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Sorry if this is kind of off-topic, but I was curious, what kind of displays do people use to watch UHD content? I don't really understand much of the QOLED or OLED or SRGB stuff, most of it goes over my head, and I understand even less about audio, so if one only cares about raw quality and doesn't care about price, what features or qualities or brands should I keep an eye on?

i have a c9 oled
waiting for 240hz oleds to upgrade also a gamer so thats why

TV terms can be confusing. Generally speaking, a LED TV means the backlight for the TV is LEDs. A LCD panel doesn't produce light on its own, a light has to be behind it so the LCD can be seen. This is a reasonable way to make a TV, but it means a couple of things. These TVs have a hard time showing black. The backlights are on, so showing black (or really dark stuff) is hard since the LCD has to try to block out the backlights. It also means these TVs can get very bright. If the TV is in a bright room with a lot of windows, it is the way to go.

OLED is a very different technology. Each pixel on the TV emits its own light; no backlight is required. Generally speaking, OLEDs do a great job at showing black and other dark stuff. However, it is hard for them to get as bright as an LED backlit screen. They look great, generally, but won't work well in a bright room. They're also more likely to suffer from burn-in.

Quantum Dots are another piece of TV technology. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/what-is- ... -explained Sony's quantum dot OLED TV is the current hotness in the TV space in terms of picture quality, but things keep moving forward.

dcoke22 wrote: ↑

Sun Aug 06, 2023 3:11 am

Quantum Dots are another piece of TV technology. https://www.tomsguide.com/news/what-is- ... -explained Sony's quantum dot OLED TV is the current hotness in the TV space in terms of picture quality, but things keep moving forward.

Thank you, you've confirmed what I suspected. I was much more interested in 4k curved monitors than TVs, but I think the same terminology and such should still apply, do you know? Do you know anything about audio too? I figured I might just pick up a nice monitor or TV with a soundbar, but if I were to find a soundbar separately do you know what about those?

I'm not the right person to ask about audio. I have a lot of opinions about audio and I don't have a 'sound bar' in my home.

They're fine for lots of people and generally better than whatever passes for speakers on a TV these days.

At the end of the day, reproducing audio is about moving air. A sound wave is, at the most basic level, a pressure wave moving through air (or water). Recreating that is something that takes speaker cone area. Speakers move by having energy applied to magnets attached to the speaker cone. This is what an amplifier does. It it sends energy through a wire to the magnets in speaker, making them vibrate back and forth in the right way to reproduce the audio fed into the amplifier as input.

Big speakers can make lower frequency sounds but generally not higher frequency sounds. Smaller speakers can more easily make higher frequency sounds but generally can't make lower frequency sounds. Reproducing the entire range of frequencies that a grand piano can make generally takes more than one speaker. You generally need a small one and a big one. The thump of a bass or the beat of kick drum (or the rumble of an explosion in a movie) typically takes a pretty big speaker; people often use a subwoofer for that task.

The bigger a speaker is, the more power (typically measured in watts) it takes to drive it. The power requirements ramp up in a non-linear way. A dialog only scene in a movie or just the radio playing low as background music might take 1 or 2 watts of power. A big, loud explosion or the bass track of your favorite song turned up to party levels might take several hundred watts of power to drive the big speakers needed to properly reproduce the sounds.

At the small end of the scale, differences in amplifier power matter. 5 watts is better than 3, for example. Just like 15 watts is better than 8. But, quickly, you need to start changing an order of magnitude to really matter. A 60 watt amplifier isn't really all that different than a 50 watt amp. 125 watts isn't much different than 100. 100 watts is quite different than 15 watts. Just like 500 watts is noticeably different than 100.

So far, I don't think I've said anything that'll start an argument. Personally, I think more traditional speaker & amplifier setups sound better and are a better value than most sound bars. But lots of people really like the conveniences of a sound bar.

Ah I see, thank you for the insight. I think I may be one of those people who prefer the convenience of a soundbar, maybe I'll change my mind in the future, but I think right now a small and simple soundbar setup looks more appealing to me than a speaker setup that might be more complex. Really I want a dedicated setup for Kodi that I'm happy with, and maybe trying to configure speakers on Debian or Fedora to work properly especially with stereo sound might be too much for me. Probably something I'll change my mind on but only time will tell.