Centre Speaker or Soundbar

Sony looks the usual toy rubbish.

I bought Dali Kubik One. It’s very good.

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Far better pricewise than the Senn (about 1/3rd!) though still costly just to get a bit of clarity. Do you use yourse for s,erieous movie watching, or just general purpose telly (e.g. news & current affairs, documentaries, the odd serial or two, hobby/interest programmes like Masterchef etc)?

Just the general purpose TV, and the occasional film once or twice a week. Masterchef? If she started watching that I’d put a Binson Echorec in line with the current soundbar :rofl:

The Bose Solo 5 is under £200 and has a speech enhancement mode.

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Use it for general tv, 4K player for movies and TV movies. Yes pretty serious stuff. The soundbar coupled with a good subwoofer is great. It’s high quality rather than surround sound digital, big blousy and harsh.

That’s the difference between your and my (and the OP’s) needs - sound requirements are not as demanding if not for serious watching. (as I indicated, I do that with a projector and genuine surround system).

One that is a bit tempting though above my target price range is the Sonos Beam - what makes it tempting is that my wife often uses that room to just sit and read, and sometimes for other things with the radio on for background, and it might make an alternative to the radio.

I wonder which colour you bought. Lime or may be lila colour?! :smiley:

In the right house, red, orange or blue would look great. I’m boring and went for safe black :grin: You can easily change the colour fabric panels anytime for £58.

In this tv products market, you can imagine the issues. A few hundred quid for a soundbar and some add in a rubbish wireless sub too. They’re usually full of gimmicks that av geeks like to read about, but are generally made of plastic, poorly designed & built, vibrate/buzz, etc… The Dali is well built and designed and there’s no where for anything to vibrate. And there’s no sub to include in the production cost.

Saying that, my Dali had a small amount of distortion from the left hand side that only happened on very specific parts of tracks when played very loud (Dire Straits - So Far Away). TBH I was looking for faults. The replacement was perfect, but it does make you think.

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Awesome. :+1: We all love well made audio equipment. With plastic enclosure I imagine vibration or resonance can be a real problem. Whilst I have never listened to one, from the design perspective and on paper, the Dali looks impressive. Modern with active and passive drivers for better bass. I know not another soundbar that employs passive drivers. It has a mixture of (4) woofer and (2) soft dome tweeter rather than full range drivers. Claimed freq response is spectacular 46Hz-25kHz at +/-3db. Noticed it is not Alexa or Google home enabled albeit it does provide usb charge port to power them. I wonder if one could plug chromecast audio into it and stream such as radio.

It is great to see Dali going against the trend and produced a tall soundbar in order to fit 4" woofers like Yamaha YSP series does. The only thing I don’t like about it is the leather straps used to hang it on the wall. May be that provides good isolation. I feel like it is going to tear over time if I push the buttons on the top side. Good thing it can sit on the table or screw mount to wall as well.

Does the Dali have any way of emphasizing the speech in a movie or is it just a high quality general speaker?

It has 2 sound modes - Wide and Focus. The latter is for clearer dialogue.

Source: https://media-dali.azureedge.net/6404/dali_katch_one_manual_en.pdf (p12)

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Mine is the Dali Kubik One.

It just does things right without gimmicks. When I first bought it, I connected digitally via optical, as that’s what the manufacturer tends to push and is apparently the general wisdom for av. For the first month I tried different optical cables to see what sounded best and found the more expensive Wireworld Supernova 7 sounded better. However, there was a compatibility issue with my LG oled which lead to intermittent drop-outs. It’s LG’s problem, which they acknowledged and were aware of it. So I tried analogue connection and was surprised at how much better this was. Smoother, fuller and voices more real sounding.

A good example of how gimmicky processing ruins movies; someone is talking outside in the street. With the processed effects, the street noise, wind, trees, etc…is far too loud, unreal and gets in the way of dialogue (which is harsh and unnatural). With the simplicity of analogue (on my Dali) the voice is smooth, full, real, forward and the background street noise is distant, where it should be. When they make films, they don’t have mikes everywhere!

I did write a thread on this forum 20 months ago, about this soundbar and all the cables I tried, etc, but I think it didn’t get much response so, from memory, I asked Richard to delete it.

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Now we know both Dali soundbars and I think there are only 2, the others are center speakers. :smiley:

All aluminium one-piece casing and weigh almost 10kg! Very nice! Price is actually pretty close between the kubik and the katch. Interesting.

GraemeH

3d

Heresy I know…We just bought a Samsung HW T-550 ‘Sound-bar & Sub’ for telly duties. The screen and hifi are at 90deg and incompatible in terms of room configuration.

I’ve never bothered about the sq from tv but lately lots of broadcasts seem a bit muddled and difficult to decipher. This results in us turning the tv up, which is silly as our hearing is fine.

Anyway, the tv does now sound a lot better at sensible volume.

It was a ‘Which’ best buy and as we have a Samsung TV the bluetooth was picked up and works seamlessly.

£200

G

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Why heresy? Its a telly, not a part of hifi (at least that’s the case with mine!)

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Much the same boat and a strong possibility that our speakers and TV will be at 90 degrees too if and when we ever get to move house.

I think my wife has some hearing loss along with the bad TV sound , certainly some higher frequencies that are as plain as day to me she can’t hear which given the bass heavy content of a lot of films is a loser all round, so using the main speakers will never be the final solution. I’ve been looking at the Samsung bars, they get great reviews especially for their ability to enhance voices. I’ve been reading through lots of forums etc for the hard of hearing and they get great reviews but I think I’m going to go for a £500 Sony HT-ZF9 which seems to go down well with those with what sounds like similar hearing problems to her and like the Samsung it has a nice small soundbar which fits in better with her idea of a lounge

Probably heretics both on a HiFi forum but it like @Innocent_Bystander says, it is only the telly after all to some of us

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I was thinking last night, how cool would it be if Naim had a 1 or 2 box solution similar to the AV2/175 that had a bog standard serviceable basic design like the older products but also had an updatable/upgradeable internal decoder unit? Of course that’s me dreaming, in all probability totally impossible and definitely improbable

After a lot more reading we eventually took the chance with the Sony HT-ZF9 because of the recommendations from others with acute hearing problems. It’s quite small and blends in quite well without looking like a monolith that has fallen over . The sound quality is OK, I’m not disappointed by any means but it certainly doesn’t rival the HiFi, more importantly so far with the voice enhance on my wife has been able to understand everything other than when someone mumbles or is just very quiet and to be fair even I missed those bits. The downside is that it comes with a sub and needs it, the Sennheiser didn’t but was a lot more expensive.

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That’s a success then!

I haven’t progressed my consideration yet.

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We have a Senneheiser Ambeo be mounted in the coming weeks. In the demo room it was by far the best soundbar I had heard and OK for background music. We didn’t want a speaker set up in the living room but do like to watch movies so a good soundbar was the right compromise for us. Came with an SVS sub.

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