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55” or 65” TV Screen Size and Your Speakers: Please Join Survey

 

With my two-way speaker build on hold as the clock ticks towards December 31st when my $1200.00 in Sony card points expire, I am struggling to decide between the 55” or 65” Sony A95L OLED TV. Sitting on chairs at Best Buy, I tape measured 11 ft from the 55”, which looked small, while the 65” looked too big at the same distance.

 

My largely empty living room is 20 ft x 11, with the west side open, crossing a 4 ft wide x 27 ft hallway and into a ~ 10 ft x 9 kitchen and then 3 ft wide staircase. A triangular ceiling that peaks at 11 ft is above it all.   

 

I plan to listen 10 ft from my speakers, with the TV between them and a foot or so behind the horns.

 

I built the 65” (56.9” w x 33” h) cardboard mock and to my eyes at 12 ft the 65” “screen” looks immersive.  

 

I will build the 55” (48.25” x 27.5”) mock as soon as I can get more cardboard from the local supermarket.

 

Meanwhile, it might be very helpful to learn of the experiences of other 55” and 65” TV users.

 

How far are you from one of those screen sizes?  

 

Do you sit on a chair or recliner?

 

Please describe the speakers that you use in place of the TV’s internal speakers, and how far you sit from them.

 

 

ajant

Showing 11 responses by ajant

ajant OP
88 posts
 

Thanks guys for the great feedback, though things aren’t good with a second look at the numbers. James’ room looks at least 50% bigger than mine, here on obscenely overpopulated, overtaxed Long Island, where the price of living space is equally obscene. Of course, > 3.5 decades of NAFTA driven bipartisan legislated massive over immigration made that inevitable. The 8.9” width difference between the 55” and 65” TVs can matter badly. Nope. On the 11 ft wall, the 65” TV, the speakers plus a foot between the speakers totals 14 ft, not including the subs. Even toeing in the speakers and subs would be a gamble to keep the right speaker and/or sub out of the hallway.

 

There would be plenty of room to put everything on the 20 ft wall but at least half of the back of my chair would be in the hallway.

The other option might be to place everything diagonally across the room, but that still might not work either.

Last resort for the 65” TV would be to use smaller speakers and dedicate my horn speakers for music listening. Not a desirable alternative, but unless you have a good-sized house Schiit Island’s a bad place to be an audiophile wanting to add a nice TV, where every inch counts here. But I’m stuck here until I retire; should have thought this through better.

Looks like it’s the 55” or nothing. At least that way if I got Revel or Wharfedale tower mains I could then fit a center speaker below the TV and still have my eyes on axis with the screen’s center, as a decent phantom center for movie dialogue my horn speakers is a big concern, though I doubt James has that problem with his JBLs.

 

 

ajant OP
88 posts
 

Bigger=better every time.

NAFTA hasn’t really changed my TV viewing habits.

Don’t mean to rant, but yes, I sure can thank NAFTA legislators, the transnational investor elites they serve and conspirators like these bums for driving up the cost and down the quality and quantity of every basic human necessity-and that goes double for living space-not to mention having zero issues with accelerating climate change. https://fortune.com/2023/12/16/jeff-bezos-elon-musk-human-population-outer-space-mars-spacex-blue-origin/  Indeed, that self-serving mentality has firmly put life on earth on the road to this hideous and terrifying future.

https://www.google.com/books/edition/Planet_Aqua/O28TEQAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover

An alternate view, though good luck finding parallels even on PBS.

https://www.theglobalist.com/is-population-growth-a-ponzi-scheme/

Meanwhile, let’s not kid ourselves: For a bigger TV to always be better, you need to have adequate space for it, versus space for better audio. Footprints of my speakers and subs will be nearly as big as James633’s. That plus my electronics forces me to count every inch. For me, and I’d think like James633 and most forum members, high performance audio must trump video every time.

So, like Stereo5 and a few others on this thread, I’ve had to face the miserable fact that I don’t have adequate space to do both-at least the way I want to. But at least they don’t seem to find the 55” screen oppressively small, as some even view it from 10 ft or more. The 55” will have to be 10.5 to 11 ft behind the horns, and with the speakers 10 ft from me. Such are the economics of living space on Schiit Island.  

I got lucky last night and picked up this big slab of cardboard; resembles the size of 77” Sony I saw last week at Best Buy. I’ll cut it down to a 55” mock of the A95L and compare it to the 65” mock at various distances.   

 

ajant OP
88 posts
 

revel’s 226be is a nice sounding slender speaker if you ever wanted more room but I think they lack dynamics/snap next to a good horn. I would keep the horn and rock the phantom center.

I watch a lot of vintage BDs from the 50s through the 70s. While there are some very impressive exceptions- https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/PJ-Blu-ray/258849/

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/North-by-Northwest-Blu-ray/139345/ -the audio of most of my titles were often hit with a lot of dynamic range compression for various reasons.

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Big-Heat-Blu-ray/170647/

While the compression may not necessarily make the movies sound as bad as if the audio had clipping (overload) distortion https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/Inferno-3D-Blu-ray/174325/ , hum or other audible noise, if you were often to play such content, might the lack of dynamics and flatness of the sound become very fatiguing, even with well-designed horn speakers?

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Laughing-Policeman-Blu-ray/155116/

https://www.blu-ray.com/movies/The-Parallax-View-Blu-ray/42659/

And since the dynamic range of a recording cannot be restored once it has been compressed-even with software like this https://www.izotope.com/en/products/rx.html?srsltid=AfmBOoprArvJASWIn_nRl5VfwNTUTkD4b1iscv0adPnsn6rzV9aHxAcG -might we then be more inclined to instead choose direct radiator cone speakers for movie soundtracks with such audio quality problems? Perhaps even some of the better turnkey speaker systems?

https://www.crutchfield.com/g_12000/Floor-standing-Speakers.html?fa=1#&price=3070-7130

 

 

 

 

 

ajant OP
88 posts
 

When you go to the movies (do people still do that?) where do you sit?  How immersive  do you want the experience?  I usually try to sit where the screen fills my whole field of vision so usually try for the seats behind to the crossing isle.

My current TV is 85 inch and doesn't seem to big at all.

omg, dystopian sci-fi by way of Musk and Jeremy Rifkin, "action" for the warrior culture and incredibly dumbass comedies. Sadly, Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 911" was the last time I was in a movie cinema-and thank goodness I brought my ear plugs. 

 

 

ajant OP
88 posts
 

I’m barely 8’ from my 65” screen. My best tv is a 55” Oled in the bedroom. I don’t do surround sound anymore because the living room size has gotten much smaller. I miss the days of having a 20x25’ room. Those days are long gone. 
 

I wouldn’t buy anything less than a 65” screen nowadays. And is it me or the screens have gotten smaller. My 65” screen is nearly as big as today’s 75” screen. What’s up with that?

I sit about 12 ft. from our TV in a stressless chair. We had a 55 inch but went to a 65 inch. No looking back, the 65 inch is a great size and doesn’t overwhelm the room. The 65 inch would work very well. If you look at the "recommended" viewing guide charts for TV viewing they would probably say a 75 inch would be recommended depending on the content resolution.

I started with a 55” with my seating position 12’ from the screen, after a while, it began to look very small!  Switched to a 65” Sony OLED, it was much better, but it, too, began to look small!  Was contemplating an 87” but, bit the bullet when a good deal came up on a 98” and I jumped on it. So far, I’m loving the experience, still at 12’ viewing distance, and wondering how long it will take before, it too, looks small! When it comes to TV’s bigger is better. 

have an 85incher coupled with a room corrective sennheiser ambeo max and my face is about seven feet from the screen.

Every time I catch a faint whiff of heated electronics it takes me back to that experience.

My Don Sachs tube preamp driving my First Watt F4 poweramp.

Another often overlooked aspect of viewing and vision is that our peripheral (side to side) viewing is greater than our vertical (top to bottom) vision. The sense of overwhelm from large image is due to image height, and not so much image width. The older days of 4:3 aspect ratio screens, a 70" rear projection TV could be quite overwhelming, both physically and from a viewing perspective. That 70" image was 42" high, roughly equivalent to a 85" 16:9 screen today.

Here’s one more reason to go BIG:

If you watch blockbuster movies, these are (almost) always "letterbox" or 21:9 aspect ratio. This reduces the image height fairly significantly, around 60% of the full 16:9 height. So, doing the math: a 65" screen will produce an image size of approximately 57" wide by 24" high. In this case you are, literally, watching the equivalent of a 48" television. Which brings us back to the good "ole" days. Imagine that massive 35" CRT television.....

 Thanks to all for sharing your TV size experiences with me. Like I did with the 65” mock last weekend, this Saturday night I finished the 55” mock, precisely cut to 1/8” of the Sony A95L specs. I spent much of that night and today placing them in various locations and distances in the room . I’ve narrowed my chosen locations down to two.

One last question: Whether I go with the 55” or 65” I would want the screen to be between 13.5 and 14 ft from my eyes, with the TV between my floor standing speakers and the speakers 10 to 11 ft from me.

At that distance and looking at the center of the 55” mock the entire screen falls within the full viewing area of my eyes. But this isn’t so with the 65” mock. Because of this difference I wondering how my eyes would react while watching moving or even stable images on a 65” TV. Wouldn’t they be compelled to hunt across the screen a lot more than they would with the 55” screen?

Indeed, for those of you who sit between ~ 8 ft to 11 ft from a 65” or 77” screen, do find your eyes get especially tired from hunting for aspects of images while viewing a screen that big and from that distance? OTOH, everyone’s eyes must zoom around the huge screen in movie cinemas, though I haven’t been in one for many years, nor plan probably ever will again, in part for this reason.

But again, don’t you guys get some kind of eyestrain if or because your field of vision is overshot by your > 55” or > 65” screen size?

 

ajant OP
88 posts
 

A word on center channel:

Yes, center channel is the way to go. One consideration is room acoustics (or lack of them). When using 2 speakers to produce an "phantom" center channel, you have energy emitting from 2 speakers (often close to room boundaries) to produce that center channel information. With a center channel, you’ve cut the complexity of the signal (and its resultant reflections) in half. We’ve had highly reflective rooms where dialogue was unintelligible with 2 speakers, and "tolerable" when the burden of center channel info was sent to a single dedicated speaker.

From what I’ve usually heard at speaker design and home theater forums is the trouble with adding a center speaker is that unless the drivers are virtually identical to high, mid and midbass drivers in your main speakers you’ll likely end up getting discordant timbre and other unpleasant issues. It may be hard enough to “match up” drivers in a Revel, Wharfedale KEF or what have you brand center with those in the front radiating cone drivers of your mains. But what if your speakers are horn speakers like Gary’s? https://galibierdesign.com/wa-trip-01/

Or Pierre’s? See posts 15266, 15276. https://www.diyaudio.com/community/threads/beyond-the-ariel.100392/page-764

My new speakers will be similar to this. https://encrypted-tbn0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcQlo_4Lv16sQWCN0pxhVvvmfH83lEEFRtEbpw&s

A center similar to this one might work.               https://josephcrowe.com/products/speaker-system-no-2015-10-mtm-with-1-4-horn

But Troy Crowe won’t build it for me and I can’t DIY myself.

 

ajant OP
88 posts
 

You may not have room for this, but I offer this recommendation because it was a wonderful solution for 2 channel main systems. AWOL makes short throw laser projections and screens specially made for this purpose.

Yes, I sure considered this but it won't fly for several reasons. My room is only 23 ft wide. The triangular ceiling peaks at 11 ft, but the south wall's s only 11 ft and then empties into a ~ 3.5 ft hallway, beyond which is a 9 ft 8 kitchen. And while my long wall might allow a screen that big, with my speakers and subs reasonably well placed, my chair would be in the hallway, In any case, with a screen that big I'd need to have even more room to use a recliner; otherwise I'd be forever craning my neck to have my eyes reasonably on axis with the screen. NOT happening in this size room. Besides, could this or any projector compete with the Sony A95L's contrast and black level range? Also, Sony just reduced prices by ~ $300. And I have $1200. in Sony card points that I have to redeem before the rewards program ends Dec, 31st. So it's got to be a Sony OLED.

ajant OP
88 posts
 

I took my centre speaker over to two friends' who also believed a centre was not necessary, and after trying a few films with/without, they both bought a centre speaker and said it (watching a film), was a MUCH more involving experience with a more even soundstage where vocals were much better produced, and the whole film sound stage was more clearlly defined. And, as for the poster who doesn't use a pair or rears!!! Wake up man, you're missing a MASSIVE amount of film experience.

Trust me, I'd have no problems spending serious money on a center speaker.

https://www.crutchfield.com/shopsearch/center_channel_speaker.html?fa=1#&price=1370-3340

But as I just explained above, all DIY speaker builders I've consulted strongly advise not using dissimilar drivers in mains and center speakers. But are you saying from experience that YMMV that much in favor of disregarding this advice? I'd hate to have to ship a > 45lb center back to an online store. 

 

ajant OP
88 posts
 

But again, don’t you guys get some kind of eyestrain if or because your field of vision is overshot by your > 55” or > 65” screen size?

I ask this because of this supremely relevant post by Dave in Green:

THX recommends a “best seat-to-screen distance” FOV of 40 degrees. But that's based on averages where some prefer greater and some less. An FOV of 50 degrees is more like front row seating at a commercial cinema. Some people prefer that level of immersion while others don't. It would be best to experiment by viewing content with a 50 degree FOV before locking into it as it will create a lot of eye movement that could get tiring when viewing fast moving action content depending on your individual tolerance.

https://www.avsforum.com/threads/would-50-degrees-horizontal-viewing-angle-be-too-much.3006084/

Clearly, screen size vs. viewing distance is largely a matter of 1.) How visually immersed one cares to be and 2.) what kind of content one typically views. For sure, if I were a gamer and/or a big fan of “action” movies, I very likely would get eye fatigue or even headaches with a 65” screen-even at 13 ft. But save for a James Bond film now and then, I’m mostly a fan of film noir genre and other classic and new but fairly slow-moving TV shows and movies. Furthermore, I keep my living room dimly lit, at least for TV viewing, so there may therefore be less risk of eyestrain.

 

Given these facts, I’ll be ordering the 65” Sony A95L this week at Best Buy. I can always exchange it for the 55” within the 10-day trial period, but thanks to Dave in Green’s presenting of those crucial facts, after some hours viewing of various BDs from my collection there’s at least a 50% chance that the 65” will be the one.

ajant OP
88 posts
 

This week with hundreds in Sony Card points it’s time to buy a new TV.

It’s probably laughable to those here but I don’t subscribe to any streaming or even basic cable service. I get news via internet, NY Times, et al.

Except for free services like Kanopy, all my movie and vintage TV show content are from Youtube, but mostly from my own collection of 2K BDs and DVDs and those borrowed from local public libraries.

Being a huge film noir fan, OLED is the only way, and everyone also says Sony has the best upscaling for DVDs, which is essential as many of my favorite titles will clearly never see a BD release. So even though I will rarely be viewing 4K content the A95L still seems justifiable.

Where problems lie are with viewing distance. I want to keep my ~ 26” wide Troy Crowe floor standing main speakers 10 ft from me, which means that the TV must be at least a foot behind the front of them.

Would 11 to 12 ft be too far to enjoy my non-4K content?

FWIW, I keep my room dimly lit and will therefore be dialing down the TV brightness.

Note that a 77” TV is not doable since as its width would make proper speaker placement impossible, which will already be challenged by the 65” TV’s footprint.

If only I had more space this would have been the one.

https://electronics.sony.com/tv-video/televisions/all-tvs/p/xr77a80l

 

 

ajant OP
88 posts
 

a Sony A80j 65" oled in 22 and in the family room in 23 the A85 Sony oled. Both sets are google OS and have been problem free.

Subject: HELP! Will A95L Stutter with DVDs and Youtube Downloads?

I can’t believe that Sony’s top model OLED TV has this problem, which I only just learned of when reading this review. https://www.rtings.com/tv/tools/compare/sony-a95k-oled-vs-sony-a95l-oled/31217/39009

It shows the supposedly “new and improved” A95L scoring worse than the A95K on this parameter.

Until I read this review I didn’t even know that stuttering over low frame rate content was a problem with any OLED TVs!!

How will this impact the A95L’s DVD performance? This is critically important as many of my favorite movie titles and TV shows in my large collection, on DVD for years, have next to no chance of ever being issued on BD. And I have no plans to subscribe to any streaming service as an alternate source.

I also have numerous Youtube downloads, of either 720p, 420p-and early ones at 240-that I would also want to view on this TV occasionally.

I had planned to buy the A95L this week. But if it’s likely going to stutter on any of this content please suggest the next best Sony OLED model that won’t. However, the TV’s 4K performance is irrelevant as I only play 2K BDs and DVDs from my collection and those I borrow from local public libraries.

What’s very bad now is that the best such 65” model (s) may no longer be available at Best Buy, PC Richard, Wal-Mart, Target, Microcenter or other retailers in the New York area.

I would order said models from online stores but they MUST be authorized Sony retailers or I will not be able the redeem my $1200.00 in Sony Card points-and the sale must be made before December 31st!

 

Please advise ASAP.

 

 

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