CNET’s AV studio the place I take a look at audio gear
Ty Pendlebury/CNET
CNET follows a rigorous, unbiased analysis course of for all of its soundbar and AV system testing, from easy stereo audio system to Dolby Atmos methods. Within the CNET AV Lab, I do comparative testing, pitting comparable methods towards one another aspect by aspect.
I consider the efficiency of every system with quite a few various kinds of content material, together with films, music, TV exhibits and video games. I take advantage of quite a few take a look at scenes — together with the opening of Mad Max: Fury Street for playback of the spatial audio normal Dolby Atmos for methods and soundbars that assist it. I additionally use the Thanator Assault scene of Avatar (26.53) to check a product’s dynamics and element retrieval.
In terms of music, I take advantage of a variety of CNET take a look at tracks which you will discover right here in a Tidal or Spotify playlist. Tracks corresponding to Nick Cave and the Unhealthy Seeds’ Crimson Proper Hand, with its deep bass and tenor vocals, assist decide a system’s capacity to trace male voices particularly, with out sounding congested. The tune additionally helps with uncovering hidden particulars and the relative dynamics a speaker system is able to. Utilizing each forms of content material — films and music — I then grade the sound high quality of every product. I consider traits corresponding to speech readability, dynamics/quantity, bass response and musical playback.
CNET’s devoted audio lab in downtown New York features a collection of 2022 and 2023 televisions (with HDMI eARC), plus Apple TV 4K streamer and Roku Extremely streamers, a Microsoft Xbox Collection X and an Oppo UDP-205 4K Blu-ray participant. I additionally use Roon music software program to stream to particular person units or the Oppo participant as wanted.