Large “flat-screen TVs” have become very accessible in the last decade. You can order from Amazon or walk into Best Buy and pick up a 55-inch Mini LED smart TV for around $300! That was unheard of at one point. For many people, the visuals that the $300 TV provides will be sufficient for their “eye.” Budget devices almost always involve trade-offs, but the value proposition in this economy is unmistakable.
What isn’t unmistakable is how crappy your TV’s speakers are compared to an external speaker system. With TVs being as thin as they are, there’s just no space for the physics of rich, robust, room-filling sound in those frames. Heck! There isn’t even enough room for mediocre room-filling sound, but I digress. Don’t just take my disdain for TV speakers as Gospel, though. Let’s dig into the red flags that signal your need for a soundbar so you can actually hear dialogue and get big sound that matches your big TV.
Downward Dog
Is only good for Yoga poses
While a good downward-facing dog yoga pose may awaken and strengthen your body, downward-firing speakers may weaken the impact of the beautiful sound design in a movie like Dune and put you to sleep. Bouncing sound and light off things is doable, but in the average home or apartment, most people won’t take the time to DIY or pay a professional to retrofit a room to accommodate it. So you end up with speakers sending sound into your TV table, or whatever is underneath that unit if it’s wall-mounted.
It doesn’t end there, though! Many TVs have rear-firing speakers, and some even have an additional set of side-firing ones, so you’ll run into the same problems with all of those: what surfaces are those speakers bouncing sound off of? And when we’re talking about sound and surfaces, we’re also looking at room echo and reverberation, sound isolation, the distance between the speakers and bounce surfaces, and more!
One of the only TV sets I’ve had the chance to listen to where the built-in speakers did an admirable job was TCL’s new X11L SQD-Mini LED with built-in Bang & Olufsen speakers, pictured above. It was truly impressive, but it still needed a subwoofer because no TV cabinet that small can deliver enough bass for movies with today’s accessibly-priced consumer technology.
Ideally, you always want the primary sound firing directly at you! Even your primary surround speakers should still point directly at you, no matter what stands or wall mounts you use. Your speaker configuration(s) should generally form a triangle with you at its apex. We won’t even talk about height channels and side-firing surrounds if those basics aren’t in place first.
Physics don’t lie
But the marketing manager might
In the race for thinness and light weights, there will almost always be some sort of tradeoff! The first big-screen TV I ever bought had a massive cabinet, so there could’ve been plenty of space (in theory) for larger woofers and tweeters. These days, many manufacturers will sell you on how thin the TV is, while trying to tell you somewhere in their literature that the speakers are solid. No. They are not. They may be made of solid materials, but they won’t give you solid sound.
Instead, they will give you missed lines of dialogue, underwhelming sound-design elements like explosions, or a lackluster reproduction of nuanced sound design like that found on the “A Quiet Place” or “Dune: Part Two” 4K UHD Blu-rays. All you need to do to truly understand this problem is look at every soundbar on display at your local big-box tech store and see how many are as small or flat as your TV. Did you see any that were flat and affordable? Did you see any at all that were as flat as your TV, or even close?
Size does matter
Little volume energy
Do you think that you’re not going to want a soundbar when you’re watching a small TV? The problems I’ve written about in the previous sections only get worse with the itty-bitty speakers built into what we’d call a “small” TV these days. Generally, that’s anything below 55 inches.
When we’re talking about speakers, on the physics side, we’re really talking about the ability to move or displace air – yes, that’s a very simplified description. In this case, those size issues are magnified by speakers housed in a box that is not only super thin but small. Those dialogue and low-end issues will be worse here, but no worries, there are soundbars made to complement small spaces, “small” computer monitor setups, and small TVs.
Big TVs make it worse
The audio doesn’t match the visuals
Some soundbars don’t measure up to the scope of 75-inch and larger TVs, which is why Sony made the Trio that I reviewed recently. Those external speakers sitting out at the edges of your TV expand your sound field and make it as immersive as your visual experience. Just look at that picture below. Now imagine trying to accomplish creating sound that wraps around you with speakers trapped inside the confines of the rectangle of what used to be called your TVs “cabinet.”
But wait. There’s more! For immersion that complements what would today be considered a “big screen,” you’ll want a “big” soundbar. By “big,” I mean one at least as wide as your TV. With a smaller soundbar, you risk hearing something that doesn’t match the scope of your visuals, and from an aesthetic standpoint, you also end up with a block under your TV that throws off the look because it isn’t complementary to the width of your unit.
So, what you want to do is measure (or look in your manual) the width of that TV, then buy a soundbar with that number in mind. For example, one of the widest soundbars on the market is the Sony BRAVIA Theater 9, at roughly 51 inches across, while a 75-inch TV will be somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 inches, depending on the bezels. This size difference is also why some audio enthusiasts prefer standalone speakers over a soundbar. With standalone speakers, you can increase immersion by spreading your primary sound wider than your TV, while adding a standalone center channel speaker for clearer dialogue than your TV alone can deliver.
