On today’s You Asked: What if your soundbar blocks the bottom of your TV? What’s the best, biggest TV I would personally buy for $5,000? What’s the best-sounding bedroom TV for dialogue clarity?
When you need more soundbar space
Peter from Prague currently has an older 32-inch TV with a central pedestal stand sitting atop his Blu-ray player. That arrangement allows for the five inches of clearance needed to accommodate their 5-inch-tall soundbar system. Peter is looking to upgrade their TV and has noticed that most stands don’t leave much clearance between the bottom of the TV and whatever it sits on. What are his options?
Even TVs with a generous amount of clearance, like the Sony Bravia 8, only offer 3.5 to 4 inches when the legs are mounted to raise the TV up. Peter needs more clearance than what’s allowed by the legs or pedestal that come with just about any TV that I’m aware of.
The best bet is to go with a VESA mount pedestal stand. Keep in mind that the larger the TV, the less play you’ll have toward achieving a high degree of clearance from the bottom of the pedestal.
You’ll want to take a look at the dimensions of the TV and try to find a schematic that shows the location of the VESA mount holes, relative to the top and bottom of the set. Then, using the specs and dimensions for the pedestal stand, try to ascertain whether mounting the TV to the highest available holes on the stand will provide the needed clearance. It’s a lot of internet searching and math, but that upfront work could help avoid the trial-and-error approach. Of course, it is best to order from a site that has a liberal return or exchange policy, just in case you miscalculate and have to get a different product.
You can also get legs that attach to the VESA mount holes, but this can be a less flexible option. Considering you have been using a pedestal stand thus far, you may want to stick with that.
I hope this is helpful for anyone who needs more clearance for their TV than what the manufacturers allow for these days. This isn’t the first time I’ve heard from someone who is frustrated that the soundbar blocks the bottom of their TV.
Biggest (and best) TV for 5K
Pavan from California’s beautiful Bay Area writes: If you have about $5,000 to buy a new TV and only want the biggest size possible with this budget, what would you buy: an 83-inch OLED or 98-inch mini-LED?
If it’s an 83-inch OLED, which LG model would you go for: B4 (83-inch C4 and B4 are almost the same except for the brightness booster in C4) or G4? Is paying almost double the price for G4 (compared to B4) worth it, considering both of these models fit the $5,000 budget?
If it’s a 98-inch mini-LED, which one will you pick: 98-inch Hisense UX or 98-inch TCL QM8 or something else?
Which big TV will you buy in 2024 for about $5,000?
So, the first thing to determine is whether you really want the biggest size TV possible for your budget. At first you asked: What TV would I get if I only wanted the biggest size possible? In the next sentence, you asked if my choice would be a 98-inch TV or one that is 15 inches smaller diagonally.
This question speaks to a conundrum I point to almost weekly at this point: With a budget of, say, less than $10,000, you can go picture quality over size, or size over picture quality. There’s no escaping it.
For me, a 98-inch mini-LED is the only option because that is the biggest TV you can get for under $5,000. When it comes to the model, my choice is between the 98-inch Hisense UX and the 98-inch TCL QM8 — but it’s almost a coin flip. The Hisense UX is a little bit brighter and has a slightly more advanced audio system on board. The TCL is slightly less expensive, but it’s also an awesome-looking TV.
The TCL is the smarter buy, but, admittedly, I usually want to wring every nit out of my budget, so I would say Hisense — and Hisense UX in this case.
As large as an 83-inch TV is, a 98-inch TV is significantly larger, and 98-inch TVs are a ridiculous amount of fun. The picture quality on both the Hisense and TCL is so amazing, I think you should get the bigger TV.
The only reason to get the OLED instead would be if you are exceptionally picky about certain aspects of picture quality and it would bug you if you didn’t have an OLED. (If that’s the case, then you should already know you have to get the OLED.) However, since you listed the 98-inch mini-LEDs as an option, my advice is to get the 98-inch Hisense UX in this particular case.
Best-sounding bedroom TV?
David from Bradenton, Florida, writes: I’m about to buy an LG C4 65-inch as our primary TV. Meanwhile, my wife would like to replace our bedroom TV with something “that she can hear” (read: that doesn’t need a soundbar to produce decent sound). It would be mostly for streaming shows or movies. While 48 inches would be ideal, I could go to a 55-inch.
With no mention of budget, I’m just going straight for the best option, and it’s easy: Get the 48-inch Sony A90K – that’s a 2022 Sony OLED TV and the screen is the speaker system. It uses transducers mounted to the back side of the glass panel so that the panel makes sound (I and most other reviewers have raved about this design’s clarity for years now). Despite it being a 2022 model and only 48 inches, it is an OLED, and a Sony OLED at that, so you will still pay a premium of about $1,300.
However, this really is the best-sounding 48-inch TV. I would love it if we could get the 55-inch Panasonic Z95A here in the U.S., but unfortunately it’s not here yet. The Z95A is the king of dialogue clarity, and it does it at low volumes like no other TV I’ve experienced. The Z95A is the only model I would recommend over the A90K, but to get that sound, you’d have to go up to 65 inches, which would be significantly higher in price.
A word of warning, though: Sometimes a lack of dialogue clarity is not due to the TV speakers. The way the dialogue and the center channel audio in general is mixed these days is totally inconsistent. Sometimes the show you’re watching has just terrible dialogue clarity in the audio mix (I would caution you to manage expectations with your wife here). Sometimes the problem is the show or the movie and not the TV.
You can only do what you can do, and that starts with getting the TV with the best, most direct sound. Forward-facing speakers are hard to come by in TVs these days, so it’s the Sony A90K 48-inch.
Getting that ideal white light
Debashish writes: I have a question about QD-LED. I know that QD-OLED TVs did away with the color filter and instead use QD color conversion and the actual OLED layer is blue. Do QD-LED TVs also use blue LEDs as backlight and QD color conversion layer instead of the color filter?
I’m going to try and help clarify that question with my answer. Simply put, the answer is no. Quantum dots in an LCD TV are not used in a manner similar to QD-OLED TVs.
You are correct that in QD-OLED, the quantum dots that glow red and green are used as the light source for those colors. They are extremely accurate red and green so, when paired with the blue OLED pixel, the combination makes for extremely accurate colors with high brightness. Part of that high color brightness comes from not having a color filter involved at all.
In an LCD-based TV with quantum dots — most often called a QLED TV — a sheet of red and green quantum dots is used in combination with a bluish LED to create a more pure form of white light than is possible with a blue LED coated with a phosphor to make it white. The goal is an ideal white light, because with an ideal white light — which has excellent components of red, green, and blue — the LCD panel’s color filter can effectively carve red, green, and blue out of that white light.
For a more in-depth look at the technologies, you can read our guides about QD-OLED and QLED TVs.