In Erwan Bouroullec’s head, Samsung’s new Music Studio speakers don’t start as gadgets – they start as atmosphere. He talks about music the way most people talk about light or fresh air, as something that quietly changes the “color” of a room, shifting how you feel long before you notice where the sound is actually coming from. The Music Studio 5 and Music Studio 7 are his attempt to give that invisible presence a physical shape: a calm, moon‑like orb with a single dot at its center, a graphic shorthand for a traditional speaker cone that has been stripped back to its most essential symbol.​

When he first sketched the project, he drew a series of orbs with dots, almost like little eclipses, because that simple combo was “the skeleton” of how we’ve always imagined speakers: a circle that vibrates, a point where sound seems to originate. That became the visual DNA of the Music Studio series – a circular body that feels almost like a small moon resting in your living room, with the dot acting as a focal point that suggests sound unfolding over time. Bouroullec is very aware that not everyone reads design symbols the same way, depending on culture and imagination, but for him, the orb‑and‑dot language is a way to make sound visible without shouting for attention. Instead of the aggressive “tech box” aesthetic, you get a sculptural object that sits in the room like an artifact, something you could almost mistake for a piece of decor until it starts playing.​

What’s striking is how he frames the collaboration with Samsung: less like a brand partnership and more like composing music with a very large, very capable orchestra. He describes design and engineering as inseparable – the speakers began as his pure form, then went through what he calls a “morphological transformation” as Samsung’s audio engineers iterated on the shape to make sure it didn’t just look good but actually sounded better. The circular orb isn’t a random design flourish; it ties back to the geometry of classic loudspeakers and was refined to improve acoustics, helping the final products deliver clearer sound and deeper bass without sacrificing that quiet, sculptural presence. In his metaphor, his tools are materials and production methods, and Samsung, with its Audio Lab and hardware expertise, is the orchestra that can turn those notes into a full performance.​

You can feel that tension between heritage and “what’s next” in how he talks about the speakers at home. Music Studio is meant to be a “timeless and enduring companion,” a phrase that sounds lofty until you look at the details: a sturdy metal mesh front that openly reveals where the drivers sit, a form factor that can live on a sideboard or shelf without looking like a piece of AV gear, and a design that consciously builds on decades of familiar speaker archetypes instead of pretending those never existed. At the same time, he wanted the product to signal a new era in audio – not through RGB lights or brutalist geometry, but through a kind of purity that lets it slip into a range of interiors while still feeling contemporary. That’s where the orb‑and‑dot abstraction does its best work: familiar enough to connect to the history of speakers, fresh enough to hold playlists, podcasts, hi‑res streaming and multi‑room setups without feeling out of time.​

From a tech lens, the hardware quietly backs up the design narrative. Music Studio 5 and 7 are Wi‑Fi speakers tuned by Samsung’s Audio Lab, built to slot into the company’s broader ecosystem rather than exist as isolated art pieces. They support Wi‑Fi casting and streaming services, Bluetooth with Samsung’s Seamless Codec, voice control and hi‑res audio playback (up to 24‑bit/96 kHz on the higher‑end model), which means they are just as comfortable with lossless playlists as with podcasts running in the background on a lazy Sunday. The larger Music Studio 7 leans into immersive 3.1.1‑channel spatial audio, with left, right, front and top‑firing drivers plus a super tweeter aimed at delivering extra extension and height; the smaller Music Studio 5 keeps things more discreet with a 4‑inch woofer and dual tweeters in a gallery‑friendly body. Both can run solo or join Samsung TVs and soundbars through an upgraded Q‑Symphony system that now lets up to five audio devices and a TV sync together, using AI to read the room and decide how to spread the channels so dialogue stays clear and effects feel enveloping rather than chaotic.​

The AI and acoustics story stays mostly under the surface, which is exactly how Bouroullec seems to like it. Features like AI Dynamic Bass Control and Audio Lab Pattern Control are designed to handle the nerdy stuff – balancing low end so bass feels deep but not bloated, managing how different drivers project sound so the soundstage feels wide and precise without obvious hotspots. That lets the physical object remain calm and almost anonymous in the room, while the tech inside quietly adjusts to whatever is happening: a movie at night, background jazz while you cook, or a focused listening session with hi‑res tracks. In a way, the product is a comment on where home audio is going: away from boxes that demand you rearrange your space around them, and toward objects that accept they are guests in your home, shaping the mood as much by how they look and sit in space as by how they measure in a lab.​

For Bouroullec, that’s the real throughline: harmony. Harmony between sound and space, between the long history of speaker design and the very current reality of streaming, voice control and multi‑device setups, and between an industrial giant’s engineering muscle and a designer’s almost poetic view of what music does to a room. Music Studio is not about putting a sculpture on a pedestal; it is about letting something quietly sculpt the air around you. If you walk into a living room and notice the atmosphere first and the speaker second, that’s exactly the reaction this project is aiming for.