Having trouble hearing TV Talk? The right sound bar can help.
It’s generally unwise to make generalizations about sound — especially if you’ve deliberately selected listeners with varying degrees of hearing loss. However, through these tests I learned that some aspects of voice enhancement work well, others can be made to work very well, and others seem to not work at all.
Let’s start with the simplest of all my panel tests: the Samsung HW-Q900A Active Sound Editor, which offers no change other than an on/off setting accessed through Samsung’s SmartThings app. Although panelists’ opinions on this mode differed, they all thought it made voices easier to understand but also made the sound less natural. “Dialogue is improved, and I understand it better,” commented one editor. But it seemed to amplify all the sounds in the pitch range, so it changed the mix of sounds a lot.” Another commented, “With this, I can understand dialogue without using my hearing aids, but the overall sound is less smooth and natural than without stimulation.”
Two of our editors who don’t wear hearing aids also found that the Active Loudspeaker mode helped them understand the dialogue but it wasn’t enough to overcome their annoyance with what one of them called the mode’s “unbalanced sound”; that tester complained that the mod sounded thin and harsh. For the same reason, none of the panelists liked listening to music with the Active Voice Amplifier mode of the HW-Q900A turned on.
With the Roku Streambar, all of our panelists noted that its voice intelligibility was significantly better than that of the Samsung bar when both bars were set to their normal listening mode. But they weren’t impressed with the Roku bar’s Voice Clarity mode. Only one in five panelists thought the Voice Clarity mode made dialogue sound clearer. Two said it had little effect, while two others complained that the Voice Clarity mode reduced the high frequencies and quieted the sounds a bit. Midway. None of them liked the sound of the Streambar with stereo music, with or without Voice Clarity engaged.
In the end, all the reviewers said that the Zvox AccuVoice AV157 clearly has great sound amplification, and a very flexible adjustment. “In the 3rd session [halfway up]dialogue is very clear, even with my hearing aids on, and it still sounds natural,” said one of them. Both of my non-hearing aid panelists agreed, but the other two panelists thought the AV157 was too slow even with the AccuVoice setting turned to only 3 with their hearing aids off. Neither of them liked the sound of music with the AV157, whether AccuVoice was enabled or not. no.
Our tester from Texas, who tried the slightly larger Zvox AV357, said that model gave him the boost in clarity he’d been looking for but not getting from other soundbars, especially when he put it in SuperVoice mode. “I like to watch a lot of British TV shows, but the dialogue often sounds silly to me,” she said. With this, I was able to understand the dialogue without turning up the volume. I also like that it’s compact and easy to set up.”
