CNET’s AV studio the place I check 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. Within the CNET AV Lab, I do comparative testing, pitting comparable programs in opposition to one another aspect by aspect.
I consider the efficiency of every system with various various kinds of content material, together with films, music, TV reveals and video games. I exploit various check scenes — together with the opening of Mad Max: Fury Street for playback of the spatial audio commonplace Dolby Atmos for programs 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 the case of music, I exploit a variety of CNET check tracks which yow will discover right here in a Tidal or Spotify playlist. Tracks resembling 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 specifically, with out sounding congested. The music 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 resembling 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 Sequence X and an Oppo UDP-205 4K Blu-ray participant. I additionally use Roon music software program to stream to particular person gadgets or the Oppo participant as wanted.