Even the best cheap soundbars will be a massive improvement over the speakers in not only budget TVs, but lots of mid-range TVs too.
Of course, if you go reading about soundbars in home theater communities online, you’ll find that people consider them to be the work of the devil, and that anything except a system with dedicated separate speakers is a fool’s errand.
There are reasons for all of this, of course – there very much is a sound quality hierarchy, from the built-in speakers, through to soundbars, up to home theater speakers. And that’s due to physics.
The built-in speakers on TVs have to be small, especially in today’s world where TV makers want to brag about how thin the sets are. And to avoid them taking up space on the front of the unit, they’re often downwards firing, so they’re not projecting directly towards you.
Speaker drivers make sound by vibrating and moving air, and being able to make a more powerful sound, and in particular being able to make mid-range and bassy sounds, requires moving further and displacing more air.
The easiest way to do that is by having a larger speaker, which is why bass-providing subwoofers are the biggest kind of driver (whereas tweeters, which produce treble sounds, are very small). It can also be achieved by having the speaker membrane move more deeply forward and back (known as ‘high excursion’). Both of these require more space for the speaker to sit in, though.
And remember, you need space both in front of and behind the speaker drivers, as well as the driver itself being a large 3D object. And the bigger a speaker is, the stronger the structure around it needs to be to absorb the vibrations it creates in reaction to the generated sound – you don’t want to ‘hear’ these sounds, but the energy has to go somewhere. Again, physics.
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