For Better or Worse, This TV Design Trend Changed Home Audio Forever

Soundbars are so common in many living rooms today that it’s easy to forget that for decades, most consumers didn’t have a separate speaker just to handle their TV’s audio.

While it’s hard to argue that using a separate, dedicated speaker for TV audio offers an improved listening experience over the integrated speakers in most TVs today, it’s reasonable to ask why buying a dedicated speaker for your TV even became necessary in the first place.

Given that most decent soundbars cost over $100, with many costing far more, it’s also natural to wonder what features are really worth paying for.

In this podcast episode of season one of Know Your Stuff, Managing Editor Steve Mazzucchi asked our tech editor, Tucker Bowe, to explain the rise of soundbars and what to look for when shopping for one today.

You can listen to the full episode below or click the links to import the Know Your Stuff episode into your podcast platform of your choice, or download every current and future episode.

Want to go deeper? We’ve put together additional context and reporting on the subject below.

The Sins of Thin

Fujitsu

It’s not a stretch to think soundbars only gained popularity because TVs slimmed down.

In 1995, Fujitsu released the world’s first 42-inch wide-screen color plasma display. It measured 75mm thick, astoundingly thin compared to the large box TVs that sat in most living rooms then.

While the push towards thin designs made TVs easier to place in rooms, not to mention more appealing to look at, their slim form factor also presents a downside. While audio technology has evolved in astounding ways alongside display tech, the laws of physics still present some significant audio challenges.

At the most abstract level, powered speakers transform electrical signals into sound by moving air, technically referred to as air displacement. The more air a speaker can move, the more sound pressure it can theoretically create, the intensity of which is measured in decibels (dB). Decibels measure sound intensity, which most people perceive as volume. 0 dB is often thought of as equating to silence. The more dBs a speaker can produce, the louder it will sound to most and, therefore, should be easier to hear, at least in simplistic terms.

Sony

The size and shape of a speaker driver also generally influence the kinds of audio frequencies a speaker will excel at producing, typically thought of as highs, mids, and lows/bass. This is why speaker drivers focused on low bass frequencies, like subwoofers, often tend to be bigger and boxy. In contrast, drivers specializing in high frequencies, commonly known as tweeters, are usually relatively tiny. It’s also why most speaker designs incorporate a variety of drivers in different shapes and sizes into a single unit. The combined strengths of the various-sized drivers result in richer sound reproduction overall.

As such, to some extent, smaller speaker designs inherently stand at a disadvantage over larger speaker designs, because they physically can’t move as many air molecules as their larger counterparts. “There’s no replacement for displacement” is an old audio cliche for a reason.

A smaller form factor also means there’s less room to accommodate a wide range of driver sizes, which makes reproducing deep bass sounds successfully a more complex design challenge.

This is at least partly why the small and thin speakers squeezed into today’s thin TV designs often sound flat, lifeless, and frequently muddled.

Sony

Speaker placement is another audio woes of modern slim TVs and compounds the problem. These small speakers arn’t positioned to directly face listeners. Instead, they are typically hidden behind a flat-screen TV’s nearly edge-to-edge display and forced to project audio signals to the sides or back of the display as a result.

This combination of smaller speakers and poor sound direction are the two major audio challenges that most modern slim TVs consistently struggle to surmount. As a result, many more people are interested these days in finding solutions to better hear their TV.

Make Way for the Soundbar

Ebay

The “surround sound” systems that were already commercially available tried to evolve to solve the audio issues of thinner TVs. Systems became more consumer-grade, causing prices to fall. Manufacturers also began offering complete home theater systems as a set, known as home theaters in a box, to simplify the shopping and setup process.  

But even the cheapest of these offerings tended to cost hundreds of dollars. They also remained relatively cumbersome and complicated to set up, not to mention ugly to anyone not into surrounding their couch with speakers.

Given these limitations realities, it’s no wonder that the first soundbars started hitting the market only a few years after the flat screen TVs became commercially available.

TCL

Many credit Altec Lansing with introducing the first multichannel soundbar in 1998. The ADA106, also known as the Voice of Digital Theater, offered improved audio in a relatively sleek and dedicated package through a combination of a soundbar and a separate companion subwoofer.

Despite being released over 25 years ago, the system’s exterior design still resembles the modern soundbar systems made by most audio brands.

Now With a Better Bag of Tricks

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

While soundbars today don’t look all that different from their ancestors of the late 90s, they now aim to do far more than playback basic stereo TV audio to listeners.

Thanks to advances in speaker driver design and audio processing technologies like Dolby Atmos, many soundbars now can approximate a surround sound listening experience once only achievable by sitting in the middle of a room filled with individual speakers.

In the best implementations, modern premium soundbars like the Sonos Arc and Arc Ultra now include dedicated speaker drivers tilted towards the ceiling in addition to dedicated drivers facing straight in front. These upward-facing drivers bounce select signals off a room’s ceilings and walls to create the sense that a particular sound is coming from a specific location other than directly in front of you.

Photo by Tucker Bowe for Gear Patrol

Today, a growing number of soundbars also support Dolby Atmos without dedicated upward-firing drivers. The Sonos Beam (Gen 2) is one popular example.

These options are more affordable because they lack additional speakers and tend to be smaller. While they can’t compete with the sound quality of their bigger and more expensive Dolby Atmos soundbars equipped with dedicated upward drivers, most still offer a compelling and sometimes convincing immersive listening experience, at least compared to a typical two-channel stereo setup.

It’s taken nearly two decades, but today’s soundbars at least finally offer a listening experience that feels like an actual improvement to the home theater experience versus simply solving for the physical design constraints of owning a ridiculously thin TV.

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