← Back to context

Comment by umanwizard

7 hours ago

Anyone who cares about audio will have dedicated speakers, so it barely even makes sense to make TV speakers good.

I'm a bit on the fence about this.

If someone buys a TV (y'know, a device that's supposed to reproduce sound and moving pictures), it should at least be decent at both. But if people want a high-end 5.1/7.1/whatever.1 sound then by all means they should be able to upgrade.

My mum? She doesn't want or need that, nor does she realistically have the space to have a high-end home-cinema entertainment setup (much less a dedicated room for it).

It's just a TV in her living room surrounded by cat toys and some furniture.

So, if she buys a nearly €1000 TV (she called it a "stupid star trek TV") it should at least be decent—although at that price tag you'd reasonably expect more than just decent—at everything it's meant to do of the box. She shouldn't need to constantly adjust sound volume or settings, or spend another thousand on equipment and refurbishment to access to decent sound.

In contrast, they say the old TV that's now at nan's house has much better sound (even if the screen is smaller) and are thinking of swapping the TVs since nan moved back in with my mum.

  • Good speakers isn't really compatible with flatness of modern tv's. You can certainly make one with good speakers, but it would look weird mounted on the wall. Buying external speakers seems like a decent tradeoff for that.

Nope. That's a misconception. Due to space constraints I don't have dedicated speakers for our living room TV. And I don't think I'm the only one.

And I do own two proper dedicated speakers + amps setups. I also know how to use REW and Sigma Studio. So I guess I qualify regarding "cares".

Sadly I lack time to build a third set of cabinets to the constraints of our living room.

  • A sound bar, even though fairly bad, is still a million times better than internal speakers, and you'd need a very exotic setup to be unable to fit one.

    I'm surprised given you care about audio that you can even tolerate internal speakers. I'd just not use that TV and watch wherever you have better audio.