Quick review
The good
The not-so-good
Hiding sound isn’t easy inside the home, even with minimalistic speaker design. But the Samsung Music Frame hides audio in plain sight by making it a picture perfect speaker.
With more manufacturers getting into speakers than ever before, we’re beginning to see how the humble speaker can evolve.
More than just another box with obvious round drivers and diaphragms, the speaker is gradually being hidden by layers of design and grilles, as designers turn their R&D focus to making speakers look sexy for more rooms and styles.
While the look of a classic loudspeaker used to be a big rectangular box with obvious circles that vibrate when in action, pulsating with every flex of volume delivery, these days living rooms don’t need to have that look at all.
Long slim grids of dots and crosshatched fabric covering the speakers are more common, as speaker manufacturers hide the look of the common and conventional speaker, making everything that much more uniform and minimalistically pleasing.
But even then, that may be too much like a speaker for some.
If the idea of a speaker in your home is one that should be heard and not seen, you might be looking for ways to make a speaker more inconspicuous, blending into the surroundings and decor of the home. And that’s where Samsung has been toying with something a little clever.
Design and features
Designed like a picture frame with no obvious speakers or even a speaker grille in the front, you’d have a difficult time working out where the speaker was in a room if you didn’t know what you were looking for.
Rather, the Samsung Music Frame is the stereo audio embodiment of what its Frame TV tries to do: turn media into something more aesthetically pleasing. In short, it is aesthetically pleasing sound, if there ever was such a thing.
You can’t see sound, but typically when you glance at a speaker, you know what you’re looking at: a device designed to give you that sound.
In the Samsung Music Frame, you don’t even have that. You have a wall-mounted or desk-based picture frame, with the speakers found on the back.
Those speakers include two channels of sound, also known as stereo, delivering the sound via six speakers, even if the design mostly looks like two at the rear.
Mind you, you’re not supposed to be looking at the back. The LS60D Music Frame is more about delivering sound in a way where you don’t see the speakers, so stop looking for them.
Stop paying attention to where the speakers are. Instead, look to the front and the picture for your space, and just focus on that minimalist take on style.
In-use
Despite the minimalist aesthetic of Samsung’s Frame speaker, there are actually physical controls, though you probably will never use them.
Found along the back edge, you’ll find a few controls for volume and playback, but this is largely the sort of thing where an app will be your go, and mostly Samsung’s everything-app that is “Smart Things”.
If you have a Samsung washing machine, you use Smart Things. If you have a Samsung robotic vacuum, the same applies. And yep, if you have a Samsung Music Frame speaker, you can turn to the settings connected on that app, because that’s where all of them can be found.
That’s not a bad thing, either: fewer unnecessary apps on your phone is a good thing, so Samsung can’t be faulted here.
All the service options are found inside this app and device, and really, it’s just a part of how Samsung sees building its connected appliances down the track. You get that vibe the more you use it, or any other Samsung device meant to stay in the home.
Depending on how you use your speakers normally, though, you might not even touch it.
Once the speaker is set up for a home network, a process that takes seconds, you really just need to ensure it stays powered and it’ll be a speaker you can connect to. Bluetooth is here, while Chromecast for Android and AirPlay for Apple seem to be the main ways of connecting to it, and there’s also support for Amazon’s Alexa voice assistant, too.
Thanks to that AirPlay support, you can even start a stream from an iPhone to the Music Frame, and then link up other AirPlay-enabled speakers, such as those made by Sonos.
The Music Frame isn’t technically a Sonos speaker, but you can play music from an iPhone or iPad to the Music Frame and Sonos speakers by stacking them in this way.
There’s an optical audio input here if you want to plug directly into the speaker from a TV, but that would be one stereo speaker for an older TV, and frankly, you have better options available.
Setting up a picture
You can also change the pictures in the frame, too, so you’re not forced to stare at Samsung’s stock artwork that it comes with.
Unlike the IKEA Symfonisk Picture Frame which forces you to buy art from IKEA and doesn’t let you use your own, Samsung’s Music Frame offers one of two options: print your own pictures on acrylic using a service, or cut your pictures to match Samsung’s matte board.
The former is pricey, starting at $46 USD for the privilege, something Samsung offered as part of the Music Frame review process. Meanwhile, the latter is inexpensive, and something anyone can do: print your photo, ideally in square on an 8×10 or A4 photo card, cut it to match, and then replace it on the photo frame Samsung provides.
The fact that you can replace the picture is interesting, simply because the speaker gives some of that aesthetic control back to the user.
Much like how Samsung’s The Frame TV lets you pick the art on its screen, its Music Frame speaker lets you decide on a piece of static art for your living space. Frankly, it’s one step removed from making the speaker into a square screen to accompany the bigger Frame TV, and that might be too many screens for one space.
Performance
Once the frame is showing the image you want, it’s time to get stuck into the sound.
As we do with all our sound product reviewers, speakers and headphones, we’re getting stuck into the Music Frame review by running it through the Pickr Sound Test, a publicly available music test you can run on your own speakers and headphones, too.
That starts with the electronic of Tycho and Daft Punk, both of which give you a somewhat balanced take on dance and electronica, offering a bright and booming sound that delivers decent detail, even if the mids are slightly behind.
In the poppy sounds of Carly Rae Jepsen, that bright sound is more noticeable: the bass is surprisingly more present and the highs of the vocals are more pronounced, even if the mids belonging to instruments feel slightly withdrawn by comparison.
You get that vibe in Mark Ronson and Ariana Grande, too. There’s plenty of meat in the lows, with a booming reverberation to match the loud delivery in the high of the vocals, while the instruments in the mids retreat slightly by comparison.
Throughout much of what we play, the “bright and booming” sound means the balanced sound you might expect isn’t complete balanced. Balanced enough for some tastes, you might say, but certainly lacking that warmth we’ve come to love from other speakers.
But in rock, jazz, and classical, everything rounds out rather nicely. In Muse, we get the warbling lows of “Madness” with the rounded highs, delivering a real nice harmony of sound and tones. In the Deftones, the spacious delivery sounds much larger than the Music Frame speaker should provide, and the pulled back mids are hardly a big deal.
It’s much the same across David Bowie and Paul Simon and The Who, all of which sound quite lovely overall: bright and booming, and good enough for jazz.
Which, by the way, jazz sounds great.
Ray Brown’s live sessions lack the warmth, but deliver a surprisingly rounded and detailed recreation with plenty of detail, and plenty of volume to make your living space, outdoors or otherwise, sound like a fun jazz club.
It’s much the same whether we were tuned into Dave Brubeck or Miles Davis, or even getting Etta James to sing her heart out. The mids aren’t pronounced or sitting where they should be, but the vocals are high and the lows are punching, with everything else just firmly behind.
We even tried to wrench a little more bass out of the Music Frame with our extended bass playlist, and make no mistake, this speaker can deliver.
The punch of Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy” didn’t over-flex the bass driver too much, while the heft from Childish Gambino’s “Heartbeat” still let you feel each bass hit firmly.
The highs and lows of this speaker are balanced and great, and if your sound isn’t over-engineered, it will clearly deliver.
There are some other technologies you can employ to improve or change things further, such as a voice amplifier that adapts the sound to noise levels in the room — hopefully, there’s not a lot of that in your room while you’re listening, defeating the point — as well as a space calibration system happening from the speaker’s point of view.
In the end, however, the sound is roughly the same: bright and booming, which for some styles of music will be as close to balanced as some may like.
TV sound
Samsung’s Music Frame speaker also supports TV sound, but this is one of those things that you kind of need a Samsung TV for, and that’s not something we have.
An optional extra, the speaker can work with Dolby Atmos in a virtualised psychoacoustic way because there are only rear speakers and not upward firing speakers.
We’ve seen psychoacoustic Atmos enough times to know how this works, and if you have a supported Samsung TV, more power to you. However Samsung goes a little deeper here thanks to Q-Symphony, allowing the speaker to wirelessly talk with the speakers inside a Samsung TV, expanding on what is normally weaker sound from built-in speakers by boosting what’s there.
Value
The price can feel a little too high for all of this, however.
In Australia, you’ll find the Atmos-capable Samsung Music Frame for $699, though its street price varies between $499 and $599. And while that might seem fine for a loud speaker designed to fit in with home aesthetics, it also manages to feel a little on the high side.
There isn’t a lot that competes, largely because speakers made to match home aesthetics are still quite new. No one really does these things, and certainly not like this.
The IKEA Symfonisk picture frame speaker is $299 in Australia. Monitor Audio’s Sound Frame speakers start at $499 before going up in price dependent on the size and aspect ratio you’re setting your room up with. And that is arguably it. Picture-frame speakers are a rarity, so Samsung can really set whatever price it wants for the look and feel it is going for.
Technically, the price of the Music Frame is a little higher than we’d like, largely because of the other speakers it competes with.
While there may be very little for it actually play against in picture frame speakers, there are quite a few excellent speakers designed for all around the home that are arguably better value.
Take the Apple HomePod, another Atmos-capable speaker with a nice aesthetic that retails for $479, under both the RRP and street price of the Music Frame.
The Sonos Beam Gen 2 doesn’t look like a picture frame, but does fit into living rooms with a minimalist aesthetic, and works as a virtualised Dolby Atmos soundbar with every TV, not just those made by Samsung, only managing to cost $799 at its recommended retail price, or $599 at street price at the time this review was published. Even at RRP, a cost of $100 more for arguably more support of TVs, not to mention the Sonos app supporting most services, not just one or two, makes the Beam Gen 2 a more clever buy overall.
That might be the biggest problem with the value in the Music Frame: there are better speakers with more rounded value if you have any TV that isn’t made by Samsung.
If you already have a Samsung TV, sure, this thing makes that little bit more sense. But without one, your options widen considerably.
And that’s before we talk about what needs work.
What needs work?
The warmth of the speaker could be refined, with a big focus on the mids. They’re clearly the part of the sound that needs a little bit of tightening, and outside of a few genres, just needed that little bit more.
Likewise, the smart integration just didn’t feel that smart.
You get Alexa, but it doesn’t seem to be as seamless as other smart speakers, while support for Google’s voice control is missing in action. Samsung notes Google Home is supported, which seems to mean controlling the speaker from a Google Home device like the Google Nest Hub, but not specifically talking to Google on the Music Frame speaker itself.
It’s actually surprising Samsung’s Bixby isn’t here, given it is still clearly a thing, albeit one that the company doesn’t talk as much about. Frankly, we’re not complaining, we’re just surprised.
But better integration with services would be appreciated. The moment we linked up Alexa with Samsung’s Music Frame, we shouldn’t have needed to jump around the apps to connect up Apple Music. Amazon’s Alexa supports Apple Music, and our Echo speakers already talk to it, but for some reason the Music Frame wouldn’t. It has Spotify Connect on-board, but no native connection in the app for what is arguably the second most used music service.
There are ways around this. You get Chromecast and AirPlay, so one could argue that you don’t directly need Apple Music or any other service baked in. However, the omission of a direct link for Apple Music means you never get to experience Apple Music’s Dolby Atmos spatial audio music on the Music Frame, unless you plug that speaker into a TV, and your options for using it as a TV speaker are already limited to Samsung TVs.
Lots of catches in a long paragraph, and you can easily see why this is a bit of a thing. If all the stars don’t align in all the best ways, you’ll never get the best experience the Music Frame aims to deliver on.
What we love
We still love the idea, though, and it’s one not many manufacturers have really explored.
Amazon and Google have both tried something similar with smart displays, and in Australia, Google has arguably managed to get the closest due to its Photos service actually working on the display here, something Amazon just doesn’t deliver on locally.
Samsung’s style is a little clearer, though: one picture made for the living room with a big emphasis on sound and an aesthetic that makes it a large piece of art for your wall, or even a shelf.
That last one is a particularly important point: while you get a wall mounting kit in the box, you don’t actually have to mount the Music Frame speaker. It also comes with a clever stand that makes for an easy setup to just balance the frame and its speaker at an angle, turning it into a clever addition for any bookshelf or entertainment unit.
It can even be weirdly portable for outdoor listening, thanks to the long lead on the custom power pack. If you don’t mind keeping it plugged in, it’s a functional bit of art for outdoor listening, though keep in mind there’s no battery and it’s not water resistant, so bring it back indoors when you’re done.
Final thoughts (TLDR)
While the sound of The Frame Speaker could do with some improvement in the mids, what Samsung has been able to wrench out of this speaker is still impressive enough. Practical and functional aesthetics, the Music Frame speaker makes home decor into something you’ll actually use.
It’s one step away from being a picture perfect product in homes looking for more than just grilles and dots and boring speakers in rooms of the home. Worth checking out.
