I love my five-star OLED TV and Dolby Atmos soundbar – but I have ...

I love movies. That’s why I work at What Hi-Fi? and frequently take great pleasure helping test some of the best OLEDs, best Dolby Atmos soundbars, and best surround-sound packages to launch each year.

It is also why despite my partner’s insistence we didn’t need an expensive set-up at home, I went to great lengths to ensure we still had an OLED TV and Dolby Atmos-ready soundbar in our lounge when moving house in 2022.

For context, she originally wanted a tiny LCD instead with no external sound system after getting fed up with the admittedly too-big-for-the-space Panasonic TX-55JZ1500B and full-fat 5.1 speaker set-up we had in my old flat. This was also largely due to my poor cable management which led to frequent trips… and not to the Bahamas...

Specifically, after much discussion, I nabbed us a then cutting edge 48-inch LG C2 and JBL Bar 5.0 MultiBeam which met both her “not too expensive or too big” and my “OLED and Atmos are essentials” criteria.

Since then, a wealth of new small OLEDs that are undeniable upgrades on the C2 have appeared – a list not surprisingly headlined by the 48-inch LG C4, which proved to be brighter and capable of producing much more realistic colours when I saw it in our viewing rooms earlier this year.

But to this day I love my lounge set-up for casual viewing – Pottery Throw Down and Bob’s Burgers look fantastic. I do, however, have one very big regret.

Specifically, my choice of blinds. When we first moved into the house we went about renovating the property, and in the sea of decisions about what flooring we’d use and which walls we needed to re-plaster I will put my hands in the air and say I didn’t think about what blinds to put in the lounge too much. Which is why we ended up with some, admittedly nice looking, wooden venetian blinds.

The reason I regret the choice? We live in an Edwardian terraced house with a triple pane window in the lounge that lets lots of light into the room. That’s fantastic for day-to-day living, but terrible if you want to enjoy some serious movie watching. Myself and our TV/AV editor, Tom Parsons, have long argued light pollution is one of the biggest hindrances to picture quality in most homes.

And my lounge is a great example why. Forget the impact ambient light has on key things like colour accuracy and contrast, on bright days even with my blinds closed I still struggle with stray reflections making swathes of the screen unwatchable. And to make matters worse, even at night street lamps still sneak through the blinds, irritating me at regular intervals as I try and enjoy my millionth watch of Little Shop Of Horrors or Barbie.

First world problem? For sure. But each time this happens I have one thought I can’t get out of my head: why oh, why didn’t I invest in black out blinds?

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Alastair is What Hi-Fi?’s editor in chief. He has well over a decade’s experience as a journalist working in both B2C and B2B press. During this time he’s covered everything from the launch of the first Amazon Echo to government cyber security policy. Prior to joining What Hi-Fi? he served as Trusted Reviews’ editor-in-chief. Outside of tech, he has a Masters from King’s College London in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion, is an enthusiastic, but untalented, guitar player and runs a webcomic in his spare time.