TV screens are becoming more and more efficient, they offer a very high quality image in increasingly large dimensions. Unfortunately the audio part is quite often disappointing. With a big picture, you expect sound to match your setup. In the majority of cases, to overcome this, we turn to soundbars. There are many of them and are mainly intended for Home Cinema and do not provide Hifi listening.
If you have a pair of quality speakers, it may be time to imagine a mixed solution which will allow you to benefit from TV sound in full quality while having the possibility of listening to your vinyls or your streaming service in high resolution.
TV connection
First of all, you must identify the connectors on your television. Depending on the age and model of your hardware, your television may not be equipped with all of the options currently available on the market.
Optical
This output uses an optical cable to transmit digital audio between devices. It offers superior audio quality to analog, it is almost present on all televisions. If it is not, it is easy to add an accessory that allows you to extract the sound optically from the HDMI socket.
Analog (RCA/Jack)
RCA or Jack cables are traditional analog connections, widely used on Hi-Fi systems. It has become rarer on modern televisions in favor of the optical output.
HDMI ARC
This feature allows an HDMI ARC-enabled TV to transmit audio to an external audio system via the same HDMI cable used for the video connection. This is an increasingly common method of connecting your TV to an external audio system. However, traditional Hi-Fi systems do not have this connection.
Bluetooth
Some TVs come with Bluetooth technology, allowing you to connect wireless speakers or headphones directly to your TV. This is a convenient option for a wire-free connection, but the audio quality will be lower than other wired connections. Furthermore, you will inevitably be confronted with latency (lag between sound and image).
The ideal configuration
You have a TV and a pair of speakers, the missing link will be the amplifier. It will be used to connect your old wired sources (Vinyl turntable, CD player)
To connect it to your TV, HDMI Arc is often a recommended option, but it is very often already used by your TV Box or your multimedia gateway (Apple, Nvidia Shield, Chromecast etc.)
The best option is therefore to choose an amplifier model that has an optical input which will allow quality sound reproduction without any perceptible latency.
For our use case, we started with the Octavio Amp . This has an optical input to connect your TV, two analog inputs to connect a CD player or preamplified vinyl turntable.
Simply plug in your two speakers and place them on either side of your screen to benefit from a real, convincing sound image. The soundtracks of your films will be highly intelligible and perfectly in phase with the sound because very often the sound bars located under the screen lack credibility, especially during dialogue.
If you ever feel the need for ''explosive'' bass, you can add an amplified subwoofer to the ''Sub'' output of your Octavio which will bring an additional dimension to your installation with a more immersive reproduction .
The icing on the cake is that Octavio Amp has a quality Streamer which will allow you to benefit from the entire library of your favorite streaming service (Qobuz, Deezer, Spotify etc.)
Conclusion :
This mixed solution is very ergonomic since it allows you to listen to all your music sources even if the TV is turned off. TV sound reproduction will be excellent with a single installation, this will also be the case if a game console is connected via HDMI to your system. It’s also an opportunity to reuse a pair of forgotten speakers.
