The 4 Best Audio Settings for Watching Sports

For many fans, sports are as much an aural experience as a visual one. When you watch your favorite athletes on your TV at home, you want to hear the commentators discuss the latest plays with the same clarity you expect when watching your favorite movie. However, even if you’ve invested in an audiophile-friendly soundbar, that doesn’t mean your setup will automatically deliver the audio quality you desire. You may need to adjust the overall audio settings of your setup to optimize your enjoyment of sports.

Just as changing your TV’s picture settings can improve the viewing experience, making the right adjustments can ensure that what you hear when watching sports is clear and vibrant. Just keep in mind that these are general suggestions. The degree to which you can adjust audio settings may vary between TVs, soundbars, and speaker systems. While it may take some experimentation to find the “sweet spot,” applying the tips presented here can make a substantial difference in how sports sound when you watch them at home.

Audio commentators have to deal with a lot of background noise during live sporting events. Enthusiastic crowds can add to the energy of a game or match, but their volume can drown out other sounds you would like to hear. Additionally, sports broadcasts may feature background music that is not always mixed to ensure a clear listening experience for anyone who wants to hear the commentators clearly.

Because of all this excitement, the background noise is often very low. As such, one of the easiest ways to potentially improve audio settings when watching a sporting event is to turn down the bass. While it doesn’t require a lot of technical know-how, reducing the bass on your TV or soundbar will often be enough to ensure that you can hear not only the commentators, but also the referees and others whose voices might otherwise be drowned out by a sea of ​​enthusiastic fans and distracting music tracks.

The specific settings you need to adjust to get the optimal sound quality you’re looking for may vary depending on your TV model. This is because most TVs have preset audio modes designed to suit different purposes. While there’s no guarantee that any of these modes will deliver perfect sound, they’re worth exploring before trying to make too many adjustments yourself. Although the process of accessing these modes may vary from TV to TV, you can generally access them by going to your TV’s settings menu and scrolling down to the audio settings category.

If you decide it’s best to adjust the audio settings manually, check if your TV offers the ability to create custom modes. Once you’ve achieved your audio goals, creating a custom preset allows you to adjust the audio for other visual experiences (such as those where heavy bass is actually something you want), while knowing that you can always easily switch back to “sport mode” whenever you want.

Lowering the bass is often an effective way to improve sound when watching sports for several reasons. First, bass can interfere with the frequencies that typically allow a person to clearly determine what someone else is saying when listening to human speech. Second, in general, the human voice occupies the middle frequencies. Any audio setting that doesn’t prioritize these frequencies can make hearing human speech during sporting events quite difficult.

Fortunately, some soundbars offer dialogue enhancement modes. This could also be called speech enhancement mode. Such a mode, as the name suggests, generally enhances frequencies that fall within the speech domain. Enabling this setting can be a simple and effective way to resolve the issue if you have trouble hearing voices during sports broadcasts. This mode can also be useful in other circumstances, such as when environmental factors muffle speech, such as when watching certain types of news reports on location.

This last recommendation applies if your setup is made up of traditional speakers. One of the biggest mistakes you can make with speakers is placing them too close to a wall. Ideally, you want at least six inches of space between the speakers and the nearest wall, although it’s best to aim for a space of 12 inches. Audio quality can become murky if your speakers aren’t placed far enough from the wall for sound waves to propagate properly.

You should also confirm that nothing is blocking the sound waves, causing them to bounce back to the speakers. If there are large pieces of furniture or accessories between your speakers and where you sit to watch sports, move the speakers or items accordingly.

Most importantly, remember that experimentation is part of the process when you test different audio settings to see how they affect sports broadcasts. If you’re lucky, finding the right setting can be as simple as choosing the right preset mode on your TV or soundbar. In other cases, you may need to make several adjustments before everything is exactly right. However, once you do, you will find that the days of straining to hear what the commentators think of the latest play are over.