The 4 Best Sounding TVs - Fall 2023 Reviews

The best sounding TV we've tested is the LG G3 OLED. It's an impressive TV that delivers fantastic visuals with good sound quality due to its 4.2 speaker setup. It has a very good frequency response, although, like most TVs, it doesn't have much bass. It does get very loud, however, and it sounds good and clear all the way to its maximum volume. It has a well-balanced sound profile at moderate listening levels, making dialogue clear and easy to understand. It also supports eARC, which is great if you connect it to a home theater system or soundbar.

Of course, it also delivers fantastic picture quality thanks to its OLED panel. Blacks are perfectly deep and uniform in a dark room, which is great for watching movies as there's no distracting blooming or haloing around bright objects or subtitles. It can display a wide color gamut with HDR content, which looks incredibly vivid and lifelike. The LG G3's MLA technology makes it one of the brightest OLEDs on the market, so it looks great even in very bright rooms. Its predecessor, the LG G1 OLED, sounds better overall, especially with its surprisingly good bass. Sadly, it's now very hard to find, as it's discontinued. Of course, the G3 has other advantages; it's brighter and supports advanced DTS and DTS:X audio formats.

The TV with the best sound we've tested in the upper mid-range category is the Sony X93L/X93CL. It's a great TV overall, and it sounds very good. Its well-balanced sound profile makes dialogue clear and easy to understand. It gets just as loud as the LG, with less compression and very little distortion at high volume levels, although the LG sounds a tad clearer at moderate volumes. Like the LG, it supports eARC and a wide range of audio formats, including DTS:X via DTS-HD MA, which is great as that's the most commonly supported format on UHD Blu-ray movies.

It delivers fantastic picture quality, but while the LG delivers perfect inky blacks with no blooming thanks to its OLED panel, the Sony relies on a Mini LED full array local dimming feature to achieve deep blacks, so there's more distracting blooming around bright objects. It still looks great, and bright highlights stand out with its excellent peak brightness in HDR. It also has a wide color gamut, making HDR content vivid and lifelike. This TV's unofficial predecessor, the Sony X95K, also sounds great, but it's a bit worse overall than the newer model.

The TCL 6 Series/R646 2021 QLED is the best-sounding mid-range TV we've tested. It's a great overall TV available in a few different sizes, from 55 to 75 inches, and it combines its great picture quality with good sound quality. It has a decent frequency response with a well-balanced sound profile that delivers clear dialogue, which is great for watching the news or TV shows. It also gets very loud as it's one of the lowest TVs we've tested, with very little distortion, even at max volume. If you plan on using an external soundbar or home theater system, it supports eARC audio passthrough with all major formats.

It delivers similar overall sound quality to the Sony X93L/X93CL but has slightly worse picture quality, as it's not as bright as the Sony and has a narrow viewing angle. It performs well in dark and bright environments thanks to its great peak brightness and high contrast ratio. It uses the user-friendly Google TV smart platform, which is easy to use and has a huge selection of streaming apps, so you can easily find your favorite streaming content. Its successor, the TCL 6 Series/R655 2022 QLED, sounds good overall but not quite as good as the 2021 model, so if sound is your primary interest, go for the older model.

The Insignia F50 QLED is the best budget TV with decent sound quality that we've tested. It's a simple TV with okay overall performance, and it offers good value for its price. It surprisingly has an alright sound quality for a budget-friendly TV, as most other low-cost options have mediocre sound. It gets fairly loud and has a well-balanced sound profile, meaning it's a good choice for listening to dialogue, but like most TVs, it doesn't produce much bass, so get a soundbar for the best sound possible. If you do, the TV supports Dolby and DTS audio formats for passthrough.

The built-in Fire TV platform is user-friendly, and menu navigation feels smooth. It has a bunch of apps you can download, and the mic built into the remote gives you access to the Alexa voice assistant feature. It also has decent overall picture quality with deep blacks if you want to use it in a dark room and decent peak brightness and reflection handling in bright rooms. It isn't easy to find, as the manufacturer has discontinued it, but the 50-inch and 65-inch models are still readily available.