The 4 Best Audio Settings For Watching Sports

For many fans, sports is as much an audio experience as it is a visual one. When watching your favorite athletes on your home TV, 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 your setup’s overall audio settings to optimize your enjoyment of sports.

Just as changing your TV’s picture settings can improve the visual experience, making the right tweaks can ensure what you hear when watching sports is clear and dynamic. Just keep in mind that these are general suggestions. The degree to which you can adjust audio settings may vary from one TV, soundbar, and speaker system to another. Although it may take some experimentation to find the ideal “sweet spot,” applying the advice here can make a substantial difference in how sports sound when you watch them at home.

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

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

The specific settings you need to adjust to achieve the optimal sound quality you’re aiming for may vary depending on your TV model. That’s because most TVs have preset audio modes designed to serve different purposes. While there’s no guarantee that any of these modes will deliver audio perfection, they’re worth exploring before you try to make too many adjustments yourself. Although the process for accessing these modes may vary from one TV to another, you can usually access them by navigating to your TV’s settings menu and scrolling to the audio settings category.

If you decide you’re better off adjusting the audio settings manually, check whether your TV offers the option to create custom modes. Once you’ve achieved your audio goals, creating a custom preset lets you adjust the audio for other viewing experiences (such as those where heavy bass is actually something you want), while knowing you can always easily go back to “sports mode” whenever you wish.

Turning down the bass is often an effective way to improve audio when watching sports for a couple of reasons. First, bass can muddy up the frequencies that typically allow a person to clearly determine what someone else is saying when listening to human speech. Second, in general, human voice occupies midrange frequencies. Any audio settings that don’t prioritize those frequencies can make hearing human speech during sporting events quite challenging.

Luckily, some soundbars offer dialogue enhancement modes. This might also be called a speech enhancement mode. Such a mode usually, as the name implies, enhances the frequencies that are the domain of speech. Turning this setting on may be an effective, simple way to address the problem if you’re struggling to hear voices during sports broadcasts. This mode might also be helpful in other circumstances, such as when environmental factors drown out speech, such as when watching certain types of on-location news reports.

This last recommendation applies if your setup consists 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, though you’re better off aiming for a 12-inch gap. Audio quality can get muddied if your speakers aren’t far enough from the wall for the sound waves to travel properly.

You should also confirm that nothing is blocking the sound waves, causing them to bounce back toward the speakers. If any large furniture or fixtures are between your speakers and where you sit to view sports, move either the speakers or those items accordingly.

Most importantly, remember that experimentation is part of the process as you test different audio settings to see how they affect sports broadcasts. If you’re lucky, finding the right setting may be as simple as choosing the right preset mode from your TV or soundbar. In other cases, you might have to make several adjustments before getting everything perfectly right. Once you do, however, you’ll find that the days of straining to hear what commentators think about the last play are over.