Just wondered if anyone could recommend a soundbar that will improve on our Samsung TV dialogue quality , some channels are worse than others and particularly things recorded on the sky box - we sometimes have to keep playing back to try to work out what has been said !

A sound bar may not make things any clearer. The problem lies more in the sound mix than the speakers you use.

If the audio track is plain stereo then the dialogue is mixed directly in with the rest of the audio and is difficult to lift out of the mix to make it any cleaner. A fully discrete surround mix is better as the dialogue is usually on the centre channel, often on it's own. So on a surround system you can boost the centre channel relative to the others to make the dialogue stand out.

In some instances a surround system with Dolby Pro-Logic can do a fairly decent job of creating a surround effect from a stereo mix and though not perfect you can get some benefit from boosting the centre channel. Even more so if the stereo mix is actually encoded with surround information at the broadcast end.

Not many sound bars do multiple speakers though with a separate centre. Though simply having a better sound quality won't do any harm, it certainly won't make things worse!

Yamaha do some pretty decent kit. They also have a feature they call Clear Voice which claims to make dialogue easier to listen to. Might be worth investigating. You don't mention any budget though.

For just under a 100 quid you could look at the Yamaha YAS101

http://www.richersounds.com/product/...01/yama-yas101

For a bit more there is the

http://www.richersounds.com/product/...yama-yas93-blk

And at the upper end

http://www.richersounds.com/product/...0/yama-ysp1400

If you can, try to listen to a few soundbars to see if any meet your requirements. Sound quality is very subjective, what I consider great you might consider crap and vice versa so always best to utilise your inbuilt test equipment (the Mk 1 Human Ear and Brain ) and evaluate a few options before opening your wallet.

Richersounds may be able to do a demo if there is a store near you and you ask them nicely.

Thank you for your very helpful answer , I am looking at the soundbar option as space would be an issue with surround .Budget around £ 200 max .
We do have a richer sounds nearby so I think a trip there might be on the cards .
Thanks again

I got a Yamaha-YHTS401 (after toying with the idea of a full system but deciding it wouldn't fit in the room). The clear voice does make a difference to a lot of programmes.

well its all "loudness wars" and bad sound mixing, increasingly. if clear dialogue is what you want, then best thing is to increase volume of the centre front channel (on 5.1 sound), relative to the other 5 audio channels ,or as 2nd best use the mono derived audio (on 2.0 with prologic) ..... this is one instance where 5.1 will work much better than 2.0 .......

there are also some audio compressor devices,which partly counteract the very poor dialogue level control on modern movies ......
Last edited by spiney2 : 07-11-2014 at 13:55

..... whichever type sound feed you are using, also make sure the built in audio compressor is working, for best dialogue. usually its the setting for "noisy environment" .......

a soundbar, as such, wont help much. as what you want to do is "separate out" the centre front channel, which has the dialogue. getting hd reception if at all possible for 5.1 sound, then a proper 5.1 sound decoder so you can completely isolate the centre front channel, would be the most effective approach.

the stereo mix is ALWAYS encoded with dolby surround. even when there is no actual out of phase componnent.

A stereo mix is just a load of sound sources panned between left and right channels. There is NO surround component in that at all. Something like a Dolby Pro-Logic decoder may be able to generate a pseudo surround effect from that mix but that in no way shape or form means the stereo mix had any intentional surround information.

The original sound track would have to be explicitly created as a surround mix with the 5.1 channels (or however many were used) down mixed to two for transmission then decoded back again on reception.

But it is not true to say that ALL stereo sound tracks are Dolby encoded.

a stereo mix is just dolby surround but with no out of phase component. as i said above. all 2.0 has dolby surround.

if there is no out of phase component - ie nothing "outside" the L and R stereo speakers - then all any decoder can do is create an articifially wider surround by increasing the m-s signal relative to m+s. which will generate some out of phase. the old "wide stereo" trick. the stereo image gets widened, and on surround sound it starts going ouside the front speakers and wrapping around towards the rear .......

dont forget .... some films shown in hd with 5.1 soundtrack have only ever had an optical analogue soundtrack. in which case the 5.1 is generated from 2.0 which is full dolby surround.

... on a 2.0 with no surround, u can think of it as the antiphase component "cancelling out" between the m&s and m-s ...... exactly same principle as motorola stereo used on fm radio ......

..... on 2.0 at very best you can only throw away the antiphase component. to improve dialogue. thats why 5.1 is better because it does have an actual centre channel ..... with more dialogue and less garbage ..... of course if the 5.1 has been derived from 2.0 to start with then there is no difference !

It is of course worth making sure that you have experimented with all the Sound settings on your TV. There is for instance often a speech mode, which may improve the sound quality on some dramas.

Personally I tend to give up worrying too much about the quality of the sound and use subtitles wherever there are problems. Of course this doesn't work on some channels where they frequently get away with not offering subtitles - 5 USA for instance.

I like the idea of improving the sound though and would like to try a soundbox (which the TV sits on) rather than a soundbar with a separate speaker.

I didn't bother with a soundbar, and another remote control etc. I unscrewed the back panel of my set and unclipped the speaker wires off their speakers and brought the wires out through two handy holes in the back panel.I connected a secondhand pair of little hifi speakers to them. Good god! The sound quality is a revelation! Much much better and much clearer voices. And of course, using the normal tv remotes volume control.

Why don't they go back to putting external speaker connections on the TVs, oh forgot people might not buy soundbars.

For day-to-day viewing I use an old 2.1 system from an old PC.

Sadly, the producers of television programmes live in their own little world, where they create a mix for the optimum sound through the state-of-the-art equipment in their multi-channel studio environment. At least that's the only explanation I can think of for the bombastic sound mixes in most TV documentaries. They seem so enamoured with their special effects and musical soundtracks that they might as well provide subtitles.

http://www.johnlewis.com/panasonic-s...oofer/p1437408

I have this and there is a button on the remote called 'clear voice' that simply accentuates everything down the middle of the stereo spectrum, 99% of the time this is the vocal/voice. It works very well.

I have this soundbar. There's an option too improve dialog.

http://m.richersounds.com/#!/product/pion-sbxn500

I just have an optical (why optical?? Surely audio...) cable from the telly into an £80 amplifier which goes to just the two speakers.

Therefore I can adjust both the TV's controls and the ampliier's settings to get the sound I want.

However much I try though, Ed Miliband still sounds like a fish in a bucket.