TV Soundbars Really Work?

[Chuckanut]

Thank you all for your advice.

 

[Souschef]

To add my $0.02; We have a Bose soundbar with an optical input. I wear hearing aids and have a TV adapter that plays directly into my hearing aids.
I needed to get an optical splitter to take the output from the cable box and split it to my adapter and the soundbar.
I also agree with comments about the sound on some programs. There are times we have to run the program back and add CC to understand what they are saying.

 

[Chuckanut]

I ended up with a small (about 30 inches) and relatively inexpensive sound bar from my TV’s manufacturer. It makes a huge difference.

The other night I was watching a show where two of the actors were having dinner at a restaurant. I kept getting distracted by the sound of something falling to the floor to the left of my chair. Yet, could not see what it was. The noise turned out to be background restaurant clatter coming from the sound bar! Very nice.

The sound bar is a real pleasure, and makes the spoken word a lot easier to understand. Thanks again for the advice.

 

[APP01]

There are so many shows that my DW and I would say "What did they say?" Or would rewind and still could not understand what was said. Yes hearing related, but this is made worse with how Hollywood mixes sound.

From a previous company I worked at, I had experience with audio processing. One of our customers, Zvox made boxes to clean up audio for this exact issue. It enhances the audio track from the background sounds.

Six months ago we purchased this box and love it. We can now understand almost everything. There are some trade-offs between how much clean up you need to use, versus a slight change in overall sound. We only need to use the minimal processing settings, so room for more improvement as our hearing gets worse.

This is what we have. Super simple to setup up and use.

ACCUVOICE AV855 SOUNDBAR WITH DUAL SUBWOOFERS, 20 LEVELS OF VOICE BOOST, HDMI COMPATIBLE

Low-profile 34" soundbar with powerful built-in subwoofers and 20 levels of voice enhancement for additional fine tuning. HDMI-ARC compatibility for easy one-wire TV setup: control AV855 with your TV’s remote 20 levels of dialogue boost (AccuVoice® 10-levels + SuperVoice™ 10-levels) PhaseCue®...

zvox.com