[bigshot]

I just finished up researching and shopping for a new bedroom video/audio setup and I was surprised at how many things were different since I last shopped for AV stuff. I'll skip the video stuff... 4K, HDR, Dolby Vision, etc. It was the audio components that really surprised me. The TV I chose has multiple speaker ports firing in all directions, as does the sound bar. I don't know how anyone could predict how it will sound until they get it into their room and installed. But the presets are what totally shocked me. The sound bar does a psychoacoustic version of Dolby Atmos with a processor chip that sculpts the sound within multiple EQ genres... movie, music, sports, etc. There is absolutely no documentation about what any of the presets do, yet they all sound totally different. Aside from treble and bass, there is no way to adjust any of it. It isn't my main setup, so I'm not terribly picky, but it feels weird to take all of this on faith. I hope this doesn't become a trend in home audio too.

 

[The Jester]

Bit of a “guesstimate” with soundbars, usually placed below the TV and close to the front wall so the “Atmos” effect can be a couple of directional speakers facing up to reflect sound off the ceiling to mimic the true Atmos ceiling mount speakers,
For what they are they give a reasonable illusion for casual TV, Movies etc …

 

[71 dB]

I don't know how anyone could predict how it will sound until they get it into their room and installed.

It is easy to predict it will sound bad.

 

[bigshot]

Well, better than the speakers in the TV itself.

 

[71 dB]

Well, better than the speakers in the TV itself.

I thought you were talking about the TV speakers (firing on all directions...)

 

[bigshot]

The soundbar isn’t great either, but it’s better than the internal speakers.

 

[71 dB]

The soundbar isn’t great either, but it’s better than the internal speakers.

Yes, but I would never spend my money on soundbars. For a bedroom TV I'd get an affordable small hifi amp and small hifi speakers. Surround sound is ridiculous idea in bedrooms. Just have decent/good stereo sound! Works for music too!

 

[bigshot]

Unfortunately, no room for that. If the TV wasn’t mounted on the wall there wouldn’t be room for that either. Also, it all needs to work off a single remote. There are advantages to eARC and CEC.

 

[bigshot]

I solved the problem. On my computer I have Boom Audio, which has a whole bunch of settings, including a basic equalizer. I was able to connect to my computer using bluetooth and play music through it with the U shaped curve dialed out. It sounds great now, and the processing for spatial audio in Boom actually seems to help the sound bar's chip simulate something roughly approximating multichannel separation, even if it doesn't do the distance and directional stuff. I can stream from my media server and not mess with CDs. I'll find out how well I can get movies to work when the TV arrives Monday. I'm not as worried about that though. Movie sound is less critical than music.

I'm glad I was able to jury rig it. This sound bar fits the space perfectly and it cost a bit of money. Very happy with it now. It definitely sounds better than bookshelf speakers would.

If they're going to do heavy processing, they should tell the user what is being done, and they should add settings to make it user configurable... at the very least an equalizer.

 

[bigshot]

Played around with iTunes and now it seems I can play the Dolby Atmos versions of the songs on iTunes on my computer now. I output it over bluetooth to the sound bar and it put out the same sort of pseudo surround that the Air Pods Max produce. Boom is bypassed so I had to recreate the EQ curve in iTunes equalizer. It also seems to dynamically switch between Airplay and Bluetooth, because I set iTunes to play the hires version of the songs and the sound bar displayed that it was playing it in hires. Interesting.

The sound bar has a setting for "AI EQ". Supposedly it analyzes the sound and applies an EQ correction to it. But it doesn't correct for room problems. I'm not sure what it does, but it seems to have its own taste for a warm kind of sound that some people like (not me though). AI EQ sounds like the sound bar equivalent of "Y2K compliant". I won't be using that.

 

[gregorio]

I hope this doesn't become a trend in home audio too.

It’s been a trend in the AV market for a few years now.

I output it over bluetooth to the sound bar and it put out the same sort of pseudo surround that the Air Pods Max produce.

It is a sort of pseudo surround but not the same sort as AirPods. The AirPods are outputting a binaural signal (HRTF based), the soundbar implementations obviously aren’t, although they do employ some of the same basic principles, such as using phase offsets to create perceptual positioning cues.

I’ve heard a few of these now and have been generally unimpressed (compared to a discrete system), one of them worked quite well but only within a very small sweet spot. I’m presuming that will vary significantly according to individual room acoustics. This is of course just a personal impression.

G

 

[bigshot]

The term Dolby Atmos seems to encompass a wide range of effectiveness. The pseudo surround didn’t impress me either.

It seems like the objects are placed differently than in the original mix. I played On The Run from Dark Side of the Moon, and on Blu-ray, the footsteps circle around you. With the sound bar, there was no attempt to move the footsteps. Instead it placed a different sound object in the rear and didn’t move it.

 

[KinGensai]

I'm not experienced with speakers, but as I understand from some books I'm reading ATM, the sweet spot for a 2.1 system is a spot equidistant from the speakers with a 30° offset from center right? The sound bars I know of (those bose models) aren't that large, so the sweet spot would be rather close in right? And how does the AI pick up what that sweet spot sounds like to adjust it? That's interesting.

What model is this sound bar? Maybe there's some documentation buried online about it.

 

[bigshot]

Sound bars are different than stereo speakers. They’re designed to sound right from the range of tv viewing positions. The one I got has speakers firing in different directions.

The model I got is the Hisense U5120G. It’s 47 inches wide- longer than most. The documentation is scanty. I have no idea what the AI EQ does, I just know I don’t like it.

 

[KinGensai]

https://www-sunmedia-com-cn.transla...sl=zh-CN&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en&_x_tr_pto=sc

I dug this up as the DSP chipset used. Apparently this is a budget option, so no room correction. Says nothing about the software implementation, so I suppose that is proprietary information.