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As much fun as it is going to a professional sporting event, nothing beats watching the big game in the comfort of your own home. If you're watching who's going to take it all on the basketball court, diamond, soccer pitch, or gridiron, you need to ensure your soundbar's audio settings are ready before the first ball is in play.
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If you're watching the game on an over-the-air cable or satellite broadcast, you may notice fuzzy or degraded audio quality. The good news is that your soundbar likely has some features that can help.
1. Use room calibration
Most soundbars have a room calibration feature that will use either built-in microphones or the microphones in your mobile device to measure your room's acoustics. This feature will account for your room's size, shape, and furniture to optimize the soundbar's audio output.
This feature is easy to overlook, but tuning your soundbar to your room can make a tangible difference in your soundbar's performance. Room calibration can level bass response, eliminating or significantly decreasing a muddy or overpowering bass response.
Room correction can also improve your soundbar's dialogue performance by leveraging your room's characteristics to balance audio channels.
2. Reduce bass
Sporting events can be full of bass, either from backing musical strings or from roaring crowds in the stadium. If you're having trouble hearing a commentator highlight a player's stats when music plays in the background, you could reduce the bass to keep it from muddying dialogue.
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If you're hearing booming crowd noise instead of commentators, on-field action, and referees, your soundbar's bass is likely too high.
3. Turn on dialogue or speech enhancement
In your soundbar's settings, there's likely a dialogue or speech enhancement feature. Turning this feature on or adjusting its strength will enhance midrange frequencies and damped high and low-range frequencies.
Human voices primarily exist in the midrange; reducing the extremes while enhancing the midrange should make voices clearer.
4. Try night sound
If your soundbar has a night sound or night listening mode, use it when you're catching the tail end of a primetime game to hear it clearly without disturbing your housemates. This feature, along with dialogue enhancement, dampens the intensity of loud sounds while preserving dialogue volume.
Bonus: invest in rear speakers
If you already have a soundbar, there are several included features you can try to adjust its output to your liking. However, rear speakers take some of the audio output load off your soundbar, introducing ambient crowd noise and allowing it to focus on dialogue.
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Some streaming services, like Peacock, allow users to stream sporting events in Dolby Atmos. If you're preparing to watch an upcoming season in spatial audio, rear speakers will add a layer of immersion that your soundbar can't deliver on its own.
