Suggestions for better voice in streaming tv

[Confused Vorlon]

Hi,

I'm not an expert on cinema/hifi, so would really appreciate some guidance.
I'm finding it increasingly hard to make out dialogue when watching shows (mostly Netflix, Prime, etc). It could just be the source material (really struggling with The Witcher at the moment) - or it could be that my audio system is sub-par

Current setup is 5 * Boston Soundware XS, Satellite SE with a Boston Subwoofer
Receiver: Yamaha RX-V675

Speakers are mounted high on the walls.
Constraints are that the centre speaker is mounted in front of my pull-down projector screen - so has to be short, and I don't want very bulky speakers elsewhere.
I could have somewhat larger speakers, or ceiling mounted ones.

The TV area is about 3m * 3m within a larger open-plan kitchen living room
I use a Mac Mini for the source (output over hdmi)

My goal is to improve clarity so that I can make out voices better.
Do you have any suggestions on where I should be focussing without spending massive sums?

New Centre speaker (something like the Polk Audio S23CE ?)
New Receiver (something like the Denon AVRX2600H ?)
Something else??

What is likely to give me the most improvement?
Any suggestions gratefully received

 

[Phoenix211]

Hearing aids? Your probably loosing your midrange hearing which is basically speech on the TV...

 

[lucid]

Unless you're particularly looking for an excuse to change the amp, there's really nothing that the Denon can do in 5.1 configuration that the Yamaha can't do as well or better. For this reason, changing the amp would be the last thing on my list of suggestions.

There are three things to tackle. The first is the room acoustics and first reflection points. Don't panic. I'm not going to suggest full room treatment, but you should consider something to help with the first reflection points. If you haven't come across this concept before, it's to do with how much sound gets to us that has bounced off a wall a floor or a ceiling or any other large flat surface first compared to the sound we get directly from the speaker. These reflections create a small but perceptible delay that has the effect of making what we want to hear seem more distant and less clear. If you want a good example of first reflection points taken to extremes, think of the Tannoy announcements in old Victorian railway stations. They sound echoey and hard to make out.

In your room, the main three speakers are all up at- or close to- ceiling level, and so some of the sound bounces almost immediately off a large reflective surface. Either a diffuser (best) or an absorber will help to rebalance the sound back in favour of the direct sound from the speaker.

The other place to use some diffusion is on the wall behind you. This is also a first reflection point. The effect of both bits of treatment will be to clean up the sound and make it seem like the speakers are sitting closer to you.


Next, the centre speaker. The Bostons are good for what they are, but there's a limit to what the small cube speakers can do from a £300 5.1 package including powered sub.

There are a few different approaches, but we have to rule out a large conventional centre speaker because it just won't fit. That leaves us with some combination of better quality drivers and larger-but-slim cabinet and smarter technology.

Whether you're looking at new or used, for better quality small drivers I would consider KEF and Monitor Audio first. In the KEF range you have some of the later versions of Eggs, but also the HTS speakers. They have a wide dispersal too which helps with getting the best-seat-in-the-house effect more of the seating positions than just the prime point. Monitor Audio has the Radius series including the Radius 180 and 225 centre speakers.

KEF also classes as smarter technology with their wide dispersal sound thanks for the Uni-Q technology. Anthong Gallo speakers use a different approach buy achieve something similar with their Sphere and A'Diva SE speakers.


Finally, there are some tweaks you can make to your existing Yamaha amp that will provide the icing-on-the-cake finishing touch. For multi-channel audio (DD/DTS/Dolby True HD/DTS-MA) you have the Dialogue Level control. This goes beyond simply setting a higher volume level for the centre channel. For stereo sources such as TV (Stereo/Dolby Pro-Logic) where the centre channel signal is matrixed or created from stereo, the Yamaha has very good effects processing found in the Sound Programs menu. Try Drama.

The sound processing is often overlooked because we listen critically to discrete multichannel audio from discs and streaming and the Hi-Def TV channels that generally don't need it. Also, because it's often applied inappropriately when we first get an amp, so playing daytime TV with say Cathedral effect just sounds like a completely jumbled mess so we never venture there again... lol. Not many people know that Yamaha put a lot of work in to these though, particularly when they first started doing DSP effects. The company is big in musical instruments and recording gear, so they have a lot of expertise in live venue recording.

Summing it all up, get the room treatment bits done and then any changes you make to the gear will really stand out. In fact, you might find that your current stuff works just great once the room is out of the way. If you wanted to put this in to some kind of percentage to how effective each element of the above will be, I'd go with 60/30/10 in the order I have listed them

 

[hornetstinger]

Higher quality center speaker I prefer large 4 driver designs, not the usual two or three driver type. Also sealed box.

Also could use dialogue enhance, some av might have this.

Or try boosting center channel a couple of dB

Could also be the mix sometimes they seem.ro have it messed up, so I use the dialogue enhancer, where other movies I don't need it and it's fine.

 

[Confused Vorlon]

Hearing aids? Your probably loosing your midrange hearing which is basically speech on the TV...

I'm sure that day will come, but I'm not going there yet!

 

[Confused Vorlon]

Hi @lucid
firstly - thanks for taking so much time to respond. I really appreciate it.

I hope you won't mind me following up section by section as I figure my way through them.

Firstly - a little more detail. The left and right speakers are about 11" from the ceiling. The Centre speaker is only 2" from the celling.
The back wall is another 2m back from the 'movie area' - and one side is open to the dining area.

I understand the physics re reflection and diffusion/absorption - but I'm not clear how you achieve this. I searched online for speaker diffusers, but all I get is aromatic oil diffusers! Is there a set of products/devices to buy, or do you re-purpose other materials?

The room is also our main living room, so I can't do anything too dramatic - but slight changes around the area of the speakers that were not too visually dramatic would be fine.

 

[Confused Vorlon]

@lucid - looking at speakers.

The Radius 225 looks like a good option. It's slightly taller than my projector box - but not by much, so should fit in fine at ceiling level.
The KEF E310C is just a little deeper, so I'd probably go for the Radius

Do you know about the Polk Signature S35E? - just on size, that would be marginally better than the Radius at about the same price, though Polk reviews generally seem less good than Monitor Audio.

Finally - I'll have a play with the Yamaha settings and see if I can make a difference there.

thanks for your input.

 

[lucid]

I understand the physics re reflection and diffusion/absorption - but I'm not clear how you achieve this. <SNIP> Is there a set of products/devices to buy

There are ready-made products for the purpose. Look up "sound diffusion panels" and "sound absorption panels".

The room is also our main living room, so I can't do anything too dramatic - but slight changes around the area of the speakers that were not too visually dramatic would be fine.

Right, so you've told me it's your living room, and that there's a significant other to consider. Acoustic treatment - even single panels - aren't small. Some can be huge; so you're going to have to play it smart if you want to get even the least obtrusive products in to the room.

The smallest and least obtrusive are the sculpted foam panels (not great really) and the fabric-framed panels which are more effective. However, if that's your opening gambit then your significant other is likely to shoot you down in flames. That will leave you with no fallback position. You'll need to be a little bit crafty by showing the big wooden slotted diffusers (Fractal QRD- and Helmholtz- diffusers) and the skyline diffusers. Suggest those first, then offer the concession of some GIK panels as a compromise.

 

[lucid]

@lucid - looking at speakers.

The Radius 225 looks like a good option. It's slightly taller than my projector box - but not by much, so should fit in fine at ceiling level.
The KEF E310C is just a little deeper, so I'd probably go for the Radius

Do you know about the Polk Signature S35E? - just on size, that would be marginally better than the Radius at about the same price, though Polk reviews generally seem less good than Monitor Audio.

The advantage with the MA 225 is that it's roughly as deep as it is high. That's important since you'll need it tilting down to point at the main seating area. If you don't mind second-hand there are some KEF column speakers for L-C-R duties that are even more streamlined. Much cheaper too.


Polk Signature S35E..... I apologise in advance, but I'm going to suggest against the Polk. There are a number of reasons for this.

The Americans do make some very good speakers, but - and I'm aware I'm using broad brush strokes here - their forte has been larger speaker products in general. I think that's partly because the room sizes have leant themselves to accommodating big floorstanders with 8"-12" bass drivers, so for the longest time that's what they focussed on. Bookshelf and smaller standmount speakers were a bit of an afterthought because they were seen simply as a stepping stone to something bigger. There have been exceptions, of course. Acoustic Research did some sterling work up to the mid-80s, but those were still large by bookshelf standards (AR18 with 8" bass driver and nearly 1.5ft tall).

Contrast that with Mission 70mk2 from the early 80s which shows the direction that British designers were taking. Our designers started to use laser interferometry to really understand in a visual way how driver cones and speaker cabinets vibrated throughout the frequency range. With that information, speaker designs took a leap forward based on proper R&D rather than best guess. CAD-CAM helped pave the way for greater efficiencies in design and build. Britain has always been excellent at small speakers. America still hasn't caught up.

The Polk centre is good by their standards, but the design, which has already been revised from the original introduced in 2017(?) simply does what our transatlantic cousins do when they're a bit short on a real technical advantage. Instead of using better drivers, they just throw 'more' at it. More drivers - seven(!) in total for a £250-£300 centre speaker. Logic dictates that dividing the driver budget seven ways instead of three ways means that each driver must be cheaper, and in a competitive market where costs are paired-down to the minimum then that means cheaper drivers are lower quality. The maths doesn't add up any other way. Multiple driver arrays work in bigger centre speakers, but that's because the total budget is higher so the parts cost for drivers offers more scope to buy (or make) quality drive units.

The marketing blurb talks about the Terylene tweeter and the mica-reinforced polypropylene midrange drivers like they're something new. British speakers were using polypropylene (PP) bass drivers back in the 80s, and the idea of mica reinforcement goes back to the 70s. We don't use PP so much now except where cost or moisture resistance is a factor. It's a heavy material which slows bass responsiveness. Terylene was invented by a British chemist from Accrington (Lancs) just after WWII. The driver is a soft-dome tweeter. As for the rest of the jargon...

Dynamic Balance Technology - they used laser interferometry to help analyse cabinet resonances. Congratulations, we've been doing that since the late 70s

Ceramic motors - a fancy name for common-or-garden hard ferrite magnets as used in everything from low-cost speakers upwards for decades. They're cheap and dependable

Four layer voice coil - great(!) - lower efficiency than a 2-layer VC because of the additional mass, no advantage in power handling, and more coils means more inductance and with that a greater loss the upper frequencies for this driver size. A 4-layer coil is more robust so will survive a production process with sausage-fingered operatives, so it's not all bad news


If you have set your heart on the Polk then at least go have a listen to it. I haven't heard it myself, but reading between the lines it seems that the tonal balance is quite forward, almost edgy, and certainly sharper than the Monitor Audio which itself is leaning towards brightness.

 

[Confused Vorlon]

Thanks for all the great advice - I feel like there is a deep rabbit hole here and I'm just starting to peer into it

Great to read the perspective from historical approaches.
There seems to be something of a comparison with cars here - Not much in the way of Ford 150 over here, not much in the way of Golf mk5 over there!

I'll get the MA 225

Now I'm off to read about diffusers and how to use them.

Thank you and Merry Christmas