Help!!! How hard can it be to get better sound from a standard TV?
Last month, we finally decided to get rid of the enormous 50″ telly that Phyllis had got in her divorce (and which had replaced my old 14″ one), on the grounds that it was far too big for our TV room, which meant that there was hardly any space left for furniture, which can be a problem when there are seven of us living here.
Given that neither Phyllis nor I are TV people (we tend to watch one hour a week, plus perhaps a film when the big kids are away), we didn’t want to waste money on this, so we bought a 32″ LCD TV by Technika at £300, and to splash out a bit and please the kids we also bought a £50 Blu-ray player.
We got almost £90 for the old TV on eBay, and everything is fine – the room now has space for six adults instead of four, and the picture is much better than before.
However, the built-in speakers aren’t great, and good Blu-ray movies really suffer a bit from this.
In an ideal world, I’d buy an AV receiver (with prices starting at £140) plus speakers, but it’s simply ludicrous to pay almost as much for the sound as for the TV itself, and there are many other things we’d rather spend that much money on (money tends just to disappear into thin air when you’ve got five kids!).
The TV has a coax audio out thingy, so I’ve been trying to find some speakers that could be attached to this, but although some of them look like they just might work (such as the Logitech Z506), none of them state unequivocally that will take coax audio signals from a TV and do the rest.
I’ve also become a bit worried after reading this: “Due to copyright laws, it is not possible to output video/sound from the TV on certain sources, i.e. HDMi, DVD etc. If you want to have surround sound while watching a DVD, you will need to purchase a ‘home cinema’ style DVD player with its own surround sound system.” Can this really be true? Our Blu-ray player also seems to have a coax output, but would systems such as the Logitech one accept two distinct coax inputs?
I’m really not an audio person, and I’m getting awfully confused.
All I want is to get slightly better sound (preferably surround sound, but just stereo would do me) from my TV, especially when watching films on the Blu-ray player, but also when playing games on the Xbox and watching stuff on Sky, and I don’t want to pay much more than £50.
Is this really impossible?
Also, why are Tesco selling £20 5.1 surround speakers if there is no way to connect them to a TV of the same brand?!?
ASK Tesco ??
Better still ask Derek ,, he’s good on all this geeky sound stuff !
He asked Derek – he doesn’t know anything about the systems in our price range!! 😉
I find it interesting that nobody seems to know what to recommend. One would have thought attaching better speakers to a cheap telly was such as common task that this should have been a no-brainer, but it clearly isn’t.
@Dougie, I guess I could ask Tesco, but I’m not sure whether I’d trust their staff. I’d rather find advice on the Internet.
I have various good quality speakers under the bed if you want to try attaching them ??
Have you got an amplifier, too?
Yeah ,, and also a good one but I was chatting to Derek about your problems and he didn’t seem to think the amp or the speakers would work with your TV ???
But let’s try and prove him wrong ?
Hmmm, at the very least it’d require this bit, I imagine: http://www.amazon.co.uk/LINDY-Digital-Analogue-Stereo-Converter/dp/B002AKXG5E/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1298136490&sr=8-3
I dont think that you can buy a Technika TV and expect the best level of performance. Ultimately you get what you pay for. Also you should have tested the TV on Blu ray before you bought it
The TV is working really well, and the Blu-Ray player is working well, too. I’m not really sure how a more expensive TV would have improved matters – do they have more audio out connectors?