Hands on Samsung's HT-WS1 soundbar
We've put our ears to a variety of speaker solutions for delivering the audio portion of your video entertainment experience, but the virtual-surround soundbar category is one that we've missed. Just from the sheer number of these products in the market, you know this gadget genre is popular with folks, so when the Samsung HT-WS1 drifted by, we just had to grab it up for review. Out of the box it sure does look nice in the red "Touch of Color" design, and feels more solid than the Samsung AS730 HTIB we reviewed last month. This $350 soundbar + subwoofer combo is limited to a 3.5-mm stereo jack and a SPDIF optical feed. As we said in our ZVOX review, though, we'd rather have good performance on a few codecs than poor performance on all of them. We'll tell you if Samsung's HT-WS1 finds a good balance in the features-performance-price triad in due time, but until then, take a gander at the pics after the break.
