CNET’s AV studio the place I check audio gear
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 techniques. Within the CNET AV Lab, I do comparative testing, pitting comparable techniques towards one another aspect by aspect.
I consider the efficiency of every system with a lot of several types of content material, together with films, music, TV reveals and video games. I take advantage of a lot of check scenes — together with the opening of Mad Max: Fury Highway for playback of the spatial audio customary Dolby Atmos for techniques and soundbars that help it. I additionally use the Thanator Assault scene of Avatar (26.53) to check a product’s dynamics and element retrieval.
In relation to music, I take advantage of a variety of CNET check tracks which you’ll find right here in a Tidal or Spotify playlist. Tracks similar to Nick Cave and the Unhealthy Seeds’ Crimson Proper Hand, with its deep bass and tenor vocals, assist decide a system’s capability to trace male voices particularly, with out sounding congested. The music additionally helps with uncovering hidden particulars and the relative dynamics a speaker system is able to. Utilizing each kinds of content material — films and music — I then grade the sound high quality of every product. I consider traits similar to speech readability, dynamics/quantity, bass response and musical playback.
CNET’s devoted audio lab in downtown New York features a choice 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.
