Sony’s television and display technology is something that many agree is pretty good, especially with the use of the BRAVIA engine. This year at CES Sony is back with new televisions and has announced the BRAVIA A1E OLED TVs which comes with a rather interesting piece of technology.
Pretty much all TVs come with speakers built into them because TV makers know that not everyone wants to invest in an a home theater system. For the most part the audio on TVs are decent and passable, but with the BRAVIA A1E, Sony is introducing the first of its kind technology in which the sound is emitted from the TV screen itself. Yes, the screen is the speaker.
Sony CEO Kazuo Hirai calls it a “world’s first”, which is a claim that we have to agree with. According to Sony, this was achieved with a new Acoustic Surface sound technology where the screen will resonate with sound, which the company’s claims is the “perfect unification of picture and sound unattainable by conventional TVs”.
"STUNNING DESIGN: THE SCREEN IS THE SPEAKER"Note that this seems to be similar to Piezo speaker sound technology, which has been executed on a much smaller scale to create flat speakers, or glass speakers. However, it is the first time that a TV Maker includes it inside a television. Unfortunately, CES is a really bad place for a sound demo, so we can’t yet have an informed opinion about the sound Quality.
We found the industrial design of the Sony BRAVIA AE1 to be excellent. The TV won’t win a thinness competition because of the large stand in the back, but the aesthetics of it is wonderful and we can totally picture it in all kinds of cool decors, hopefully including your own place.
People often forget it, but just like it is the case for digital cameras, Televisions image quality is not only decided by the panel quality, but also by the set of image-processing algorithms from the TV maker. As you know, Sony has always been quite advanced in this area because of their photo and video background, along with video games hardware. At times, it’s been fair to say that this helped Sony have excellent image quality, despite having less competitive panels. So when an excellent-looking OLED panel is associated with top algorithms, one should take notice.
The OLED panel is powerful enough (brightness) to support both HDR10 and Dolby Vision (after a software update). Inside, the BRAVIA A1E has the same processor as the current Sony BRAVIA Z9, which ironically was considered by many as an “OLED TV Killer”. The truth is: OLED is here to stay, but it simply cannot address all segments (size, price) of the market.
Learn more: LCD vs. OLED. Which is Best And Why?
As expected these new TVs are of the 4K variety and apart from the high resolution, the Acoustic Surface sound technology, these TVs are also incredibly thin and look amazing. No word on pricing but with its size and features, we’d almost hate to ask.
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