CNET’s AV studio the place I take a look at audio tools
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 programs. In the CNET AV Lab, I do comparative testing, pitting related programs towards one another aspect by aspect.
I consider the efficiency of every system with a quantity of differing kinds of content material, together with films, music, TV reveals and video games. I take advantage of a quantity of take a look at scenes — together with the opening of Mad Max: Fury Road for playback of the spatial audio customary Dolby Atmos for programs and soundbars that assist it. I additionally use the Thanator Attack scene of Avatar (26.53) to check a product’s dynamics and element retrieval.
When it involves music, I take advantage of a quantity of CNET take a look at tracks which you’ll find right here in a Tidal or Spotify playlist. Tracks comparable to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’ Red Right 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 succesful of. Using each varieties of content material — films and music — I then grade the sound high quality of every product. I consider traits comparable 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 Ultra streamers, a Microsoft Xbox Series 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.