Samsung Electronics, the world’s leading TV manufacturer for 16 consecutive years, today announced a collaboration with Prime Video that offers fans the opportunity to experience exclusive 8K content from the much anticipated The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power series only on Samsung’s cutting-edge screens.

Before the September 2nd series premiere on Prime Video, Tolkien fans and newcomers alike also will have early access to exclusive content only with Samsung. Today in New York City, Samsung will host an exclusive sneak peek screening event featuring 25 minutes of content from the series’ first two episodes on its three-story LED video wall at Samsung 837 — its flagship experience center. Starting this week, dynamic creative from the series will debut on Samsung’s landmark LED digital screens overlooking New York City’s Times Square, London’s Piccadilly Circus and Milan’s Piazza del Duomo.

Samsung will be the first to offer series content in 8K resolution through a custom sneak peek with exclusive scenes. Viewers will have the opportunity to experience the epic journey in unimaginable depth and detail on Samsung Neo QLED 8K TVs and “The Wall” 8K Micro LED displays. Opportunities for fans to access the exclusive 8K trailer will be announced soon.

“Collaborations such as this mark a major milestone in bringing 8K — the most premium display technology — to the forefront for viewers,” said Simon Sung, Executive Vice President and Head of the Sales & Marketing Team of the Visual Display Business at Samsung Electronics. “For the first time, fans can experience the stunning imagery of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power on Samsung Neo QLED 8K TVs.”

“When considering how to immerse our global fans in the world of The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, Samsung’s exceptional technology and screens felt like a natural fit,” said Andrew Bennett, Vice President of Global Device Partnerships at Prime Video. “Samsung’s depth, detail and incredible passion for the series has started us on an amazing journey together — one we can’t wait for audiences to experience.”

The leader in the development of 8K display technology, Samsung’s Neo QLED 8K series TV’s deliver the most immersive home entertainment experience available today. Whether it’s the stunning vistas of the Khazad-Dûm, the majestic forests of the elf-capital Lindon, or the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, fans can experience the Second Age of Middle-earth in pristine 8K resolution thanks to Samsung’s Neural Quantum Processor 8K while being enveloped in the action thanks to Dolby Atmos and Object Tracking Sound — a Samsung technology that follows the action on the screen.

For more details, please visit www.samsung.com.

​About The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power

​Prime Video’s The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power brings to screens for the very first time the heroic legends of the fabled Second Age of Middle-earth’s history. This epic drama is set thousands of years before the events of J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, and will take viewers back to an era in which great powers were forged, kingdoms rose to glory and fell to ruin, unlikely heroes were tested, hope hung by the finest of threads and the greatest villain that ever flowed from Tolkien’s pen threatened to cover all the world in darkness. Beginning in a time of relative peace, the series follows an ensemble cast of characters, both familiar and new, as they confront the long-feared re-emergence of evil to Middle-earth. From the darkest depths of the Misty Mountains, to the majestic forests of the elf-capital of Lindon, to the breathtaking island kingdom of Númenor, to the furthest reaches of the map, these kingdoms and characters will carve out legacies that live on long after they are gone.

​More info on The Rings of Power can be found here: www.amazon.com/lotr.

Samsung Electronics exquisitely refined its Neo QLED 8K lineup’s sound system to allow users to take full advantage of their large TV’s audio quality. The flagship displays were designed to analyze both the size of the space where they sit and how they’ve been installed in order to calibrate sound to its optimal settings. The TVs use that information to pump out realistic, object-tracking sound through their eight total speakers. When applied to our ‘family movie night’ scenario above, the TV’s speakers would compensate for when the family’s thick blanket absorbed the tones of mid-to-high registers, and evenly distribute three-dimensional sound from the corners to the center when the family sat closer to the screen.

To learn more about how Samsung’s newest TVs customize sound based on where users place their screen, and how sound has evolved as tool for fostering immersive home entertainment, Samsung Newsroom sat down with some of the developers behind the displays.

▲ (From left) Engineers Jongbae Kim, Sungjoo Kim and Sunmin Kim of Samsung Electronics’ Visual Display Business.

SpaceFit Does Spatial Analysis Daily to Optimize Sound Settings

Today, with more users watching TV in more places, including living rooms, workrooms, bedrooms, terraces and more, both sitting up and lying down, and at different times of the day, our viewing habits are changing. Now, more users are customizing their viewing experience based on their living environment. With this in mind, the developers focused on creating technology that would automatically analyze users’ viewing environments to ensure that they’re always enjoying the best possible sound. The result is SpaceFit, a feature that automatically checks for changes in your living space once a day and calibrates sound settings accordingly.

Here’s how it works. First, a built-in microphone identifies elements that can affect sound, such as curtains, carpets and walls. Suppose the TV is placed in a user’s living room, which features a carpet that we can assume absorbs mid-to-high range sound. In this case, SpaceFit would optimize sound settings to raise the mid-to-high range sound accordingly and automatically. It works the same regardless of whether stands, wall hangings and other elements are changed. If the TV were to be moved closer to the wall, then the space behind it would become narrower, which could affect low frequency sounds. SpaceFit allows the TV to notice this change and adjust its settings in advance to produce clearer sound.

The key point to remember is that all of these processes occur automatically. As Engineer Sunmin Kim explained, “SpaceFit is an automated function that does not require that users press a button, and the device won’t send out a ‘testing’ sound. By simply turning it on or off, the TV will analyze the environment based on the sound of the content that the user actually consumes. So all you need to do is just enjoying what is being played on screen.”

This industry-first technology was made possible thanks to innovations that were based on a myriad of data and AI technologies. From sound-absorbing areas, such as what are referred to in sound engineering as ‘dead rooms,’ to acoustically reflective spaces, the team considered both extremes in terms of viewing environments.

“Since there were so many variables to consider, we built up a sufficiently wide learning database and analyzed it using machine learning technology. That’s where the AI technologies that Samsung developed kicked in,” said Sunmin Kim, who also noted that the feature “can cover almost any typical space in which a TV may be placed.”

OTS Pro Uses Eight Speakers to Produce 3D Sound From All Corners of the Screen

Content is beginning to make use of a wider range of sound channels, and users’ preferred ways of enjoying that content are also changing. As home entertainment expands and both wide screens and multi-channel sources with immersive formats like films become more popular, it’s becoming commonplace for multiple people to enjoy the same content together. The key here is to widen the ‘sweet spot’ – the location from which users can enjoy optimal sound even at the outside edges of the screen. As content grows more varied and screens become bigger, sound, too, must evolve in a way that enhances users’ enjoyment.

Object Tracking Sound (OTS) technology, a feature that tracks the movement of objects onscreen using the TV’s multi-channel speakers, is allowing Samsung to take users’ enjoyment to the next level. Neo QLED 8K includes an enhanced version of the technology, OTS Pro, and adds two center speakers to previous models’ six-speaker setup, for a total of eight. When an object onscreen moves, the speaker located in the optimal spot for expressing the movement produces sound, matching what the viewer sees on their screen. The immersive sound setup enriches the left and right stereo experience and the 3D effect, taking the viewing experience to new heights by making the user feel as if they were standing in the middle of the action.

“Often, when consuming content on a large screen, viewers watching the TV from both sides notice that sound produced at the center of the screen seems like it’s being produced in only one side,” said Engineer Jongbae Kim. “That’s why we added a center speaker between the left and right sides. The combination of the newly added center speaker and OTS Pro gathers sound in the middle of the screen, makes voices clearer, and expresses sound’s position more accurately, without distortion.”

If a speaker were to actually be placed at the center of a TV, it could clash with the overall design concept. The developers solved this issue by attaching a tweeter applied with a wave guide to the rear of the device. “If a speaker were to be placed on the back, sound would disperse in all directions and bounce off the walls, reducing clarity,” said Engineer Sungjoo Kim. “We needed a technology that drew sound toward viewers when they were in front of their TV. Employing a hole array technique enabled us to ensure that sound would travel well from a tweeter to the front of the display.”

The team’s efforts to balance sound also extend to Samsung’s next-generation MICRO LED display. Because the bottom of this large screen can almost reach the floor of users’ living rooms, if users connect their display to a multi-component home theater setup, there may not be space to place a center speaker.

“The 110-inch MICRO LED lineup features a μ-Symphony function, which allows you to use the built-in speaker as the center speaker,” said Jongbae Kim. “This means that you do not have to use a separate center speaker for your home entertainment system because MICRO LED’s multi-channel speaker fills that role. Because sound comes from the center of the screen, there is no sound-image mismatching, and the user enjoys a cinema-like experience.”

Making Use of Each and Every Piece of a Ultra-Slim Design

The Infinity Screen, a unique aspect of Samsung’s TV design, maximizes immersion by making bezels nearly invisible. It also posed a unique challenge for the developers, requiring them to explore how to best mount multiple speakers within the device’s slim form.

“In the past, a duct structure was used to draw the low frequency sound from the inside of the woofer speaker to the outside,” said Sungjoo Kim. “This type of design is capable of generating unwanted noise resulting from air turbulence. So, for the 8K models, we decided to take a ‘passive radiator’ approach that allowed us to produce rich, low-pitched sound. This not only enabled us to use the limited space inside the slim TV more efficiently, but it also allowed us to create rich and pure sound.”

“By exposing the diaphragm of the woofer and the passive radiator on the back of the TV,” he added, “it became possible to visualize Neo QLED’s sound performance in an interesting and intuitive way.”

It’s just one of Neo QLED TVs’ many innovative, out-of-the-box design elements. To help accommodate for panels becoming thinner and thinner, components that used to serve basic functions have been given new roles. “We used part of the rear cover of the TV as an acoustic component that guides the direction of sound to the sides,” said Jongbae Kim. “We also reinvented the design of the ‘slit vent,’ a component inside the rear cover that extends from the center tweeter to the bottom and was previously used to emit heat, to improve acoustic performance by controlling directivity. We utilized each and every part as much as possible, which means that no element of the design is without purpose.”

Delivering Rich, Realistic Sound

The developers have also gone to great lengths to gain a deeper understanding of the content users enjoy as part of an effort to provide better sound performance. For example, when analyzing sports content, they focus on reproducing the sound of the crowd, while for music, they try to create a stable sound stage. For movies, they conduct constant analysis to ensure that dialogue comes from the center of the screen.

“With speaker form factors changing, upmixing is becoming more important,” said Sunmin Kim. “Input channels are becoming varied, and the average number of speakers is increasing to six to eight, which adds up to countless combinations of inputs and outputs.

“Let’s say you’re enjoying two-channel content. Here, instead of sending signals blindly through eight speakers, it is important to understand the mixing characteristics of the content and send each signal separately. Samsung’s unique technology makes this possible using an optimized algorithm that’s based on AI.”

Samsung TVs have led the global market for 15 years running, and the user data that the company has accumulated thus far has been an invaluable asset. As countless families across the world use Samsung TVs, the ubiquity of the company’s displays offers an opportunity to think about what’s next. Sungjoo Kim hinted at what Samsung has in store. “We are systematically building a deep learning network that is based on numerous data,” said Kim. “In addition, we are going to firmly establish our position as a global leader by discussing technologies needed in the mid-to-long term with Samsung Electronics’ overseas AI research centers.”

In response to an ever-growing flood of content, the developers are committed to helping Samsung TVs deliver a sound experience that’s as close to reality as possible.

Screens are getting bigger, designs are getting slimmer, and content is becoming more varied. Keeping pace with trends, increasing speaker channels and doing so in three dimensions, and advancing our AI technologies to allow channels to better correspond to one another will bring us closer to delivering realistic sound. This may ultimately lead us into an era where you do not need a remote control to adjust sound settings.

Look forward to more Samsung TV innovations designed to maximize users’ viewing experiences.

With the emergence of high definition and large-screen TVs that offer spectacular visuals, user attention has been turning to the importance of sound quality, the finishing touch to providing the most immersive home entertainment experience possible.

In developing its 2020 QLED 8K TVs, Samsung Electronics implemented artificial intelligence (AI) so that users are able to enjoy a truly powerful large-screen TV experience. The 2020 QLED 8K range features technology that configures content audio to follow the movement of objects on screen and will also change depending on obstructions or distractions it senses around the product. These features further maximize audible immersion sound when paired with the HQ-Q800T soundbar – winner of the CTA’s “Best of Innovation” Award. The QLED TV’s speakers sync with the soundbar, allowing it to serve as an additional audio channel and create a more dynamic soundscape.

In this two-part series, Samsung Newsroom is exploring this innovative technology to learn more about its intelligent functionality. 

Object Tracking Sound: Reading the Room for More Realistic Audio Experiences

Say you are enjoying an action movie with a dynamic car chase. As the car moves from left to right and top to bottom on-screen, with a 2020 QLED 8K TV, the tension of the scene seems even more real, regardless of where in the room you are watching from.

The secret to this dynamic and realistic sound experience is Samsung’s Object Tracking Sound (OTS) technology, realized through the optimized speaker placement of the QLED 8K range. Unlike conventional TVs, which feature two speakers, the QLED 8K has six speakers¹ positioned all around the screen for a more vivid audio experience. The QLED 8K even has two speakers on the left- and right-hand side of the back of the device for a surround sound experience that fills up any room.

A conventional TV that emits sound only from the bottom of the screen (left) and the 2020 QLED 8K TV with speakers on all sides (right). Thanks to this speaker placement, the QLED 8K TV delivers a dynamic surround sound experience

On TVs with a conventional design, which normally feature speakers only on the bottom of the device, an increase in screen size will lead to more audio blind spots between the points of sound emission. For example, if a helicopter is flying on the upper left-hand side of the screen, the sound would still be being emitted from the bottom of the screen, resulting in a dissonance between the content’s visuals and its audio.

Compared with two-channel sound that features speakers only on the left- and right-hand sides of a TV, multi-channel speakers, as found in movie theaters, deliver a more refined sense of realism. The optimum placement for speakers is on the backside of a screen, just as it is in movie theaters, meaning that when an object on-screen moves, a speaker right behind that object can produce sound to match the visual. In order to recreate this dynamic realism achieved by movie theater screens, Samsung’s OTS technology harnesses all six speakers on all sides of the QLED 8K TV in order to have a video’s audio follow the on-screen action in real time.

OTS also features 3D rendering technology, which automatically recognizes a content’s genre and optimizes the sound tracks accordingly. This means that any type of sound, including stereo and 5.1 channel, will be optimized as 3D multi-channel sound. Whereas with conventional TVs, users would need to sit front-on to the screen to best enjoy the sound of a helicopter in flight in a movie or TV show, with a QLED 8K TV, users can experience the sound of the helicopter moving and rising over the TV even while sitting at a side angle from the screen.

AVA: Intelligent Noise Detection to Enhance Voice Clarity

The living room is the heart of the home, and often, the soundtrack to a movie or TV show is not the only source of noise to be found in this busy family space. However, there is nothing more frustrating than having a crucial scene in a TV show be overpowered by ambient noise.

This is why Samsung’s Active Voice Amplifier (AVA) technology was developed for QLED 8K TVs. AVA technology recognizes exterior noise sources and increases the volume of the voices on-screen if the surrounding conditions become too loud. For example, if there is a vacuum running while the TV is playing, the TV will automatically amplify the audio track to ensure viewers can hear everything that is going on.

Not only does this technology help ensure users never miss a piece of dialogue, it does so intelligently by meticulously analyzing the space within which the TV has been placed. Through a sound sensor on the bottom middle of the TV, AVA technology will allow its quantum processor to adjust the sound output when it detects a continuous noise from the surrounding environment that is louder than the TV and lasts for more than 3 seconds.

The TV’s sound sensor takes in and monitors audio from the content onscreen as well as the ambient audio from its surrounding environment. AI technology then compares the volume levels of the two types of sound, and if external sounds are found to be louder than that of the TV’s content, it will selectively raise just the voice audio track from the content being watched to ensure users can clearly hear every word being said.

Thanks to AVA technology, users no longer need to scramble for the remote when ambient noise suddenly gets too loud to adjust the TV’s volume. Furthermore, as the only existing TV technology to extract and amplify just the voice audio track of a piece of content, users do not have to put up with a boisterous sound experience when looking to increase a TV’s volume due to a loud surrounding environment. Users can also easily toggle the automatic audio adjusting of AVA on or off in the TV’s settings menu.

The sound innovations that come together to make up the 2020 QLED 8K’s dynamic audio experience take the inconvenience of adjusting TV audio out of users’ hands. Users can enjoy intelligent, 3D surround sound thanks to Samsung’s OTS and AVA technologies. Check out the videos below to experience the realistic sound experience of the 2020 QLED 8K range for yourself.

A Closer Look at the 2020 QLED 8K’s OTS Technology

A Closer Look at the 2020 QLED 8K’s AVA technology

¹ As of the 2020 product line-ups, 8K QLED TV implements OTS+ that uses a total of six speakers and 4K QLED TV (Q90, Q80 series) implements OTS that places a total of four speakers on top and bottom.

Allan Devantier, Audio Lab Head, Samsung Research America

Devantier started working for Samsung in October of 2013. By January of 2014, Samsung had acquired lab space and recruited four staff members, and by October of that year the staff had grown to number 10 engineers and research scientists and the Audio Lab had been made fully functional. From there, the lab was ready to begin working towards its mandate of ‘taking Samsung’s audio technology to the top of the industry.’

Devantier says that “The first product we worked on was the Radiant 360 loudspeaker – it was actually the first mass-market speaker to feature 360-degree sound. We were the industry leader, and now 360-degree speakers have grown very popular in the market.”

Evolutionary Change

Cut to the present, when Samsung’s LA Audio Lab is staffed by more than 20 people with over 300 collective years of experience in the audio field between them. Eleven members of the team hold Master’s or Ph.D. degrees in audio technology, while eight are both engineers and musicians who continue to play in bands. The lab also collaborates extensively with Samsung’s audio engineering teams in Korea.

“Our focus starts at the ear of the listener,” Devantier explains, “then expands out to the listening environment – the transducers (woofers and tweeters), amplifiers, and digital signal processors (DSPs).” And this emphasis has led to a steady stream of important contributions coming out of the lab. Whereas, in 2014, industry publications awarded Samsung’s Soundbar solutions a rating of three-and-a-half stars out of five, by 2019 the average score for Samsung Soundbars had been lifted to four-and-a-half stars. What’s more, in 2019 the HW-Q90R premium Soundbar model received a perfect five-star rating from a number of industry publications. In addition to improvements in the pure audio sphere, the Samsung Audio Lab has contributed to remarkable advancements in TV sound quality as well.

The Samsung Audio Lab has proven its ability to discern changes in the audio market and act upon them swiftly, as is demonstrated by the nature of its recent innovations. The Q-Symphony solution announced at this year’s CES enables a TV equipped with a Soundbar to provide surround sound that closely reproduces the spatial feeling of original sound fields. Devantier explains that Q-Symphony “uses the top-firing speakers in the TV to improve envelopment and immersion.”

Another example of this cutting-edge innovation is Samsung’s OTS (Object Tracking Sound) technology. To improve upon Soundbar technology that allows sound to be delivered in fixed directions, the lab developed TVs that incorporate speakers not just on the bottom and sides of the screen, but in the top left and right sections as well. This allows OTS technology to make use of deep learning that can recognize what kind of content is being displayed on the screen and deliver multichannel sound accordingly. Thus, users can enjoy actual, physical surround sound that is not only immersive but is specifically tailored to whatever they are watching at the time.

What’s more, in 2020 Samsung’s Q-Symphony and OTS technologies are coming together to truly maximize the potential of both solutions. While OTS delivers multichannel surround sound through the TV speakers, Q-Symphony makes the TV-speaker-Soundbar combination possible, enabling the TV’s speakers to provide rich, lively surround sound while the Soundbar delivers powerful, absorbing bass.

Taking Audio into the Future

The inception of AI is set to reshape the audio industry, and Samsung is working to anticipate the changes it will bring about. Asked to outline what he sees as AI’s role in the audio industry, Devantier says, “I think we can use AI to help our loudspeakers play louder, with more perceived bass and less perceived distortion. AI will also help make old recordings sound better and allow our loudspeakers to adapt to different listening environments.”

Another way in which AI is empowering future solutions is by enabling features like Active Voice Amplifier (AVA). Samsung’s AVA feature makes it possible for the TV to recognize the audiovisual space environment and provide sound that is optimized not only for the content being displayed on the screen, but also for the viewing space that the consumer is in. In 2020, sensors embedded in QLED solutions will make optimized viewing possible, even in rooms with high levels of noise. For instance, if a user is watching something and a member of their family switches a blender on in the adjoining kitchen, the system will adjust to ensure that the dialogue remains audible to the viewer in real-time despite the unexpected peripheral noise.

As far as how his lab will contribute to delivering better audio going forward, Devantier reports that it will continue to meet the needs of customers who are looking for “high quality and portable sound” while improving and expanding its OTS technology. “Maybe one day we will develop a loudspeaker that sounds great, plays very loud and is nearly invisible or exceptionally small and portable,” Devantier concludes, “Until that time, we will continue to produce solutions that make incremental improvements to sound quality.

Samsung Audio Lab