Samsung has been working on speaker-less audio solutions for several years now, having showcased its latest advancements in the field at this year’s iteration of the SID Display Week. What the company refers to as “Sound on Display” is effectively a vibration mechanism that generates audio by leveraging a large display and reverberates audio without requiring any kind of openings such as speaker grilles. The prototype whose capabilities were demonstrated by the company late last month featured one of its Infinity Display panels, a Super AMOLED module with an 18.5:9 aspect ratio which also sported slightly curved long edges akin to those found on the last several Galaxy S and Galaxy Note-series Android flagships.
The demo that can be seen below suggests even Samsung’s existing technology can already deliver audio whose volume and quality are comparable to more traditional mobile speakers, though it’s presently unclear whether the company has any way to commercialize such a solution while retaining support for Dolby Atmos, one of the major selling points of the Galaxy S9 lineup, at least as far as audiophiles are concerned. The South Korean phone maker isn’t the only company that’s presently experimenting with speaker-free audio systems; Google has been doing the same for a while and even made a major bet on such a technology when it bought British audio resonance startup Redux last year.
With the Galaxy S9 line’s sales reportedly being weaker than those of the series that preceded it, Samsung may be looking to debut major innovations with the Galaxy S10 family in order to reignite consumer interest in its high-end offerings. A speaker-less audio system that would allow the firm to make its already thin flagship bezels even smaller could be one such advancement, together with an in-display fingerprint reader and a 3D camera designed for depth-sensing. The Galaxy S10 and Galaxy S10 Plus are expected to be announced and commercialized early next year, presumably running Android P out of the box.