SOUNDBAR SUPERSTAR

The benefits of a surround set-up, without the fuss

API RESPONSE

THE SYSTEM

QD-OLED TV SAMSUNG QE65S95D ₹2,55,990

GAMES CONSOLE: SONY PLAYSTATION 5 ₹44,990

BLU-RAY PLAYER PANASONIC UB820EB ₹68,000

SOUNDBAR PACKAGE SAMSUNG Q990 ₹88,990

TOTAL PRICE ₹4,57,970

Go back over What Hi-Fi? television reviews this century - at any rate reviews for what used to be called "flat-panel" sets - and you will see a common theme recurring. No matter how good an image it may be capable of providing, pretty much any modern TV fails to back up those brilliant pictures with anything approaching even fairly decent sound.

All that beautiful screen acreage deserves sonic accompaniment to match - especially now that it has become acceptable in our living rooms to have sets with screens more than four times the area of an old 32in "large-screen" CRT TV.

While the area of our TV screen might have increased in size, the space in which we put it - our living rooms, mostly - very much hasn't. The review team here at What Hi-Fi? will always recommend complementing a large screen with a full-bore home cinema system with multi-channel AV amp and a minimum of five speakers (though of course they would urge you to head up from there to seven, nine, or even 11 now that Dolby Atmos is very much "a thing"), not to mention a subwoofer. But, they also grudgingly admit that these things, as well as being really rather expensive, also take up a good amount of real estate in what is often not an enormous room. Tedious practicalities sometimes have to prevail.