The LG C5 OLED 65-inch television represents a pinnacle of modern display technology, offering viewers breathtaking 4K clarity, infinite contrast ratios, and the deep, inky blacks that have made OLED the gold standard for home cinema. However, this visual masterpiece is hampered by a significant and frustrating flaw: its internal audio system is fundamentally incapable of matching the quality of its screen. This disparity creates a jarring experience for enthusiasts who expect a premium television to provide a complete sensory package right out of the box.
The limitations of the C5’s audio were made painfully clear during a recent viewing of Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins. While the cinematography was rendered with stunning precision, the dialogue was nearly impossible to decipher without pushing the volume levels toward 70 percent. Even accounting for Nolan’s tendency to prioritize loud sound effects and sweeping scores over spoken lines, the TV’s small, down-firing drivers simply could not provide the mid-range clarity needed to separate Christian Bale’s gravelly voice from the background noise. This forced a constant struggle with the remote, fluctuating between deafening action sequences and whispers that required total silence in the room to understand.
LG has attempted to address these physical hardware limitations through a suite of software enhancements, including AI Sound Pro and Clear Voice Pro. Unfortunately, these digital patches often do more harm than good. Clear Voice Pro, in particular, tends to over-process the audio, making voices sound sharp, tinny, and unnaturally metallic. It creates an artificial echo that strips the soundscape of its depth, leaving the background score feeling muddy and distant. Standard and Cinema modes offer little relief, functioning more like basic equalizers that fail to solve the core issue: you cannot cheat the physics of sound when using tiny speakers squeezed into an ultra-thin chassis.
This leads to a frustrating industry paradox. Consumers spend thousands of dollars on a flagship TV, only to be told they must spend several hundred more on a soundbar to make it usable. This is not just a financial burden but a logistical one. Because the C5 is designed to be sleek and low-profile, many standard soundbars are tall enough to partially block the bottom edge of the screen when placed on a media console. Even wall-mounting doesn’t solve the problem if the furniture below is too high. While ultra-low profile options like the LG Sound Suite H7 are available to fix this, they often carry a price tag near $1,000, nearly doubling the initial investment just to hear what the actors are saying.
