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Our old flat screen TV was a JVC "HD ready" 37". It lasted for 15 years until it eventually grew tired of being woken every morning. Probably just a simple component in the PS but retirement beckoned.
I measured the space available and made cardboard mock-ups of potential candidates. It would be a 55" screen. Leaving just enough room on the AV "stage" for the floor standing Mission 753 Freedoms. These speakers must be nearly 30 years old by now, but have always pleased. A Mission 753C Freedom centre speaker sits in the simple steel shelf unit which supports the TV. These speakers were all bought secondhand having already been long discontinued.
OLEDs are the present best picture quality technology in most online reviews. The cost is high when newly released but drop as the different models reach the end of their sales year. A TV which lasts for years can have its purchase price divided by its lifetime. Inflation usually makes a mockery of the original purchase price. So why choose an inferior TV if you fully intend to keep it?
After extensive online research, our first choice was a 55" LG OLED TV. I collected it from a big shed, city chain store standing upright in its huge box in the car trailer. The picture quality was stunning but there was a pervasive stench of burning oil. The advice seemed to be that it was the fire protection coating on the circuit boards and it would stop smelling soon. It didn't, despite the technician who called saying it wasn't smelly in his opinion. So I returned the TV expecting to get a replacement. It just would not be an LG. Once bitten...
The Sony KD55-AF8 OLED was the next choice and I took advantage of the generous, end of model year discounts. This was duly taken home and dragged upstairs. The picture quality was even better than the LG and more importantly, much more natural. The LG picture had always looked as if it were "sharpened" with image handling software. Very unnatural it looked too on the cityscape screen saver. It would never look like that to the unaided human eye.
The experimental, manifold, 4x15" upper bass speaker was dismantled and the drivers put into storage to make more room on the AV stage. So it was back to the original AE 4x15" IB with more power from both channels of the EP2500. After weeks of TV watching we liked the picture but the SQ was demanding constant volume increases just to hear the dialogue. The Sony has a weird screen loudspeaker using rear actuators.
Netflix has never been very good on dialogue clarity from first hearing. The 4k Netflix subscription didn't help the sound. Much against my long suffering wife's strongest "advice" I brought the Linn Kans forwards from their former rear "surround" duties. They had been muted for years because they were irritating being so close to our sitting position whatever their relative sound level. The Kans were simply placed on top of the Mission floor standers and very silly they looked too!
There was an instant transformation in sound quality compared with the TV speakers. Or the big three Missions on AV system. Finally the dialogue could cut through the background garbage so beloved of modern film makers. Even YouTube videos now had stunning sound quality from the Sony's internal TV tuner. I listened to my favourite Voces8, Hauser, pipe organ and other classical music channels and was delighted.
I had to make some changes to the speaker set up in my Onkyo TX-NR818 AVR menus. It took some fiddling to get it to send OSD onto the Sony TV. Then I eliminated the Mission Center and set the Kans as L&R full range despite their 120Hz lower limit. They then sounded so much better than using a 120Hz crossover. I have always used a Naim NAP180 to Bi-amp the front L&R rather than using the Onkyo. The Kans were happy to be driven by this old English amp. It too must be 30 years old by now. Where did all those years go?
Dialogue on the Netflix 4k series, which we watched last night, was much more intelligible. It did not require the volume be wound right up just to hear what was being said. I reduced the settings on the twin knobs of the big Behringer amp by a notch or two to better balance the bass.
Age brings its problems. Not least with one's hearing. Particularly after a long lifetime of enjoying loud music, loud car and motorcycle engines and other "abnormal" abuse. The most obvious problem is "masking." Which means that background sounds easily swamp any dialogue. Daily exchanges with one's partner are apt to need almost constant repetition.
It matters not whether this is in real life or while watching or listening to TV/AV. It becomes almost impossible to hear well enough to maintain a normal conversation. With TV watching you get the deaf grandma/grandpa syndrome. The volume has to be raised constantly to cut through to the dialogue. One's ears have been filtered by age to a much narrower frequency response. The speakers must provide the inverse of that response to fill in the holes.
The Linn Kans are 40 year old, shoe-box sized speakers with a rather forward frequency response. Which nicely suited our immediate dialogue problems. I suppose the next step is to go for a commercial outlet, hearing test and start wearing hearing aids. The incredibly long waiting lists for hospital hearing consultants offers little chance of help from that direction.
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