Samsung WAM1500 speakers $79 on 11/19

Better than last year’s $99 Black Friday deal. 11/19 Sam’s club is having a Sam’s Samsung Super Saturday Sale ( say that out loud 10 times fast ).
Among the deals is the WAM1500 for $79 ea, available in store or samsclub.com with free shipping. Sale starts at 12:01 AM online , "quantities limited "

Now have the fixed the ST/ Samsung speaker integration ? I almost jumped on them for the $99 last year, but my store sold out before I decided and they weren’t available online. $79 is hard to pass up ( if they work )

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I’m not familiar with these speakers. Is the WAM1500 at that price for 2 speakers? I see you can get 2 for $129 on Amazon.

The 2/$129 on Amazon are refurbished units. Amazon also has used for $45. The new ones are $131 each

I’m interested in these mainly for a cheaper, simple, reliable “text to speech” announcement option, not so much for the music. It seems like the Sonos/ST’s integration will only work for a week at a time.

Has anybody successfully got these speakers to work with ST’s?

Yes, they do work with TTS and we are being told that Samsung and ST is reworking their integration but for now… New Official Integration: Samsung Multiroom Audio

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Has anyone had any luck getting the WAM1500 connected? They don’t look to be supported.

AFAIK, these do work, there are posts by people stating they got R1/WAM1500s working . Maybe @Tyler can confirm, before we have disappointments on Saturday.

I think that article on support was published before the R series came out last year.

I had no problem connecting for notifications and wifi music. Originally I did have a problem it spamming my activity log…that appears to be fixed, but now there are several reports, including me, of problems with truncating TTS particularly wit Notify with sound

We own 3 of the WAM1500s along with a Sonos Play 1 and a Bose SoundTouch 10. Of the three, the only one that works consistently is the Sonos. At one time, the Sonos repeated itself, but that has been corrected. Of the three, the Bose seems to have the richer sound quality. There’s a reason the only one of the three you see on sale are the Samsung. We will not be buying any more and do not recommend them.

Hey there @KayNMIke you said the Sonos is the only thing that works consistently…how did you get it working consistently? I ask because on a fairly regular basis I have to remove them and rediscover them to get them to work. If your experience is different I would love to figure out what I can do to avoid frustration and have a consistent alarm for my SHM setup. :confounded:

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@cvastola

There’s a good bit quantity-wise in our setup, but nothing fancy. From the top, we’re using the stock Sonos Player DTH. We have a combination of CoRE pistons, Notify with Sound, and Simulated Switches that activate various routines. Some are as simple as “motion at the front door.” I did find, especially with CoRE, the simpler I kept the routine, the better. From a reliability perspective, it seemed more simple pistons worked better than fewer, more complex pistons.

It was rough for awhile, but in the last several weeks the only Sonos issue has been some of the simulated switches bringing up the last routine used (rather than the desired routine). I’ve been on the road and haven’t dug into it, but I took that as being a Sonos “favorites” issue. I suppose that’s something else we’ve done is try to utilize the favorites in the Sonos Controller app for all of our routines from MP3 files to Sirius channels and sports networks. Before using the Sonos favorites, the problems were much worse in terms of calling the wrong routine.

As far as SHM, that’s another story. We have had way too many nuisance alarms (especially with “Presence”) to trust SmartThings. For example, to raise the garage door, I now use a 3 out of 3 voting in CoRE (new presence, motion sensor, and camera motion sensor). Before I did that, the garage door would be going up and down at all hours as the presence of my or my wife’s phone disappeared and reappeared. IMO, SmartThings just isn’t reliable enough with a single activation device for mission critical uses like SHM.

Hope that helps! :slight_smile:

Mike

Thanks for the detailed response. It’s was really helpful!

Outside of SHM I struggle to keep them paired just to start and stop music. They just won’t work unless I delete and re-add them. It’s so frustrating!

I will persevere and hope I can get them working consistently.

Back to SHM for a second…it has been working very well for me over the last 2-3 months. Fingers crossed! :grin:

@cvastola … glad you found the comments helpful. I know the tendency is to doubt ourselves when something goes wrong. In general, especially with computer programs, if it worked once, it’s probably not the computer when something stops working. Well, unless we’ve been in there messing with things. LOL I have found that’s especially true with SmartThings. I can mess it up with the best of them, but when I haven’t played with it, I come to the community first to see if others are fighting with it. Again, ST is just not reliable. The upgrade the last couple of days crashing CoRE for Android users is a prime example.

Back to Sonos/WAM1500 … holler if we can be of further help. :slight_smile:

I purchased the WAM1500 at BestBuy yesterday, and so far (*fingers crossed) it seems to be working solidly with ST. Note I am not running RULE MACHINE or any special dev setup, rather I’m just using the stock ‘Music & Sounds --> Speaker Notify with Sound’ SmartApp. And since we’re in the Best Buy holiday return period, I’ve got well into January before I have to decide whether to keep it or return it. For what it’s worth, the Samsung MultiRoom App looks very limited, so if the ST integration doesn’t work solidly as hoped for, I’ll very likely return this.

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I already have Echoes/Dots/Taps in every room ( and impatiently waiting for Amazon to release WHA) . I only want them for ST TTS notifications too.

WHA? World Hockey Association? Sorry, I’m not hip on all this tech acronym stuff.[quote=“RLDreams, post:15, topic:63428”]
I only want them for ST TTS notifications too.
[/quote]

I’m in the same boat as you, a Dot or Echo in all major rooms. What should I be patiently looking forward to?

Whole Home Audio, Multi-Room Audio

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To be able to do text to speech to a Echo or Dot? (hopefully to all of mine in the future) I would need to get off my lazy butt & figure out CORE to do this?

That would depend on your “needs”. AskAlexa can give custom responses.

EchoSistant can send free-form text from Alexa to remote speakers and queue messages for Alexa to repeat. Is the reason why I am looking for more connected speakers…