The Complaint Department: TV Audio

Jeremy Goldstone is a technology journalist and social media professional, having written both about and as the voice of the largest consumer electronics companies in the world. This is a column where he complains about why technology isn’t conforming to his specific needs right now, and why that sucks.

You just spent $1,500 on a brand new flat screen. It’s so thin you could cut a steak with it. It’s mounted almost completely flush to the wall. You turn it on. The resolution is stunning. The colors are amazing — lush, with the darkest blacks you’ve ever seen. You are blown away. And then you realize the audio sounds like you stuffed your ears with cotton while going through a highway tunnel.

Almost without fail, built-in audio on television sucks these days. It’s a pretty simple element of form over function. People like their televisions to be all screen, with as small a bezel as possible. To do that, speakers have to be moved to a different part of the television. Occasionally that means they are firing down, but more often than not, that seems to mean that they are firing backwards, away from the person watching the TV and directly into the wall. That means what reaches your ears ends up being whatever sound doesn’t end up getting eaten by the drywall’s lack of acoustics, after it’s rebounded between the wall and the set. In other words, not exactly pristine, clear audio.

Now granted, the crappy audio quality is only with the stock speakers. Throw in a sound bar or a home theater system, and the quality can be drastically improved, to a point where just saying “drastically improved” is an understatement. But the point is, you just spent over a grand on a television set touting itself as state of the art. No where on the box does it say “you’re going to have to spend a couple hundred more bucks so it doesn’t sound like you’re playing it under water.”

It doesn’t help that due to HDCP compliance issues, it’s difficult to even try to jury-rig an inexpensive solution. Have some decent computer speakers that you think you can hook up to the television? Unless you do some serious masterful cable work, the only thing you’ll be able to hear out of them is audio from the TV’s built-in tuner. And that’s assuming your TV even has an audio-out that is even remotely compatible. And if you do go for the soundbar option, it means you may have to shell out for a more expensive one that will take your cable options.

For electronics-savvy people, it probably doesn’t even matter. When I got my flat screen, the first thing I did was hook it up to my receiver so I could watch and listen with 5.1 surround. I know, now is the time where you make fun of me for not having 7.2, but the receiver works too well to think about replacing right now. But not everyone already has the surround sound. I recently helped my parents upgrade their entertainment center, to a level where they can now call it an entertainment center. They opted to not go with an audio option immediately to save some money in the short term. Except now the sound is so blech that even my mother, not a person anyone could call a technophile,  has complained about its lack of crispness. I don’t expect for TV manufacturers to put a disclaimer on their sets — “This set will sound like crap unless you attach a stereo to it” — but I wouldn’t mind if they did. Because it is almost universally the truth.