How Amazon's new soundbar saved my The Lord of the Rings marathon

One of the biggest moments in any The Lord of the Rings fan's life is introducing the movie series to a significant other who hasn't seen it before. You spend as much time watching their reactions, making sure that they're not checking their phone and trying to refrain from chiming in "he broke his foot when he kicked that, the scream is real!" as you do watching the films.

Even though you know deep down that the natural charm of the three movies will win over even the most cynical viewer, it's hard not to worry if you love the movies so much. And when I started introducing my girlfriend to the trilogy, a complaint of hers nearly derailed the entire process... until Amazon's new soundbar saved the day.

I was recently testing the Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus for a review, and I thought the perfect way to do that would be to continue my introducing of The Lord of the Rings to my girlfriend. Next up, The Two Towers part one (I've been playing it as six films instead of three, as each disc of the extended edition is about two hours long anyway!).

After preparing a themed dinner from my Tolkien cookbook (sadly not centered around this story in particular, as they're mainly focused on Shire food or dishes based on cultures only introduced in The Return of the King), we sat down to watch The Two Towers. It's my favorite of the trilogy, but somehow I'd never watched the extended version before.

That was probably a mistake as, like Fellowship (but unlike King), I quickly understood why the scenes cut from the theatrical were missing — lots of them felt superfluous, and some introduced comedy at really bizarre points. So I was already on my toes — will an entire scene of Merry and Pippin jostling to drink stream water with growth properties affect my girlfriend's experience with the movie? And then, as Sam and Frodo continued their trudge through Emyn Muil in one of the rare scenes that is in the theatrical cut, I heard some words which sent a shiver down my spine: "I can't hear a word they're saying".

I could tell from her tone of voice that she wasn't referring to this one particular exchange: she'd evidently been struggling to make out the dialogue for a while now. This was a LOTR fan's worst nightmare: how could she appreciate Éowyn's strong soliloquy to Aragon, Théoden's lament for his fate or Sam's rousing oration to Frodo if she literally couldn't hear the words?

I couldn't quite blame her either: the more bass that speakers like the Soundbar Plus provide, the more that lower-pitch articles of speech get emphasized, which sometimes means you need to work to hear dialogue. Even on normal TV speakers, TV shows far too often have hard-to-hear dialogue, and I'm not the only person who has this problem.

You know how I know I'm not the only person? Because Amazon has a solution, and it's one that's present in the Soundbar Plus. As soon as my girlfriend raised her concern, I remembered that the device had said feature.

This is a button on the soundbar's remote which says 'dialog' and when you press it, it basically makes the spoken word easier to hear compared to surrounding sounds. You can press it multiple times for different intensities of this effect, and I pressed it twice.

As far as I can gather, the way this mode works is by finding the frequency of speech and increasing the prominence of this frequency compared to higher and lower ones; in effect, though, it just made the words Frodo and Sam were saying much easier to understand.

I'm not a scientist, I'm not going to pretend to understand exactly how it works beyond that, but the effect was clear: my girlfriend said "oh, thanks", and nothing more.

To a LOTR fan in this particular situation, "oh, thanks" was as good as saying "I'm enjoying the film more now" which is like Christmas and your birthday wrapped into one. And just as importantly, I could hear the speech more clearly, which would have been really useful if we'd reached the Osgiliath and Helm's Deep sequences.

Unfortunately we didn't, because after an hour and three quarters she was tired of watching — I don't blame her, given some of those inserted Treebeard scenes — and I wanted her to be in her highest spirits to appreciate the second half of The Two Towers.

But our slow The Lord of the Rings marathon will continue, and I'll definitely be using the Soundbar Plus and its dialogue feature for the rest of it. In fact, it could have saved the marathon — I can't abide by a single word being lost from Théoden, Aragorn and Sam's speeches in Return of the King!

And it'll be over soon: after the second half of The Two Towers and both halves of King, there won't be any more movies (or a TV show) as part of the marathon...

For more information on the soundbar, find my full Amazon Fire TV Soundbar Plus review here.