saturns

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andrewelmore
@andrewelmore

This is interesting. I'm glad they got input from the actual people doing the mixing! I haven't personally experienced this problem really, and I guess now I know why. I don't watch a ton of new stuff, and when I do it's off a disc, and with a modern multi-channel speaker setup.

I figured this phenomenon was mostly because people have largely been tricked into assuming they don't need speakers anymore, and that certainly seems to be a significant factor. But the specs from streaming service platforms seem to be a bigger core issue. They're wildly inconsistent both in standardization and in codec playback.

We can't fix the problems with the streaming services, at least not until they die out, which is a lot closer than people seem to be willing to accept. But you can seriously mitigate that problem with some speakers. Not a soundbar. That's snake oil shit to part boomers from their pensions. People spend all this money on gorgeous LG OLEDs and then when they can't hear jack shit in anything they're watching, they just throw their hands up and go "well darn, that's just how it is". I realize no one wants to hear this because they don't want to spend more money and put more Stuff in their homes but it's not an optional thing. If you want to watch or play any modern media, you need modern hardware. You could get away with it in the CRT days because those were big enough that they could fit some decently sized speaker cones in the sets themselves. But as soon as the HD flatpanel era started, that went out the window and never came back. The speakers in your TV or soundbar aren't "fine", you're just used to it, convenient strawman I've just constructed. The human ear is a lot better at growing accustomed to Weird Shit than the eyes are.

The reality is that if you want to hear shit, you need speakers. They're cheaper than ever, but you can get even better ones at a thrift store for a few dollars. You don't need to go full-on Atmos or whatever, though that shit does rule. Just . . . Please, I implore you, love yourself more than this. Go get a cheap receiver and some speakers and stop putting up with a shitty experience.


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in reply to @andrewelmore's post:

thank you 😬 i can't believe how many ppl try to say im overreacting when i tell them to get real speakers instead of a soundbar lmao.... "good enough", say so many people when referring to some like...google pod, smart speaker, tv speaker, want to have sources of audio in every room of their house, but it's all awful

preaching to the choir in this comment section but, you know, ahhhhh!!

yeah! audio in every room feels kind of like the millennial version of a TV in every room, I see people do it compulsorily and just shoving something into a corner of a room where there’s space, the alexa pod thing in a shelf parallels the too high TV over a fireplace

A month ago I had two friends over at my place so we could hang out and listen to some music. Their first reaction on hearing Trans Canada Highway, an album they owned and listened to (not streamed) regularly, was “oh this sounds better with your subwoofer, you can hear more details, etc.”

I don’t own a subwoofer… I have a pretty modest (IMO) pair of speakers well positioned, not big towers, no surround sound or anything. It made convincing them to buy a decent pair of speakers VERY easy though, they went through all their favorite albums after they arrived and I got bombarded with “this rules” for two days. No soundbars!!!

sure! i generally recommend buying used from thrift stores, garage sales, local listings, etc.

try and get something with a brand name you recognize, that appears to be in good shape. take the cloth grille off the front and inspect the actual speakers, make sure the cones arent torn or damaged. if you can't take the grille off, it's probably not a good speaker. as a general rule, if it feels heavy and well made and expensive, it probably is! i'd start with a simple pair of bookshelf speakers and a cheap amp, and see how you feel, and if you want to upgrade from there, go wild!

This is very timely for me; I just got my parents a decent stereo audio setup for their room and, as far as I can tell, it's been life-changing for both music and TV/film. I wish people would invest as much in their audio setup as they do in their visuals.

right??????????

there was a time when the average home at least had a cheap little hi-fi stereo set up, it was the only way people could listen to their music. so they developed a relationship with that music. that's not gone entirely, but i do hope we can get back to a place where people realize how impactful this can be to their experience with media.

I’ve an ancient 1970s receiver and some 1970s speakers to go with it, plus a second set of newer ones. They balance each other out pretty good. It’s a fantastic setup and cost almost nothing. Sometimes I flip to built in audio and I’m reminded how damn shit the speakers in my TV are.

Also: smart speakers? I had more sonos gear for a while but I eventually realised they’re about 80% smart, 20% speaker in their value proposition. Why have a £300 pair (please tell me you have a stereo pair…) when you can have a couple of bigger speakers for £100, a basic receiver for another £100 and some change for a chromecast audio or a bluetooth receiver or a CD player or whatever? And I get a shockingly good amount of use out of my DAB radio separate.

Heck, though I’ve not tried it, I bet a pair of active monitors would do a decent job.

In summary: put you money in the audio gear even if it means a smaller TV. Doesn’t have to be top of the line by any means. And buy stuff that works on good old fashioned wires. It’ll still work 50 years from now, long after your last 802.11g access point has broken down.

I've just got a pair of $30 computer speakers hooked up to my TV with an adapter and even they sound better than the TV speakers on my friend's brand-new smart-tv lmao

i love my spinkers. i had a mixed set of bigass old speakers with like 12" woofers and stuff from the 90s for a long time, then dropped a couple grand on some modern ones recently and damn. damn it's good. having truly good speakers is awesome. there's no substitute

i had those and a pair of similarly sized honest-to-god white van speakers, a BSR 15" unvented sub the size of a coffee table, and some random ass boston audio center. dropped like 5 grand on the biggest latest klipsch RP speakers and an absolutely overkill SVS sub and honestly, it's noticeable but (other than the SVS (i now get more bass extension out of my speakers than my studio headphones)) not really life-changing

the lady who got my old speaker kit for free got a killer deal imo those things still kick ass especially for the $100 total i paid for them

Tremendous mood. I have always had a decent 2.0 setup that I threw a sub on a couple years back, and this year I decided to go in. I've never had a surround system before, but I picked up a nice Yamaha receiver (you don't need my Aventage, anything that'll do 5.1 is fine) and just filled out my speaker pile with cheap Sonys. You don't need expensive speakers! Most of mine are slagged as 2.8 out of 5 star "wont take 100 watts" stuff. They sound FINE. My mains are like 8" three ways and my sub is a $20 thrift store 80 watt special. The difference is ENORMOUS.

I would say that it's probably not necessary to go Atmos. 2 atmos above the TV is interesting, but I hear it only really comes into its own when you have 4, and few receivers that aren't "call for quote" will do 4 of them. Neat to have but it's not a deal breaker.

Really the biggest thing was just getting that center channel. My god, I can hear dialogue now.

yeah, having a dedicated center channel for dialogue really clears everything up. sometimes a subwoofer is good just to have somewhere to route all those power-hungry low frequencies to clear up your main speakers too! they don't have to shake the neighborhood to be helpful.

as far as atmos goes, i'm in a rental house so i can't install anything in the ceiling, but i did recently get a pair of those klipsch wedge speakers to go up in the corner between the wall and the ceiling, above my main LRs, and for a handful of movies and games that's actually been extremely cool! but most of the time they may as well not be there lol. but damn, that helicopter chase in mission impossible fallout sounds cool as hell.

feels more likely i’ll get an answer through a comment than a share… so, from the article:

If it’s a noisy environment, get over-the-ear headphones. They do really isolate sound much better and do not use noise canceling headphones because those really screw up the audio quality.

as someone not totally familiar with how they work, i’m curious how exactly ANC headphones “screw up the audio quality”. is this consistent even with more expensive ANC headphones? surely you still hear things better when using them in a noisy environment…?

if they're well sealed you won't hear much of what's around you anyway. active noise cancelling can create issues because of the way it has to record sound coming in, invert the phase on that recording, and then add that to what you're hearing through the headphones themselves in order to cancel out the external sound, which can result in weird digital artifacting, I guess. I dunno, I've only ever used Sonys with ANCs and they've been fantastic. I think it's more Bose that's the problem lol.

Oof, this comments section. I dropped like $500 on a soundbar last year after encouragement from my boss who I thought was a pretty solid expert in audio :(

Guess 2023 is the year I figure out a real living room speaker setup

Very late reply, but I just wanted to say that this post and Lena's response are among the things that pushed me to finally take the dive into investing in a humble audio setup now that I have an LG OLED that I actually enjoy watching and playing stuff on. It's not that I never cared, but even when I'm making decent money in localization these days, it's hard to turn Poverty Brain off for a lot of purchases, even when I run the math a million times over. 😅

Anyway, I'm a complete neophyte to everything and my options for decent thrifting around here for sound stuff specifically are pretty limited despite it being urban Japan (at least, if I don't wanna commute an hour by bus), so I ended up ordering everything new after doing my best to parse reviews and figure out what's actually available here in Japan. Ordered a Denon 5.2 receiver that has all the HDMI 2.1 bells and whistles so I can keep indulging in VRR and stuff, although I only plan to use it for stereo for the time being since I'm obviously mostly playing older stuff these days (and also it being a Japanese apartment, I don't really have the space for more, or at least in a way that can be done well). And then the speakers themselves are going to be a pair of Wharfedale Diamond 12.0s. A little nervous about getting everything all wired up since I'm not really handy in that way, but definitely excited to feel the difference myself. (I've had great headphones for computer stuff for years, so I'm not completely ignorant, but yeah.) 😌

All of which is to say, thanks for writing all of this! It genuinely made a difference! (Or at least, I hope my choice of hardware says as much, ahaha.)

Yeah, I might well ultimately still raid the Hard Off I have in mind for any future expansions. If the bus ride wasn't that long and I didn't have a giant hill to climb back to my place, I may have very well done that from the start, but I figured, I have the money and otherwise wouldn't know what I'm doing shopping used other than trusting the store tested whatever I would've bought, so I figured, even if it's more expensive getting it all new, having it all fresh will at least give me a good idea of what standards to expect and then I can build up from there. I'm definitely excited to learn more!

And I learned about the surround stuff done over just regular RCA cables or however it's done in a RetroRGB video recently! I think I must've surely seen surround options in games in the past, but just never put two and two until now, ahaha. If I wanted to eventually take advantage of that while still using a Retrotink 5X, would I have to break out the audio and feed it into my receiver separately from the upscaled HDMI video? Or do you think that sort of stuff would still stay intact running over the HDMI through the Retrotink? Maybe an obvious question, but I just have no idea whether that stuff was retained in the HDMI standards, etc.