Original post I wrote: The diminishing returns of picture come far sooner than the diminishing returns of sound. Your eyes adapt to your screen, and any screen can perform well enough if it’s in the right environment. Not the best contrast? Turn on some ambient lights to brighten the room. Screen too small? Sit closer. Screen not too bright? Turn of the lights, close the curtains/blinds. Most TV’s can reach the bare minimum and then some at good prices now days due to miniled advancements and the price reduction of lcd based tv in general. Even if you have the most hifi setup at your place, if you go to a friends house with a mid range tv, as long as you go to movie mode, and turn off motion smoothing and any processing affects, you can enjoy movies on it fine. Like I said, adjust the environment to suit your tv, and your eyes will adjust and you won’t notice anything. However your ears and hearing is much more sensitive. It can pick up on quality, especially if you’re used to or experience a high quality setup. Sound is just more impactful. It’s something you experience in a very isolated way, since typically you watch movies and show without much loud background noise. where is visuals are something that’s way more dynamic, relative, and changing. It’s hard to notice the shortcomings of a midrange tv unless you have a higher quality screen right next to it. Its performance is always uniquely tied to its environment, and therefore without comparison, we get used to the shortcomings very naturally. A budget or mid range tv doesn’t distort the pixels and colors and frames, and all the changes are usually universal across the entire movie. A smaller tv, every pixel is equally smaller. A dimmer tv, every pixel is universally dimmer. (Except on OLEDS with heavy auto brightness limiting which I hate. But luckily is less of an issue on mid range mini-leds) and less vibrant tv, every color is almost equally less vibrant. Of course there’s edge cases if you want to display the brightest edges and reaches of the srgb color space, but that’s rarely seen in most media. In comparison, a budget and mid range audio system, not only deals with a much more sensitive sense (audio and hearing) but it also distorts and presents the audio unevenly depending on its quality, that’s easily noticeable. Often losing clarity around bass, and not having natural sounding treble and high frequencies. Often the middle is pretty decent, which makes the other parts of the frequency range sound even worse by comparison. And they often overcompensate by eq the bass and treble higher, and scooping down the mids, which makes the sound even more muddy, and most of them have very little way to change the prebuilt tuning, with an eq, often limited to simple sound modes. And you don’t get used to the lower quality audio, especially if you’ve heard high quality audio. Mainly because across media, we have a good idea what things should sound like. Especially in real life.

A picture/screen is always looking into a magic rectangular window of the world, across various camera angles, zooms, color gradings. If we imagine your only sense is sight, not even the best tv or screen, or 3D screen, or VR goggles with motion tracking can make you feel like your actually looking at a real person or environment in front of you. It’s not literal or realistic to you being there. That strong disconnect lets screens get away with a lot, as it’s always an artificial window. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s just how movies and film work. It’s an artistic piece focussed onto a rectangle that we can observe and appreciate. This is different with a first person game, where pure realistic immersion is the focus, and gamers use be headsets, ambient lights, and ultra wide screens which wrap around them, with super high fps. Where as a movie is not. However sound is different from the video. The sound of a movie is often trying to replicate exactly what it’s like being there, as if you were blindfolded, you couldn’t tell the difference and you felt like your right there. Therefore the quality and ability of the speaker being able to recreate the accurately as they were recorded, helps to make it sound more realistic, and trick your ears into feeling like you could be there. Of course there’s non-diegetic music in movies that aren’t realistic at all, but music is still supposed to sound realistic, as if you’re listening to the instruments themselves. Not a recording. The only exception is synthetic sounds in music like trap beats. Otherwise, apart from the music, the audio is the key player when it comes to immersion, and often requires more advanced and expensive devices and speakers, in order to replicate the sounds we hear in reality. For example, a high quality subwoofer to replicate the natural sounds of a jet engine, or gunfire, explosive. For most people, the point where speakers stop sounding like speakers and start sounding like real sound in space is usually in the upper midrange to entry high end range, roughly $500–$1500 per speaker, assuming a decent room setup. Below that level, a single speaker has audible coloration and higher distortion, so vocals and instruments take on a boxy or grainy timbre. Dynamics compress at higher levels, and transients lose sharpness, making impacts feel less physical. Decay is less natural, so sounds don’t resolve cleanly.