Samsung SP-01

Where else than on TVK would you find this ?

Out of nowhere, bar a few late 70s low-end units, like Kyocera in 1982/83, Samsung went for ultra-high-end audio in 1996 with three ultra components and... quickly went away making 51% of Sony's LCD displays and many other far more lucrative businesses.

I have no idea if the C-01, M-30S and SP-01 were actually distributed and sold but two things are sure : Samsung spared no expense, and Samsung needed help from the outside.

The one and only catalog published is beautiful and well printed ; yet, as most high-end audio catalogs, it says a lot and very little at the same time :)

So the A-Series was built "perfectly", with only the "best parts", all designed and customed by Samsung's "R&D team" and the "cooperation of leading manufacturers".
The latter bit means the series were partly developed elsewhere, like Thule did for Teac (A-BX10, 1994) or Dan Anagnos for Sony (SS-1ED, 1999), but I have yet to find who was behind the engineering of the SP-01.
JM Lab perhaps ?


Anyway -
The SP-01 are eeeee-normouS 150cm / 120kg floorstanding speakers with 6 drivers in each : three woofers, two midranges and one tweeter. Depth of the enclosure is at 95cm.

The front tweeter is obviously an import from JM Lab and, strangely, the one and only image published shows one speaker having ogival phase plugs for the woofers and the other with normal caps...
There is a second tweeter at the top of the back with a level pot named "ambient tweeter level" ; this tweeter can be turned off completely.

The filter is a 4th order network.

The two mid drivers have an anti-resonant piece of felt fixed atop their domes.

The enclosure of each is made of two : one for the woofers, and one for the mid/high drivers, the big black block sides making it act as one.


Optimum Thermal Simulation of Computer (OTSC) testing of each part and completed component was there to "assure the full elimination of sound quality variation".

Anybody know anything else ?