Is This As Good As It Gets?

[peterfoster]

I needed a 19" LED TV for the kitchen. In spite of the fact that the reviews flagged the poor sound, I went ahead and bought an M&S 19" LED TV (for £99) a couple of weeks ago, online, because it looked a bargain. The model number is "M&S 19'' 31 series with Freeview™ Black LED TV."

I wasn't prepared, however, for the reality which was that the sound was so poor that it was on a par with the standard of sound emanating from the tinniest of cheap plastic "£5" radios.... placed in a tin bucket....

I borrowed my speakers from my PC and plugged them into the headphone socket of the M&S TV and the sound was fine. But this option does produce a cosmetic problem although one can stash the speakers round the back of the TV to partially solve this.

M&S tell me I can take the TV back to a store and obtain a full refund.

Fine. This would put me back to square one - viz - needing a 19" LED TV for the kitchen....

Obviously, all I need to do is look around now for a 19" LED TV with good sound! But does such an animal exist? Are all 19" LED TVs going to provide unacceptable sound? If that is the case then I may as well hang on to the M&S model and embrace the "external speakers" option.

So the question is this - and not before time, I hear you say - are there 19" (or there abouts) LED TVs on the market which deliver acceptable sound without the need for plugging in external speakers? There. Got there in the end. Thanks.

 

[mikej]

So the question is this - and not before time, I hear you say - are there 19" (or there abouts) LED TVs on the market which deliver acceptable sound without the need for plugging in external speakers? There. Got there in the end. Thanks.

Most TVs of that size will have poor sound, but some do sound better than others.

When I was auditioning 22" LCD TVs a while back, I immediately noticed that the LG set I was interested in sounded a lot better than the equivalent Samsungs for example, due to the LG having downward-firing speakers IIRC.

I actually ended up with 19" and 22" version of the same LG LCD - the sound on the 22" is noticecably better. I've thought about trying to tuck a small 2.1 PC speaker set-up behind the 19" kitchen set somehow, but I'd probably only need the subwooofer TBH as it's bass that these small TVs tend to lack.

You can buy decent, branded 19" LCDs from places like Richer Sounds for around £100 upwards, so I'd be tempted to try and audition a few first, before taking your existing set back.

 

[peterfoster]

Many thanks. It seems from the response here and the responses on the Digital Spy forum that "sound" on LED TVs as small as 19" bought new now will always be less than satisfactory. (It seems that those TVs bought a few years ago, being wider and thicker, have more space for reasonably sized speakers so the sound situation with those isn't so much of an issue. Perhaps I'm more fussy than most in the "sound" department so rather than send the TV back and look around for another 19" model on which the sound may be better (although, probably, still less than satisfactory for me....) yesterday I bought a pair of Logitech LS11 speakers for £12.99 from PC World which I have plugged into the headphones socket of the TV and the sound now is fine even with the speakers stuffed round the back of the TV to improve the overall cosmetic appearance!