Over the six years I've been writing and editing home theater reviews, the recurring complaint I've seen time and time again about even some flagship TVs is how horrible their sound is. Thanks to their increasingly thin panels, there is less and less space for drivers, so sound is sacrificed for style. As a result, the stock warning for buyers is: “You'd better budget for a sound bar, too.”
But my faith in this particular sacred cow has begun to waver. After recently upgrading my mid-range TV with a mid-range sound bar, I've experienced first-hand how the sonic gap between the two is rapidly narrowing. So I started to wonder: is the soundbar still as essential as before?
This crisis of faith was first sparked when I upgraded my TV to last year's stellar TCL QM8K. Aside from its very vivid mini-LED screen, perhaps its most striking feature is its sound. I admit, when I heard that my new TV had sound designed by Bang & Olufsen, I was skeptical. Surely not even an audiophile-level audio giant could achieve a high level of sound with a TV, given its notoriously tinny sound.
Let me tell you: my cynicism was misplaced. Thanks to its thick rare earth neodymium-iron-boron drivers, the TCL QM8K has a truly convincing sound that rivals the best TVs, offering clarity and quite credible bass. In addition to this, B&O's signature tuning allows you to adjust the TV's audio along two axes: bright/warm and relaxed/energetic to reflect your personal preferences.
As a result, instead of the timid, meowing sound that many TVs emit, the TCL is able to reproduce dialogue clearly while giving the soundtrack decent range and weight. honestly it's a little also effective at times: every time I make a counterattack Dark Glade: Expedition 33The impact feels appropriately seismic but also makes my girlfriend shake like a pet on the 4th of July. For native TV audio, it doesn't really stop.
And it's not the only TV trying to buck the trend here. For example, the Panasonic Z95B offers a 160W, 5.1.2-channel, 160W sound system featuring a set of front-facing external speakers that deliver powerful bass and a powerful soundstage. Meanwhile, the Sony Bravia II features built-in actuators that turn the screen into a speaker, allowing you to precisely position dialogue and effects based on their position on the screen and produce spacious yet full sound.
Raising the bar?
Despite this, I was excited to get my first soundbar. While I'm not as obsessed as some with unlocking cinema-quality sound in my home, getting even more seriousness for movies is a really tempting offer. And as a gamer, I love spatial sound – the idea of being enveloped in a hemisphere of true Dolby Atmos audio sounds like the perfect way to make my visits to Lumiere even more fascinating.
So when a colleague asked me if I wanted to rehome his recently discontinued Samsung HW-Q800D, I jumped at the opportunity. However, when I first set it up, I was honestly a little surprised at how little it was able to improve on the TCL's already impressive sound.
With the soundbar running in isolation, you were able to achieve a slightly more spacious sound; Thanks to its side drivers, the width of its soundstage is much more substantial than what the QM8K is capable of. But it also sounded thinner: Lacking the TV's larger diameter drivers, its output didn't seem to have as much substance as the sound I was used to. The dialogue still maintained a decent level of clarity, but the soundtracks felt more neutralized, taking me out of the moment while watching. Kidnap either The night manager.
However, it's important to note that there are some things that a soundbar like the HW-Q800D can do better. While it sounds tamer on its own, once it's combined with its packaged submarine… oh boy, can it pull off some seriousness, with spaceships inside? Avatar: Path of Water It sounded like they were literally landing in my living room. And while the HW-Q800D's eager drivers can't achieve the ceiling-bounce spatial effects of more premium soundbars, it does a good job of placing sounds in the right area of the screen.
However, after many years of taking for granted how necessary sound bars are, I was a little surprised at how marginal some of the improvements were. Don't get me wrong: adding a soundbar with pretty decent specs can definitely unlock superior sound, especially as your budget increases. But my experience here shows that the gap is narrowing here, and rather than having one soundbar as the default, it becomes more important to consider where your sound needs the most improvement and whether a given soundbar will deliver it.
Because honestly, it may be time to let go of the assumption that “TV sound is always terrible.”
