Samsung HT-X810

After the recent Philips soundbar review, my interest was piqued toward these sleek devices, and thus we decided to call in more from the competition in the market. And who better than Samsung, who is now one of the biggest names in the audio video consumer market. We are familiar with their LCD TV lineup, thus this new sound bar home theater is something we look forward to reviewing. The model name is HT-X810, and it’s gleaming with cool features like wireless subwoofer, Bluetooth and more…

Design and Features
This system comes packed up in a long box; it takes two to lug it around. On unpacking we found the two main components of the system - the soundbar and a separate powered subwoofer. The finish all over is black gloss, which is typical Samsung, plus they have actually incorporated more style and design elements from their LCD TV range, like the thick transparent plastic flap around the border of the soundbar. As usual fingerprints will be galore on the surfaces, though Samsung has included a nice soft cloth to do the needful, along with a few cables (an HDMI is one of them).

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The front panel of the soundbar is grilled to hide the speakers, with the top edge containing many important aspects like an LED screen, a cover for the DVD slot load, and a row of flush, touch sensitive buttons. The body of the bar is convexly arched, with quite a thick part in the centre. This section has a flat stand on the bottom, thus the unit can be placed on top of flat surfaces. There are wall mountable accessories also included. The sub is a side-firing unit, with the rest of the sides sporting the smooth gloss finish.

The features are impressive. Firstly there is Bluetooth, so you can wirelessly connect devices that support stereo Bluetooth for audio playback. There is a USB in for external memory, it supports WMV, DivX, MP3 besides regular DVD video and CDs. Another important feature is that it supports DVD-Audio (for the audiophiles). The best feature is a 5.8GHz wireless subwoofer. Last but not least there is an FM tuner with 15 presets. The power of the soundbar is 75W per speaker (there are 2) while the sub is 150 watts. Not that it’s too critical, though there is no headphone jack. For inputs we have an audio EP in, a single HDMI and an optical in.

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Performance
Firstly, we connected a Kingston USB memory stick, and put in an I Robot DVD in the drive to see basic features. These all worked fine, function wise. I’ll get to performance quality later. Then came my WD portable HDD. This did not read. I know iPods would not work via USB, but to confirm this, I plugged in a Nano, to no avail. But of course there is an audio in, so we can connect any and every media player via EP wire. (This wire is not included). On my flash drive i had some Sopranos episodes in DivX. These worked fine, though overall the time taken to switch inputs, load and read DVDs etc. is a tad longer than normal. It runs into about 5 seconds on an average. Finally, I plugged in a Sony Ericsson phone via Bluetooth, which surprisingly got detected very fast and easily.

Now for video, I put in the DVE test disc, and ran the usual battery of calibration. The HT-X810 is actually quite nice in the video output domain; we had upscaled it to 1080p. The TV I was using was also a Samsung 5 series. The entire greyscale came through well, with good separation and accuracy on different levels of grey, even at full white and full black. Color representation also was impressively neutral with no edge distortion and smooth motion. There was absolutely no stutter in framerate, which is found in low end DVD players.

Unfortunately audio was not so good. The bass is just too much, and the output of the subwoofer sounds too separated from the soundbar. The sub can be reduced by 6 dB but that too is not enough. ‘Muddiness’ in the sound was also an issue, as the low frequencies do not mix in well with highs and mids. The Audio up scaling, Pbass and Virtual surround features are all not too effective in making a positive difference. The latter does give a wider soundstage to the sound though.

Conclusion
The MRP is Rs. 44,900 though you can get it for lesser on the street. This is definitely an expensive price tag, though soundbars do cost a heft sum. The price would have been reasonable and the product a hit, if the sound output was good. It’s a visual treat and is feature rich. So it boils down to what you would prefer more - audio fidelity or looks and video performance.