Televisions, speakers and the appliances nobody calls appliances

Televisions, speakers, consoles and set-top boxes are the appliances nobody calls appliances. Collectively they are often the second largest electrical load in a home after heating and cooking, they are the biggest single source of standby consumption, and they generate more household friction than anything else in the house because everybody uses them and nobody agrees.

They are also where smart home integration most often produces something genuinely pleasant. Here is the practical version.

The standby problem, quantified

Media equipment is the classic standing load, because it is a cluster of devices that are never truly off.

Typical figures, and it is worth measuring your own: a modern television draws very little in standby, often under a watt, thanks to regulation. The problem is everything around it. A set-top box or a satellite receiver can draw 10 to 20 watts continuously, because it is recording, updating a guide or simply designed without care. A games console in a “quick resume” mode can draw a similar amount. A soundbar, a subwoofer, a streaming stick, a router, a network switch and a hub each add a few watts.

Add them up and a media cabinet frequently sits at 30 to 60 watts, permanently, which over a year is a meaningful number and produces heat in a room you may be trying to cool.

The measurement is trivial: one metering plug on the whole cabinet for a week, read the figure at 3am. It is one of the most reliably surprising numbers in a house.

What to switch off, and what not to

The temptation is to put the whole cabinet on a timer. Be a little careful.

Safe to switch: soundbars, amplifiers, subwoofers, streaming sticks, most consoles if fully shut down rather than suspended, and a television.

Do not switch: anything recording on a schedule, which is the classic mistake — a personal video recorder cut at midnight misses everything. Anything doing overnight firmware updates, which then never happen. Your router and network equipment, if anything else in the house depends on the network overnight, which in a smart home it does. And a console mid-download, which will restart from scratch.

Check the behaviour on power loss. Some devices return to standby when power is restored, which is what you want. Others come back fully on, which means a scheduled cut and restore leaves the television playing at 6am. Test before trusting it.

The practical arrangement in most homes: a switched group for the audio and playback devices, off overnight and when the house is empty, and a permanently powered group for the recorder, router and hub. Two plugs rather than one, and the saving is nearly the same.

Getting the sound right, which matters more than the picture

An observation from experience: households complain about sound far more than picture, and the usual complaint — dialogue is hard to hear while explosions are deafening — has identifiable causes.

Flat televisions have nowhere to put a speaker. The drivers usually fire downwards or backwards into the wall, which is why even an expensive set sounds thin. Any external speaker is an improvement, and a modest soundbar is a bigger upgrade to perceived quality than a better television.

Dynamic range compression helps dialogue. Content mixed for cinema has a wide range between quiet speech and loud effects, which is unmanageable in a living room. Most televisions and soundbars have a night mode, dynamic range control or dialogue enhancement setting that compresses it. This one setting resolves the commonest complaint in home audio and almost nobody finds it.

Room acoustics matter. A hard-surfaced room with a bare floor produces reverberation that smears speech. A rug and curtains improve intelligibility noticeably.

Centre channel placement, in a system that has one, does most of the work for dialogue. Get it close to the screen and not blocked by furniture.

Where automation helps: a night mode scene that reduces volume, enables dynamic range compression and dims the lights, triggered by time of day. It is the difference between a household that watches films after the children are asleep and one that does not.

Automations worth building

These are the ones people actually keep.

Film scene. Lights down to a low warm level, blinds closed, bias light behind the screen on. One button, and it is the single most-used scene in most smart homes.

Pause brings the lights up. Detecting play and pause state and adjusting lighting to a comfortable level when paused, back down when playing. This is the automation that makes people say the house feels intelligent, and it is straightforward if your media device reports its state.

Bias lighting behind the screen. A dim warm light on the wall behind the television reduces eye strain from the contrast between a bright screen and a dark room, and it makes the picture look better because the surround is no longer black. Genuinely worthwhile and cheap.

Doorbell suppression during a film, or a visual notification instead of a chime.

Occupancy hold. A room with a television playing should be treated as occupied, so lights and heating do not switch off around someone sitting still.

Everything off at bedtime, with a check that nothing is recording or downloading.

Volume limit at night, which prevents the accidental full-volume start.

Screen time boundaries, if that is a household concern — a scene that ends rather than a negotiation, which several parents find easier than the alternative.

Multi-room audio, briefly

Worth having and worth understanding before buying.

Wired speakers with a matrix amplifier are the most reliable and the most work to install. If walls are open during a renovation, run the cable.

Wireless multi-room systems are easy and lock you into an ecosystem. Check whether the speakers can be driven by anything other than the manufacturer's app, because a discontinued service turns good speakers into ornaments — and this has happened more than once in this category.

Latency matters if you mix systems. Two different brands playing the same source will drift and echo, which is why matching within a room is worth more than getting the best speaker in each.

Bathroom and kitchen speakers are the ones people use most, which is not where anyone plans to spend the money.

What we would not spend on

Very high-end cables. A properly specified HDMI cable of the right standard for your resolution and refresh rate is all that is required. Beyond that, digital signals either arrive or do not.

Voice assistants built into televisions, which are usually poor and tied to a platform. A separate speaker you can replace is better.

Screens in places you will not watch them, which is most bathroom and kitchen televisions.

Chasing resolution ahead of viewing distance. Beyond a certain screen size and seating distance the difference is not visible, and the money is better spent on sound.

Smart platform features on a television, which age fast and are cheaply replaced by a separate streaming device when they become slow. A television's panel outlasts its software by years, which is an argument for buying a good panel and a replaceable box.

What we would do

1. One metering plug on the media cabinet for a week. Read the 3am figure.
2. Split into two groups: switchable audio and playback, permanent recorder and network.
3. Test the power-restore behaviour before scheduling anything.
4. Add a soundbar before upgrading a television.
5. Find the dynamic range or dialogue setting and use it.
6. Fit bias lighting behind the screen.
7. Build the film scene and the pause-brings-lights-up rule.
8. Hold occupancy while media is playing, so nothing switches off around a still audience.

Items five and six cost almost nothing and address the two most common complaints about watching anything at home: I cannot hear the dialogue, and my eyes hurt.