{"id":3371,"date":"2011-02-14T21:45:15","date_gmt":"2011-02-14T21:45:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.widmann.org.uk\/?p=3371"},"modified":"2011-02-14T21:45:15","modified_gmt":"2011-02-14T21:45:15","slug":"help-how-hard-can-it-be-to-get-better-sound-from-a-standard-tv","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/help-how-hard-can-it-be-to-get-better-sound-from-a-standard-tv\/","title":{"rendered":"Help!!! How hard can it be to get better sound from a standard TV?"},"content":{"rendered":"<div style=\"float: left; margin-right: 10px; margin-bottom: 10px;\">\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/viralbus\/5445674435\/\" title=\"photo sharing\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"http:\/\/farm5.static.flickr.com\/4075\/5445674435_324f3c2f14_m.jpg\" alt=\"\" style=\"border: solid 2px #000000;\" \/><\/a><br \/>\n<span style=\"font-size: 0.9em; margin-top: 0px;\"><br \/>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/viralbus\/5445674435\/\">Our TV<\/a><br \/>\nOriginally uploaded by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.flickr.com\/people\/viralbus\/\">viralbus<\/a><br \/>\n<\/span>\n<\/div>\n<p>Last month, we finally decided to get rid of the enormous 50&#8243; telly that Phyllis had got in her divorce (and which had replaced my old 14&#8243; 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.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t want to waste money on this, so we bought a 32&#8243; LCD TV by Technika at \u00a3300, and to splash out a bit and please the kids we also bought a \u00a350 Blu-ray player.<\/p>\n<p>We got almost \u00a390 for the old TV on eBay, and everything is fine &ndash; the room now has space for six adults instead of four, and the picture is much better than before.<\/p>\n<p><b>However<\/b>, the built-in speakers aren&#8217;t great, and good Blu-ray movies really suffer a bit from this.<\/p>\n<p>In an ideal world, I&#8217;d buy an <a href=\"http:\/\/www.richersounds.com\/products\/home-cinema\/home-cinema-separates\/av-receivers\">AV receiver<\/a> (with prices starting at \u00a3140) plus speakers, but it&#8217;s simply ludicrous to pay almost as much for the sound as for the TV itself, and there are many other things we&#8217;d rather spend that much money on (money tends just to disappear into thin air when you&#8217;ve got five kids!).<\/p>\n<p>The TV has a <a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/S\/PDIF\">coax audio out<\/a> thingy, so I&#8217;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 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/gp\/product\/B003WJR482\/ref=ord_cart_shr?ie=UTF8&#038;m=A3P5ROKL5A1OLE\">Logitech Z506<\/a>), none of them state unequivocally that will take coax audio signals from a TV and do the rest.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve also become a bit worried after reading <a href=\"http:\/\/www.justanswer.com\/uk-electronics\/4j32z-purchased-technika-tv-few-weeks-ago-model-number.html\">this<\/a>: &#8220;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 &#8216;home cinema&#8217; style DVD player with its own surround sound system.&#8221;  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?<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m really not an audio person, and I&#8217;m getting awfully confused.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t want to pay much more than \u00a350.<\/p>\n<p>Is this really impossible?<\/p>\n<p>Also, why are Tesco selling <a href=\"http:\/\/direct.tesco.com\/q\/R.204-1777.aspx\">\u00a320 5.1 surround speakers<\/a> if there is no way to connect them to a TV of the same brand?!?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;m really not an audio person, and I&#8217;m getting awfully confused.<\/p>\n<p>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&#8217;t want to pay much more than \u00a350.<\/p>\n<p>Is this really impossible?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[159,107,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-en","category-gadgets","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/widmanniana.org\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}