Trouble Hearing TV Dialogue? The Right Soundbar Can Help.

Hearing loss is a growing problem—not just for rock stars but also for people all over the world (PDF). Eventually, everyone will lose some of their hearing. One of the first times people tend to notice the difference is when they have trouble understanding dialogue while watching TV, a situation they often attempt to correct by turning up the volume—and in the process, driving other family members out of the room.

Soundbar companies have recently tried to address this problem by adding voice-enhancement modes intended to make the dialogue in movies and TV shows easier to hear and understand. These modes usually boost midrange frequencies, where voices reside, and sometimes emphasize the center (dialogue) channel of surround-sound mixes. They may also compress the sound to make quiet voices sound louder. These modes seem like a great idea, but as a former product-design consultant, I know that audio engineers sometimes put little effort into creating special listening modes.

Wirecutter’s audio-device reviewers have tried some voice-enhancement modes before, and to us, most of them have sounded unnatural and unpleasant. But we reviewers have healthy hearing, so we know that our judgment might not be relevant in this case. Do these modes really help improve dialogue clarity for people with hearing loss? The only way to find out is to recruit listeners with some degree of hearing loss.

Finding the right listeners

To learn how these modes work for the people they’re intended to help, we recruited six hard of hearing people to test them. Audiologist Julie Glick of Musicians Hearing Solutions in Los Angeles recommended three of her patients: two men ages 67 and 79 and a woman age 79, all of whom wear hearing aids. We also found three panelists who have some hearing loss but don’t use hearing aids: a man age 49 with severe hearing damage in one ear, a 66-year-old man who occasionally uses a personal sound amplification product (or PSAP), and a 72-year-old woman who had already bought two soundbars in the quest for clearer dialogue but found both unsatisfactory. (It’s important for us to specify gender here because studies show that men are twice as likely to have hearing loss and half as likely to acknowledge it.) Five of our listeners live in Los Angeles, where we test soundbars, so for them we were able to set up a listening test to compare the voice-boost modes on three different soundbars.

First up was our current top pick in our guide to the best soundbars: the Samsung HW-Q900A soundbar-and-subwoofer combo, which features an Active Voice Amplifier mode. Next was the Roku Streambar, which we currently include in the Other good soundbars section of our soundbar guide; we paired this bar, which offers a Voice Clarity mode with low and high settings, with the optional Roku Wireless Subwoofer for our tests so that its configuration was more comparable to the Samsung model’s.

The last model in this test was the AccuVoice AV157 from Zvox, a company that specializes in making soundbars for hard of hearing people and employs an audiologist as a consultant. We have included a couple of Zvox soundbars in previous listening tests and haven’t been impressed with their overall performance, but some readers have told us that these soundbars work well for them when it comes to dialogue clarity. Zvox labels the AV157 as a “TV speaker” rather than a soundbar, in part because it measures just 17 inches wide. It features 12 levels of voice enhancement, namely six within the AccuVoice mode and six more in the SuperVoice mode, which compresses the audio to make voices stand out more. SuperVoice is intended for listeners with severe hearing loss.

Our sixth panelist, the 72-year-old who has already tried some soundbars, couldn’t travel from Texas to attend our Los Angeles tests, so we asked her to try the Zvox AccuVoice AV357—a larger, 24-inch-wide model that adds a subwoofer/headphone output but is otherwise similar to the AV157—to see how it compared with other soundbars she owned.

Conducting the tests

For our Los Angeles tests, we relied on the same basic procedures we use for most of our audio-device testing. We hid the identities of the soundbars behind a thin piece of black fabric so that the listeners wouldn’t be biased by each model’s looks or brand. We offered to play any material the panelists chose, but we relied heavily on chapter 13 of the Midway Blu-ray disc, in which the dialogue is partially obscured by sound effects of airplane-engine noise and gunfire. We also tried playing some music through the soundbars with the voice-boost mode on and off; as luck would have it, one of our panelists plays in Group Nine, a prog-rock band that has several albums available on Qobuz, so he could use his own music for testing.

We asked our panelists who used hearing aids to try listening to the voice-enhancement modes with and without their hearing aids—because, we figured, if the soundbars added a boost in the vocal range that the hearing aids were already adding, the result might sound bad. Or it might not.

We played our test material with each soundbar with the voice enhancement off, then on. On the Roku Streambar we tried both levels of Voice Clarity, and on the Zvox AV157 we tried AccuVoice at levels 3 and 6. With the Zvox model, all of the Los Angeles panelists said the maximum voice boost at level 6 was far more enhancement than they would ever need, so we didn’t demo the more intense SuperVoice mode for them. However, once our Texas panelist heard what SuperVoice could do, she relied most heavily on that mode for her testing.

What our testers heard

It’s usually unwise to generalize about audio—especially when you’ve intentionally chosen listeners with varying degrees of hearing loss. However, through these tests we did learn that some voice-enhancement features worked well, some could actually be made to work too well, and some barely seemed to work at all.

Let’s start with the simplest of the modes our panel tested: the Samsung HW-Q900A’s Active Voice Amplifier, which offers no adjustments other than an on/off setting accessed through Samsung’s SmartThings app. Although the panelists’ opinions of this mode varied, they all thought it made voices easier to understand but also made the sound less natural. “The dialogue is boosted, and I can understand it better,” one panelist commented. “But it seemed to boost all the sounds in the vocal range, so it changed the mix of sounds a lot.” Another noted, “With this, I can understand the dialogue without using my hearing aids, but the overall sound is less smooth and natural than without the boost.”

Our two Los Angeles panelists who didn’t wear hearing aids also found that the Active Voice Amplifier mode helped them understand dialogue but not enough to overcome their distaste for what one of them called the “unbalanced sound” of this mode; that tester complained that the mode sounded thin and harsh. For the same reason, none of the panelists liked listening to music with the HW-Q900A’s Active Voice Amplifier mode on.

With the Roku Streambar, all of our Los Angeles panelists remarked that its intelligibility of voices was substantially better than that of the Samsung bar when both bars were set in their standard listening mode. But the panelists weren’t impressed with the Roku bar’s Voice Clarity mode. Only one of the five panelists thought the Voice Clarity mode made dialogue sound clearer. Two said it had little effect, while two others complained that the Voice Clarity mode reduced the high frequencies and partially muted the sound effects in Midway. None of them liked the sound of the Streambar with stereo music, with or without Voice Clarity engaged.

Finally, all of the Los Angeles panelists said the Zvox AccuVoice AV157 clearly had the most powerful voice-boost capabilities, as well as the most flexible adjustments. “At a setting of 3 [halfway up], the dialogue is considerably clearer, even when I put my hearing aids in, and it still sounds reasonably natural,” one of them said. “But at 6, it starts to sound like a telephone, boosted in a very narrow band—which I didn’t like, but it might be good for someone whose hearing is badly impaired but doesn’t want to get hearing aids.” Both of our panelists who don’t use hearing aids agreed, but two other panelists thought the AV157 went a little too far even with the AccuVoice setting turned only to 3 and with their hearing aids turned off. None of them liked the sound of music through the AV157, whether AccuVoice was activated or not.

Our Texas panelist, who tried the somewhat larger Zvox AV357, said that model gave her the improvement in comprehension that she had been seeking but not finding in other soundbars, especially when she put it in the SuperVoice mode. “I like to watch a lot of British TV shows, but the dialogue often sounds mumbly to me,” she said. “With this, I could understand the dialogue easily without raising the volume. I also like that it’s compact and easy to set up.”

Did voice enhancement pass the test?

Through these listening tests, we found that voice-enhancement functions always have some sort of downside. By their nature, these modes change the sound mix of movies and music into something different from what the creators intended. However, everyone who makes movies wants their audience to understand the dialogue, and certainly the voice-enhancement modes in the Samsung HW-Q900A and the Zvox AV157 and AV357 can accomplish that. It’s tough for us to make a blanket recommendation, though, because we don’t know the status of your hearing, and our panelists didn’t always agree on the efficacy of the voice-enhancement modes or whether those modes altered the sound too much for them to enjoy.

It seems to us that the simple on/off Active Voice Amplifier mode in the Samsung HW-Q900A might help people with serious hearing loss but is probably best suited for those whose hearing health is pretty good but who occasionally have trouble understanding movie dialogue. Meanwhile, the Roku Streambar is a great choice for what it is, but its Voice Clarity feature is unlikely to provide significant help in dialogue comprehension.

Considering that all the panelists were impressed with the voice-boosting power of the Zvox models and the flexibility of their settings, we’d say those models are worth trying, especially for people who have some hearing loss but aren’t at the point where they want (or can afford) to get audiologist-provided hearing aids. But the Zvox TV speakers can’t match the overall sound quality of the best soundbars we’ve tried. Zvox offers a 60-day money-back satisfaction guarantee on items purchased through its website, so there seems to be little risk involved in trying them.

We were long overdue in evaluating the voice-enhancement features of soundbars, but we’re glad we finally did it, because the feedback we got from our hard of hearing panelists will help us make better evaluations of such modes in our future soundbar tests. And if someone is actually evaluating these modes—and if Wirecutter readers who have tried these modes leave their comments, too—perhaps manufacturers will strive to make them better.

This article was edited by Adrienne Maxwell and Grant Clauser.