Looks Great — Sounds Terrible!
Have you ever noticed that your flatscreen TV doesn’t sound anywhere near as good as your old CRT used to?
With flatscreens now the norm, consumers have been bombarded with great picture quality and how to get an even better one. Unbeknownst to most consumers, TV manufacturers are giving you less for more. The sound quality in all flat screen TVs is drastically inferior to the picture quality. There are three main reasons for this: space; price; and the development of cheap home theatre all-in-one packs with built-in amplifiers.
Space is the simplest and most obvious reason why that flatscreen TV on your wall sounds so atrocious. In order to create a more compact product (in some cases, 6mm thin TVs), manufacturers have had to sacrifice some components. There just isn’t enough space within most flatscreen TVs to include any quality or reasonably sized speaker. And in some cases, some lower-end flatscreens don’t contain any speakers whatsoever.
Price is another fairly simple reason for the decline in sound quality in flatscreens. Go back 36 months and buy a Pioneer flatscreen – this Pioneer flatscreen cost you $9000. It had three 60-watt speakers with virtual surround sound. I can now buy a 50-inch for $1199. You do the maths. TV manufacturers still need to make a profit, and therefore they have cut speakers, which are a traditionally high-cost product.
The advent of low-quality all-in-one home theatre packs also means that many people now have their TVs plugged into an amplifier which is plugged into a set of speakers. This creates a problem in itself. As the amplifier, most of the time, will get the audio from the analogue TV out, creating a problem called “local volume distortion” or LVD. You might have noticed, when watching ads, it sounds like they’re in the room with you – whereas watching the TV show, the noise level is moderate. This is because cheaper amplifiers don’t contain Audyssey. Audyssey is a system used within higher end products to calibrate audio and eliminate distortion and volume spikes. This means that the volume of ads is consistent with the volume of the TV show; and it also means that the dialogue of the TV show is at a consistent volume with the musical score.
So what are the solutions? Amplifiers with separate digital optical audio control (rather than analogue) will help; HDMI 1.3/1.4 that brings home theatre THX audio as well as HD picture on the one cable; good quality home theatre or stereo speakers. It’s important to remember that even with HD TV channels, it’s very rare to find TV programs with 5.1 and near-impossible to have 7.1 surround sound. So even if you have a great set of speakers, you’re probably only ever going to get stereo sound when you’re watching regular TV.
As always, if you need the answer to your audiovisual problems, come in to our showroom at 461 Flinders St and ask for Bruce or Micheal.