John Darko
I first polled the Darko.Audio subscriber base with this question in 2022: “Do you have a TV between your loudspeakers?” 70% said ‘yes’, 30% ‘no’. This result was one reason I turned bullish on the TV’s potential as a ‘now playing’ screen for streamed music. That potential has already been realised by Marantz, Roon and, most recently, WiiM. I mean: why put postage-stamped-sized cover art on the front panel of a streaming amplifier or streaming DAC when it can be forked to a TV over HDMI or over the network to an Apple TV app? (That’s a rhetorical question).
Chatting about the ‘now playing’ screen issue with members of the Roon team at Munich High-End, I told them about my 2022 poll result. They seemed surprised that such a high percentage of people had a TV between their loudspeakers. And thinking back, me too.
Seeing that poll in the rear-view mirror made me wonder if the results were an anomaly of the pandemic years. Between 2020 and 2022, many people were forced to spend time at home. Perhaps they had spent more money on making that home time more enjoyable, including upgrading the TV and hi-fi system. Perhaps.
There was only one way to find out: run the poll again, this time factoring in projectors and the possibility that some respondents might have more than one set of hi-fi speakers:
In 2025, three years after the original poll, the result has barely budged. 69% of respondents said they have a TV or projector between their main hi-fi speakers and 31% said they do not.
I hope these numbers push more manufacturers into making hardware and/or coding software that allows us to route the ‘now playing’ screen to a TV. Why? Just as the LP sleeve does for vinyl and the booklet for a CD, a larger ‘now playing’ screen gives us something to look at when we are streaming music.
