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How to pick
If you find yourself turning the television up and still missing what people say, then turning it down when the music blares, you are not imagining it and it is very probably not your hearing. Modern televisions are too thin to hold a decent speaker, so the sound fires backwards or downward into the furniture, and films are mixed for cinema systems where speech comes from its own dedicated speaker your TV does not have. Two fixes, in order of cost. Free first: go into the TV's sound settings and look for a speech, dialogue or news mode, and turn off anything called surround or virtual sound, which usually makes it worse. If that is not enough, a soundbar is the single biggest improvement available and even an inexpensive one beats any television's own speakers. Look for one that mentions a dedicated centre channel or a dialogue mode. If the trouble is that your comfortable volume is louder than everyone else's, wireless headphones or a TV listening set solve it without an argument, and cost far less than hearing aids.
What I recommend
Wireless TV headphones
If your comfortable volume is louder than everyone else in the room can stand, this ends the argument entirely. A base station plugs into the TV and the headphones are yours alone. Far cheaper than hearing aids and immediate. Look for a set with its own volume dial on the headphones themselves.
- Solves
- Your volume versus everyone else's
- Look for
- Volume dial on the headphones
- Base station
- Plugs into the TV
- Versus
- Far cheaper than hearing aids
Soundbar with a dialogue mode
Even a modest soundbar beats the speakers inside any flat television, because there is simply no room in a thin panel for a decent one. The feature that matters for speech is a dedicated centre channel or a mode called dialogue, speech or clear voice. Do not be talked into a large surround package if what you actually want is to hear what people are saying.
- Key feature
- Centre channel or dialogue mode
- Beats
- Any flat TV's own speakers
- Connection
- One HDMI eARC cable
- Skip
- Big surround packages you do not need
Wireless earbuds
Handy for calls, podcasts and walking. If you wear glasses or find things in your ears uncomfortable, look at the open ear or bone conduction kind instead, which sit outside the ear canal and let you hear the room at the same time. Safer for walking near roads too.
- Standard
- In ear, best sound isolation
- Alternative
- Open ear or bone conduction
- Open ear helps
- Glasses wearers, and walking near roads
- Check
- Battery life per charge
Soundbar with a separate subwoofer
The step up is a bar with a wireless subwoofer box that sits on the floor. It is not really about explosions, it takes the low frequencies away from the main bar so voices have more room to come through clearly. Worth it in a larger or more open room.
- Adds
- A wireless bass box on the floor
- Real benefit
- Frees the bar to handle voices
- Best in
- Larger or open plan rooms
- Placement
- Sub can go almost anywhere
Related reading
Want it set up and tuned?
Soundbars usually sound worse than they should straight out of the box, because the settings are wrong. I can fit one and get the dialogue clear while I am there.