DESIGN + PERFORMANCE
Embodying the spirit of the Jamo brand,
STUDIO 8 series delivers contemporary design,
high performance, and balanced, natural sound.
In traditional bookshelf and floorstanding speakers
and with optional Dolby Atmos® integration.
Home theatre and music systems never looked so good.jamo.com.auDANISH SOUND DESIGNBest Buys Audio & AV 2019-#2“If 55 inches is a touch small for
you, there’s a 65-inch version of
the X7 too, priced at $3299...”
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both cases the TV treated all incoming video as though it were
video-sourced (i.e. with each of the two fields of each frame captured
at different points in time), apparently with no attempt to determine
whether that was the case. That produced frequent visible artefacts.
NETWORKING
This is an Android TV, so it does implement Google Assistant voice
control. But it also can use the Amazon Alexa system. Setting this up
turned out to be quite a complicated process, involving a change of
home country in our Amazon account along with some other compli-
cations. In the end, even after following the instructions and the TV
informing us it was linked to our Alexa account, and with the ‘TCL
Assistant’ ‘Skill’ enabled, none of the suggested commands actually
worked. Except for one — we could tell Alexa to turn off the TV.
No matter, we went back to Google Assistant. The smaller remote
has a microphone built in and can pair wirelessly with the TV, so
it doesn’t need to be pointed. It has dedicated Netflix and Google
Assistant buttons. Press the latter, talk into the remote and you can do
most things that Google Assistant can do. Ask it the time, get it to do
some arithmetic, ask it questions of geography.
But it can also do things relating to the TV. We couldn’t work out
how to change channel or input, but it would change volume level
for us — or at least it changed the volume when the TV was working
alone. When we had our Denon AVR-X3500H AV receiver connected
via ARC, so the receiver was producing the sound, its output level
remained unchanged, even though the TV was clearly trying to do
something (judging by the volume pop-up).
Netflix worked well, except that the audio was locked into stereo,
not multichannel output. Other streaming apps like Stan, and all the
catch-up services are readily available, thanks to the use of Android.
The TV supports Chromecast and also DLNA. It didn’t appear to
support Miracast/WiDi. I thought about installing an app, but the best
known Miracast app proved to be incompatible with the TV.
Using DLNA, we could stream UltraHD video from our NAS,
and the TV delivered full UltraHD resolution. Rather to our surprise,
full UltraHD resolution was also delivered via Chromecast, a first in
our experience. In both cases the video was rather choppy, with a lot
of stopping and buffering, except for the fairly low bit-rate stuff. It
didn’t seem to make a difference whether we used Wi-Fi or Ethernet.
Networks vary, of course.
With music, the TV played back most of our content, supporting
FLAC files up to 192kHz sampling along with MP3 and AAC. It also
played AC3 files, but didn’t play DSD (or course) nor Apple Lossless.
Photos appeared to be bottlenecked down to 1080p when fed either
via DLNA and Chromecast. However full resolution was available
when the media player was reading them from USB (albeit at 4:2:0
colour resolution).
CONCLUSION
While there were wobbles with Google Assistant/Alexa voice functions,
there usually are, and no doubt TCL will be looking into these things
over time and issuing firmware updates. The TCL 55X7 is a very good
TV for most free-to-air material and video playback, with Android
delivering access to a wide range of streaming content, all displayed
with a high quality picture at an affordable price. And if 55 inches is a
touch small for you, there’s a 65-inch version too, priced at $3299.