Sennheiser TV Clear review: Pick up dialogue more easily while watching TV

Watching TV with other people can be a pain sometimes.

Sometimes they like it too loud. Meaning you’re deafened by their love of Dad’s Army.

And sometimes, you’re the one who is struggling to hear what’s going on and would like the TV several notches louder – even though your hearing isn’t enough a problem to need a hearing aid or medical treatment. 

If the second scenario sounds familiar, you might be the target market for the Sennheiser TV Clear earbuds. 

The wireless headphones are designed to help people get clear audio from their television, when their hearing might not be as sharp as it was but they still don’t need to use a special medical device. 

Their target market is someone in their 40s to 60s who may sometimes struggle to pick out all the dialogue while watching TV. 

That’s the typical age people might start to notice their hearing decline, but if you’re anything like me you may find yourself rewinding to actually catch all the quick-fire comments on a show like Succession.

I tried the headphones hoping that they might help me get a sharp understanding of programmes like this without needing to switch on the subtitles.

Setting them up is fairly easy, with even me as a tech novice managing to plug the transmitter into the TV, charge the earbuds in their case and then pair them using Bluetooth.

Once ready, they last for up to 15 hours on a single charge.

It wasn’t completely straightforward though, so if you’re the kind of person who struggles with flat pack furniture and asks for help updating your phone, you may want to rope someone else in to help getting started.

At £349.99, they don’t come cheap at all, so it’s worth thinking carefully about whether this is the right product. After all, you can buy a whole new TV for that price. 

If clearer dialogue rather than clearer sound in general is what you’re looking for, then this could be a useful tool.

To try and get more clarity when it comes to voices, some of the same technology used in hearing aids is incorporated.

Sennheiser is famous as a headphone manufacturer, but it was recently bought by the larger company Sonova, which manufactures hearing aids.

The new earbuds, released for sale in the UK last month, combine the expertise of both to create a product intended to help with understanding sound from the TV, especially speech.

Does it work? I’m on the fence about these earphones. I don’t have hearing problems myself – as far as I know – although who wouldn’t want a bit more clarity sometimes?

I was hoping for some kind of immersive sound experience when trying these headphones, where I’d find myself picking up bits of audio, music and background sound I didn’t even know was there. 

Perhaps I expected too much, but I probably wouldn’t prefer to wear them over just watching the TV normally. 

Although they are intended to help with hearing, I found that the maximum volume was not especially loud – so if I wanted to watch an action film for example, I might find it a bit unsatisfying. No doubt this is better for your overall ear health in general, but I would prefer to be given a warning about whether the sound was too high and make my own choice about it. 

For those who already have slightly poorer hearing, this might become even more of an issue. 

One of the features of the earbuds is to allow ambient sound in, allowing you to have a conversation as well as hear what’s happening on TV. Great news if you like to recreate Gogglebox when watching things at home.

It works with a small microphone on the earbuds which can pick up what other people are saying and then amplify it to you, so that you can hear without taking the earbud out.

This is a smart feature which deals with one of the most annoying aspects of trying to watch TV with headphones.

It does work, with a control bar on a Sennheiser app on your smartphone to determine how much ambient sound you want picked up.

If you speak yourself, you’ll hear your own voice amplified back to you as well which is a bit strange – but it’s better than having to take the headphones in and out every time you want to say something.

Although the headphones come with three different size attachments to put into your ear, I found that they felt a little bulky no matter which one I used.

A plus point of the headphones is that I did not detect a lag between the action on screen and the sound in my ears. 

Sennheiser say that they re-used the radio technology developed by Sonova for hearing aids, allowing them to provide ‘outstanding streaming times and the ultra-low latency of the system’. 

Once you actually get them on, there are five settings to change the clarity of the voices you hear. This ranges from quite a tinny sound really emphasising the dialogue, to a more even sound.

I found myself using the lowest setting because the audio quality seemed better – but if I had more problems picking out the dialogue, the higher level could have been helpful.

Your experience of these headphones likely depends on why you are buying them.

If it is purely to experience high quality sound from your television without worrying about waking up the neighbours, there may well be another product you can find at a cheaper price point.

But if you struggle with hearing dialogue on television, this might really help with your understanding.

It’s worth a try in that case, but if you don’t have any hearing issues it’s probably not for you.

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