mid range and 2 tweeters. Now you can set these up in a few different ways. Firstly you can have just one in the room which will give you stereo sound from the one speaker. Or, you can have two speakers with decent amount of separation for a much wider stereo and obviously louder audio experience.
Now the other important thing here is that once you have the hub and speakers set up, they will now form part of what is a called a mesh network. This essentially means that all speakers don’t need to be in contact with the router, they just need to be in range of another speaker. Think of it as a daisy chain – as long as one speaker is in range of another, regardless of the router, then it can deliver content. Mesh networks are great for audio because you can stretch it way beyond normal router distances, like the pool or the back of the yard.
So if your device needs the app and to be connected to the same network. you can then choose which speakers to send a music track to. In fact you can send an entire playlist to that speaker. You can then create another playlist and send that to another speaker, or set of speakers if you’ve got the wide stereo set up.
And it isn’t just local tracks – Samsung’s Multiroom is compatible with streaming services like Pandora and Spotify Connect and TuneIn as well. So you can use the music service you currently subscribe to and completely control what plays in what room – keeping everyone happy.
Even if you’re home alone, the room to room feature is also cool, with the music following you as you move around the house. Here’s a great example of that. In the lounge room you may not have set up Multi room speakers, but here’s a tip – if you have a series 7 sound bar, you can stream your favourite music to that, keeping your home entertainment area clutter free by connected to your sound bar as a multiroom speaker. Very cool! It works by identifying it on the app as a speaker, which you then select.
Taking that one step further, selected Samsung Smart TVs can act as a source, pushing out content like concerts or even sports matches so the whole family can listen in to the action no matter where in the house they are!
That’s the Samsung multi-room system – great control over your audio content with the ability to expand as your home and family changes and great connectivity with other Samsung AV equipment!
The Bing Lee Blog 