AV Rant #379: Just Get a Bigger Subwoofer
April 24th, 2014
Lots of listener questions this week, most of them with the same answer. If you have an acoustically transparent projection screen and only one of your speakers are behind it, what can you do to make sure that your speakers all sound the same? Will High Dynamic Range come to OLED? How do you know when your sub is “boomy” and how can the subwoofer crawl help you? If someone wants to EQ their speakers/sub manually, what are their options. What exactly do the frequency response specs mean? All this, and a whole lot on subwoofers in this week’s AV Rant. Thanks for listening. Now, don't forget to:
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AV Rant Listener Gary —
was wondering whether any of the announced Dolby Vision and HDR (High Dynamic Range) TVs will look better than today’s best looking OLED and plasma displays.
Truth is, until we see them in person, we won’t know for sure. But HDR certainly seems to have made a big splash in the industry – more so than UltraHD (4K) resolution, in fact!
Tom thinks consumers will just end up lumping it all together in their minds. Rob tends to agree – it’s just like how a lot of people think that the “Soap Opera Effect” that is brought on by 120Hz processing is just part of HD.
What do you think? Will HDR make enough of a difference that the average consumer will recognize that it’s a separate thing from 4K resolution? The folks at the recent NAB (National Association of Broadcasters) Conference seemed to think so:
http://variety.com/2014/digital/news/at-nab-show-hollywood-says-meh-to-4k-tv-but-more-to-high-dynamic-range-1201154367/
We’ve mentioned this site before, but it definitely bears repeating!
http://www.audiocheck.net/audiofrequencysignalgenerator_sweep.php
is a site where you can create your own test tones and frequency sweeps for free.
For anyone wanting to do the “subwoofer crawl”, we highly recommend using a bass sweep that you play on repeat. It’s so much better than the horrible (but oh so common) advice of just playing “music or a movie with a lot of low bass”. It’s really tough to tell if you’re finding the best location in your room for your subwoofer just listening to music or a movie. But with a bass sweep, you’ll easily be able to hear whether the entire sweep sounds nice and even, or if it dips and peaks like a rollercoaster!