Ways to connect sound systems to new television set

Factual Questions
1

We bought a new 55" television set, a “Samsung UN55JU6500FXZA LED Smart 4K Ultra HD TV”, and are still listening to the little built in speakers. It’s pretty confusing figuring out what options there are for having better speakers. (In another thread, in IMHO, I asked about ways to help the hearing impaired, and got some great ideas to try.)

I would like the television set to be at the center of everything, and whatever sound system I get to play what the set’s internal speakers are currently playing. In other words I want to replace the internal speakers with something better sounding but playing the same content.

Option 1) Can I buy Bluetooth speakers and transmit the audio directly from the television set to them? The manual is pretty cryptic and confusing – there is definitely Bluetooth audio output, but for example it says I can’t use “SoundConnect” and “Surround” and Bluetooth simultaneously, which suggests to me the Bluetooth audio kind of doesn’t actually work.

Option 2) Is it possible to buy an AV receiver and just connect the audio output from the TV to the receiver? Or does using an AV receiver mean I have to route all the video content through the receiver, set it up for internet television instead, and so forth?

Option 3) Can I buy some kind of multichannel amplifier that accepts optical input from the television set, and connect speakers to that, so long as it has a remote control for volume and muting? The television set’s manual says all of its audio output channels (optical, HDMI/ARC, and 1/8" stereo jack) operate at full volume all the time regardless of the volume setting.

Also, a side question - why do most of the audio amplifiers have a DVD player in them? It just makes me think I don’t get something basic about how these things are supposed to be connected together.

I’m not looking for opinions so much. I’m really after understanding which of these things can be connected to which other things.

I did ask at a brick-and-mortar store, and they told me that using the built in speakers, using a soundbar, and making an AV receiver the center of the system with all video sources routed through it, are the only physically possible ways of setting the system up.

2

The advice you were given, quoted in the last sentence, is flat-out wrong – unless the TV has only one or two HDMI inputs. Typically either the TV or the AV receiver can be the center of the system (the switching point).

There are many different ways to get good sound of your TV, and the sound bar is the least expensive but also the least good. Much better is to get a home theater receiver and a good set of speakers – at the very least a good pair of stereo speakers, and also a set of rear surround speakers if you are so inclined. I found a center channel speaker unnecessary, and in fact a subwoofer unnecessary, too, because I have a set of front speakers with terrific frequency response including at the low end. Good speakers are absolutely critical and depending on how picky you are it can take a lot of shopping around and test-listening to get what you really like. Also potentially a lot of $$. The good news is that they can last the better part of a lifetime. If you’re unsure you can opt for something in the lower price range for the time being and a decent subwoofer, on the understanding that you’ll eventually upgrade. You might even start off with small-ish front speakers that can eventually become your rear surround speakers when you upgrade.

Assuming you go the home theater receiver route, the basic decision is whether to use the receiver as the center of your system (meaning all the HDMI connections get switched through there) or the TV itself as the center. From what you say it sounds like you want the TV to be the center of the system.

As it turns out, that’s exactly what I have, because my TV (a Sony Bravia) happens to have four HDMI inputs while my receiver is old and doesn’t do HDMI switching at all.

So what I have is pretty simple. Various devices go into the TV via HDMI and carry both audio and video over HDMI. I use the TV remote (or a universal remote talking to the TV) to switch between the different inputs, or the TV broadcast channels. All audio is then routed out the TV to the receiver via optical cable. So it doesn’t matter what TV input is selected, all audio is handled the same way, out the optical and into the receiver. It’s a pretty simple arrangement and it works great.

3

That’s what I did. I already had a very good receiver and speakers, and simply connected my new TV the same as any other audio component. The only downside is that I’m using one remote to control the TV and another to control the sound.

There are other ways to connect the components, but I’m lazy and did it the simplest way possible.

4

Do you have a cable or satellite box that feeds the video into your TV? If so, running that video into your AV receiver will save you some time and effort. As kunilou notes, if you run the audio and video through different routes, there will probably be times when you need to issue separate commands to the various boxes for video as opposed to audio.

5

I don’t understand. I have a satellite box feeding the video into my television set and it works fine. Why go to the trouble of moving it to the receiver instead? That seems like I’d have to invoke audio amplifier controls to switch the television set between internet/DVED and satellite. How does that save time and effort?

6

Yeah! This sounds perfect, for the reasons you state. Besides, I like the idea of using optical cable, because that means I still have two HDMI ports left open for future use on the set, after plugging my DVD player and my satellite box into the other two HDMI ports.

If I buy a modern AV receiver and it says it has an optical connection, I can use that as an input, right? I hope receivers don’t come with out-only optical connections that don’t clearly say they are out-only.

7

I’m not quite following. What’s the purpose of the receiver? Do you have existing speakers that you’re wanting to use? I just use a sound bar with an optical connection and a wireless subwoofer. It’s simple and it works great.

8

Yes, it will have optical-in. The question is whether it has more than one, or perhaps some combination of optical and coaxial inputs – they may come in handy in the future. I use the coax on mine as an alternate input for listening to music via the CD/DVD player – the one exception to the “TV controls everything” rule because obviously you don’t want to have to have the TV on when listening to music.

9

It just depends on the sound experience you’re looking for. I’m sitting in front of a computer with a pair of speakers that I love, that have wonderful sound, great stereo virtualization, virtual surround, and a great big adjustable subwoofer. I’m always delighted at how great they sound as a desktop system for listening to music on the PC. That’s somewhat comparable to a really good sound bar.

Then I go downstairs and put on a movie and the sound is that of a movie theatre, the power of a couple of hundred watts shaking the foundations. It’s not the same. And it doesn’t even really have to be loud. There’s just a completely different experience in even the nuances of large speakers moving a large amount of air under the precise control of a powerful amplifier. It’s a question of whether one wants decent sound that is better than the pitiful squawking that emerges from typical TV speakers, or whether one is looking for something more akin to a theatrical experience.

It’s all somewhat incidental to the question of how things can be wired if you have an HDMI switching AV receiver. If you don’t, then the point is moot anyway.

10

The purpose of the receiver is only to power the speakers. If they make amplifiers with optical in, speaker wires out, and volume/muting remote control, I sure am not finding many, maybe one or two.

I think a soundbar would be similar to using the speakers inside the television set. They’re small speakers all in the same box that is far enough away from where we sit that I could hide the whole thing from view with my hand at arm’s length. I think that physically locating all the speakers in one little box would prevent much of a stereo effect, unless we were sitting close to it.

I also have hopes that there may be some advantages we could find by experimenting with the center channel speaker, perhaps upgrading it, and with boosting its midrange, as I hear it carries most of the dialog and our biggest problem is missing dialog.

Finally, I do have some existing speakers in the wall, which I may or may not want to use. It’d be nice to be able to try.

11

Yes, actually, I forgot to mention it, but I think I may want to do something like this too. We have iTunes on networked computers and want to be able to listen to it through this system, and I’m not sure how to make that work yet, but one option is what we did with our older television set and stereo: we had an audio cord form an Apple AirPort Express, which has a stereo jack on it. That did work OK. The new television set has all sorts of connectivity but from what I read there’s no way to run iTunes on a PC and have the television set hear it.

12

Let’s say you’re watching some TV channel and decide to watch a DVD. If you have the audio and video signals of both going through your AV receiver, you hit one button on your AV controller and it switches both the audio and visual signals from one device to the other. If you’re running the video signals to your TV and sound to your stereo, you need your TV controller to switch to the other picture, and your stereo controller to switch to the other sound.

13

To work out the best solution you need to list out all of the input devices you have, or expect to have. Typically there is going to be a break point where the number of your TV’s inputs are exceeded, and you will start looking at a receiver as the centre of the world.

Things have moved fairly fast in recent times, and the expectations of how everything is wired has changed. If you are starting pretty much from scratch you have the luxury of trying to get everything to connect over HDMI. This includes the audio.

One of the disadvantages of optical audio connection is that the link can’t carry the full resolution surround sound encoded on more modern movies. It can carry full bit-depth stereo, or a compressed 5.1 sound. Using an optical link will be fine for stereo only. Indeed a totally satisfactory solution is possible quite cheaply, if you are not so into movies as to want the full Monty audio. You can get very cheap (all the way up to silly expensive) digital to audio decoders (a DAC) that sucks optical audio, and has stereo audio out, and feed this into any old stereo amplifier and speakers. Re-purposing otherwise perfectly good old gear.

At the other extreme, a modern receiver (they still have radio receivers in them, hence the name) can be used to accept all the inputs over HDMI, and feed the TV, also over HDMI. One trick that is important, all modern HDMI implementations have a reverse audio channel on the TV link, so that the TV can be both the sink for all video, but can still be the source for audio when the TV is being used with it’s in-built receiver.

HDMI allows all the connected unit to share the remote control information, so setting up control can be much simplified.

Modern home theatre receivers, even the cheap ones, have some level of room equalisation capability. In reality, this can’t do much but fix some of the worse flaws in bass reproduction, unless you are spending serious money on a higher end system. But there does come a point where it is of value.

Right now, I’m part way through a build of my home theatre room, and things are jury rigged up with quite minimal capability. I have a few HDMI inputs (PVR/Receiver, Blu-Ray, Apple-TV) and nothing more than a $20 DAC fed over an optical link, coupled to a 30 year old stereo amplifier driving a couple of speakers I made decades ago. It sounds much better than I could have hoped. So much so it has slowed down progress on the room :slight_smile: .

14

You raise some excellent points and as a matter of fact, while a couple of clarifications are in order for the above, you did perhaps inadvertently make me realize that the configuration I described that works so well for me would likely not work for the OP.

The points of clarification are the implication that some might read into that statement that optical (S/PDIF) is some sort of “inferior” connection that degrades Dolby 5.1 and is only good for stereo. It’s true that Dolby 5.1 is itself a lossy compression scheme, but optical carries full-spectrum Dolby 5.1 and DTS just fine, and was indeed designed for just that purpose before HDMI even existed. It is, however, true that optical won’t work for high-bitrate newer audio standards like Dolby TrueHD, DTS-HD, and the like. You can even get receivers now that support Dolby Atmos. All of those do indeed require HDMI, in some cases the latest spec.

But here is the real problem the OP might have in using the TV as the center of the home theater. It turns out that some TVs dumb down the signal that comes out of the optical output. It just happens that my particular model of Sony Bravia does precisely what I need, namely pass-through of Dolby 5.1 and downconverting DTS. Namely because my receiver doesn’t handle DTS anyway. But many TVs will just output PCM stereo. I don’t know about the OP’s model specifically, but according to the linked article, older Samsungs and indeed most TVs except for Sony, Toshiba, and Vizio will not pass through Dolby 5.1, let alone more advanced audio encoding, some of which, as you point out, won’t even work over optical. Furthermore, AFAIK HDMI ARC (the HDMI audio return channel that a TV may or may not support) will typically have the same limitations even if it’s supported. The specs for the OP’s TV are inconclusive with respect to its audio out capabilities (it has an optical out, no mention of ARC) but I suspect it’s probably no different than most others.

So I have to say that what works for me is somewhat a special case because I’m only interested in Dolby 5.1 and have an old receiver that doesn’t do DTS and doesn’t do HDMI switching. It would seem that the best bet for the OP is indeed to use the receiver for HDMI switching and thus circumvent all the above limitations. It doesn’t really change anything in terms of major purchases, it just changes how they’re wired up.

15

I’ve done the opposite of wolfpup and used a recevier as the center of my system. It has really simplified things.
For a couple hundred bucks you can get a decent receiver with plenty of HDMI inputs. I run an HD cable box, Blu-Ray player, XBox 360, and WiiU all into a receiver via HDMI.
I then have a single HDMI cable output from the receiver to the TV. Since the TV is mounted on the wall and the wires are hidden the only thing running behind the wall are a power cable and a single HDMI cable.
The TV input setting is a constant. All it does is powers on and off. All the device switching (audio and video simultaneously) is done through the receiver.

16

Wow… I think you guys are making this too complicated.

I’m hearing impaired and I have the exact setup the OP wants.

First off, your new television has a normal stereo audio output jack (I checked the manual) - you simply take this and put it into the input of the receiver for the home theater system or whatever you have. That’s all you have to do. If your home theater receiver has a digital audio input, the TV has digital audio out as well.

Let the TV and whatever is upstream from there do the heavy lifting.

Additionally, I also have wireless headphones that use the headphone jack on the receiver so I can listen as loud as I want without disturbing others.

Easy peasy!

17

As you may have noted from my update in #14, I agree. The configuration I have is also operationally very simple, but I now realize that it has limitations for many advanced audio formats, and even for Dolby Digital for some TVs. It’s still the only feasible way given my current equipment, but when I upgrade my receiver I’ll undoubtedly use it as the switching center.

I have to say, though, that I’m a little bit nervous about a receiver doing the switching as some HDMI implementations aren’t as robust as others, either on the device end or the TV end. Some, for instance, may not work reliably or work at all with one cable and work just fine with another. I can just imagine one of these flaky matchups working just fine with a direct connection but not working reliably through a switching receiver. But this is probably the sort of thing more characteristic of early implementations than more mature ones in recent equipment.

18

wolfpup, the newer incarnations of hdmi (1.4) don’t have the handshake issues of the earlier versions. You could potentially run into issues with early implementation and new on the same setup though. I’ve seen several people have to put their older tvs and dvd/blurays through an hdmi splitter to avoid this issue.

Napier, I would suggest you run the Av receiver as the “heart of the system” as noted by Hampshire if you decide to go with a home theater solution.

FWIW, if you are willing to spend a bit more and get a sound bar with a subwoofer you will be quite happy I suspect, as I mentioned in the other thread. Contrary to what others have said I’ve heard a couple of them that sound fantastic, but expect to be spending quite a bit more than $200.

19

Mmmm. The situation continues to evolve in complicated fashion. I wish the television set had outputs for all the speakers, and I see online that some other people do too. Seems like the television industry is leaving money on the table – you buy their television set, and then you have to go out and buy more stuff to hear it as intended.

I want to avoid duplicating the receiver that’s already built into the television set. This is actually fallacious thinking, as it’s spent money that I can’t recover. If it is easier to get where I want to get by buying an AV receiver then that’s what I should do.

The center channel still seems appealing. For example last night we were watching Dr. Who, a favorite of ours, and it kept seeming like the dialog was too quiet and the background music too loud. Though I haven’t read a definitive and reliable sounding description, there are implications all over the place that I’m hearing the left and right channels too loudly and missing the center channel – and with no access to surround sound information at all, there’s no way to even experiment. But I have a couple physical constraints. Mrs. Napier is INSISTING there not be a center channel speaker sitting under the television set. There’s a shelf it might fit into, and now I’m contemplating whether I can fit a receiver plus a center channel speaker on that shelf. Which might require finding one that incorporates a DVD player, so I can remove the four year old one from that same shelf.

It’s tactically messy, though! I have to wonder what percentage of nice television sets are not working the way they were supposed by their makers to work.

HERE’S A QUESTION for everybody - can I use wireless speakers? [note that this was my Option 1 in the OP.] The manual is still cryptic and using the menu system for setting things up in the television set offers no clue. If I tried pairing one wireless speaker, will it ask which of 6 speakers this one is going to be? Without buying wireless speakers I can’t try; I’ve written to the manufacturer to ask. This is a very practical question, as the only thing I’m trying to do is add speakers.

20

The TV doesn’t actually provide access to decoded surround sound. The DTS Premium Sound 5.1 feature doesn’t mean it does surround sound. It means that if a movie is encoded with DTS (and only DTS) it will decode the surround sound, work out how to make use of it with the TV’s own speakers, and then play stereo sound. It also tweaks the frequency response and adds some compression to the audio - basically making a movie theatre mix more listen-able on the crappy TV speakers. So, even if you could pair wireless speakers with the TV (which I don’t think it supports) it would only give you a stereo signal. No surround channels.

If you buy a receiver you will find that you are not actually duplicating much functionality. The actual receiver capability is radio only, (AM FM) and won’t replicate anything the TV does. What it then provides is actual real decoding of surround sound, in all its various guises. Giving you 5.1 or 7.1 sound.

Placement of a centre speaker really does need to be in the middle. Things won’t work well if it isn’t. In theatres they have the luxury of placing the speakers behind the projection screen, which solves a lot of issues. Very careful choice and placement of main speakers can pretty much negate the need for a centre speaker, but a centre speaker is more fool proof. Especially if WAF issues dominate.

You might like to see if some of the audio processing options can be engaged to improve the audio of Dr Who (great taste there btw :smiley: ).

Do you have a notional budget? There are all sorts of options, but much depends upon what you already have, and how much more you are prepared to spend.