Philips HTL5140 or Yamaha YSP-1400?

[Jackymg]

Run into this delimma now.

Set heart to the philips one when first doing my research, got it from Amazon. Now the YSP1400 is on sale and cost even less than the philips.

I don't mind the Yamaha without the subwoofer as long as the sound quality is good.

I acknowledge that the YSP1400 do not have HDMI connection. Since both scored 5 stars here in WhatHiFi reviews. But they were tested on different price point.

my question now becomes if I should keep the Philips or get the Yamaha instead for £30 less.

Some questiom about the optical output from TV suffers compressed audio quality. Is that true?

My set up are:

Panasonic TXP42ST60 ; chromecast ; Amazon Fire TV.

 

[Becky_Roberts]

Hi Jackymg

Good question - I wasn't aware the Yamaha YSP1400 had had such a dramatic cost cut.

Both are good options, but it depends what you're after. The Yamaha has a bigger, more enveloping and solid sound (and no extra sub to house), whereas the Philips has slightly more expressive, and crisper, midrange/vocal delivery (and does have an external sub). We'd pick the Yamaha for sound quality alone (it came close behind the £400 award-winning Q Acoustic Media 4 in our Awards testing), but it wouldn't hurt to demo the two in a store and see the differences for yourself.

As for optical, you'll find most manufacturers are putting it first, with some scrapping HDMI connections altogether (even in the more expensive models). Of course, it's always nice to have a choice (!) and a HDMI output is handy for plugging your sources straight into the soundbar’s inputs, with only one cable running out from soundbar to telly - but there's nothing wrong with optical.

Hope that's of help.

Becky
Staff Writer, What Hi-Fi? Sound and Vision

 

[bobbys]

It's a very good bar £ 189 from ssav on wed before manic Friday.

my question is which never got replied to on another post is do TVs dumb down the sound from out of the TVs via the optical out of the tv, as described around the 1.20 min mark in the video below.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=9LSxmPZ-UhA

cheers