Philips has just unveiled its 2025 range of OLED TVs, and one of its top two models (known as the OLED+ range) is the Philips OLED+910. This is a high-end OLED TV (using the new-generation META 3.0 OLED panel from LG Display) with a powerful built-in Bowers & Wilkins speaker system at the bottom.
The idea is that it offers an easy single-unit option for people who want premium sound and visuals, but don’t want to deal with the extra boxes of soundbars or an actual home theatre system. Take this out of the box, mount it on the wall – it looks good and fills the room with sound. Easy.
Of course, it actually has to deliver on this promise, but I had a demo with both music and movie audio at Philips’ launch event, and it looks extremely promising.
The speaker setup is a 3.1 system, but there are 10 speakers in total to give it real depth and power. Across the front of the TV at the bottom, hidden behind some Kvadrat acoustic cloth, are left, centre and right speaker arrays.
Each of these arrays consists of two racetrack mid-range drivers, and a tweeter, all independently suspended so their vibrations won’t interfere with each other.
On the back of the TV is a subwoofer – but there’s also a subwoofer out, for wiring up a dedicated sub, and it’s important to know that my demo used a small Bowers & Wilkins sub throughout the session.
The TV comes in 55-inch, 65-inch and 77-inch sizes, and the same speakers are used on all sizes, but are tuned for the particular size, to make sure that sound is aligned to the action on-screen.
You can definitely feel the width of the speaker setup when watching a movie, and the system impresses with ambient sounds especially. Watching the start of A Quiet Place: Day One, the sounds of the city around the on-screen characters and their dialogue feels detached from the action, in a good way – speech comes centrally from the screen, but the traffic sounds and other noise feel beyond and behind the TV.
There’s no virtual surround effect to speak of that I noticed, it’s more just about the width and height in front of you, and I’d be perfectly happy with that.
Speaking of height, while again it’s not trying to put Dolby Atmos sounds above you, it did reveal some impressive vertical motion when someone gets plucked upward from the street in the movie.
There was good dynamic attack for when things get suddenly loud, though when a big explosion hit in the movie, I felt like maybe the speaker was pushing to its limit there – I’d need to test more to find out if it’s the same in other movies.
It’s the same with dialogue; I was expecting a little more clarity than we got, considering it has a strong centre channel, but it might have just been this movie’s mix.
With music, there’s impressive fidelity and a nice warm, rich tone. There’s great separation of different elements in the mix, with crisp mid-range vocals that feel well-textured, and treble percussion could shimmer around the screen nicely.
The bass was broad, pervasive and full – but remember, it was coming from a dedicated sub in my demo, so more testing will be needed there.
What about the picture and features?
As for the picture, the new META 3.0 panel with four-stack Primary RGB Tandem construction continues to impress, after seeing it in the LG G5 and Panasonic Z95B TV at all sizes, and the 83-inch version of the Samsung S95F – it’s going to appear a lot in our list of the best OLED TVs, no question.
There’s better fullscreen brightness, which Philips says should hit 350 nits (but this may depend on the mode), and this seems to help with bolder colors in overall bright scenes (though the panel overall has improved color range), and the bright peak HDR brightness produces cleaner white tones.
I’ve also been impressed by Philips’ new adaptive AI color gamut enhancement tech in the demos so far, which is designed to shift the color gamut of what you’re watching closer to the native gamut of the panel, to provide rich colors – but it’s designed to handle skin tones separately, keeping those as neutral and natural as possible. This will be available on all of its 2025 OLED TVs, happily.
The OLED+910 has 4K 144Hz support with VRR for gaming, and some new features in Philips’ Game Bar software for customizing the picture based on your game.
However, there are still only two HDMI 2.1 ports (out of four) for gaming in 4K 120Hz/144Hz. Notably, Philips has upgraded its budget OLED TV, the OLED760, to include four HDMI 2.1 ports – but the company told me that it had to choose between a larger and more powerful chip for picture processing that only supports 2x HDMI 2.1 ports, or a less powerful chip with 4x HDMI 2.1 ports. For the OLED810, OLED+910 and OLED+950, it chose the more powerful chips to prioritise picture.
Still, at least with the built-in B&W sound, you won’t sacrifice one of those ports to one of the best soundbars over HDMI eARC.
On top of all this, it comes with Philips’ four-sided Ambilight tech. I’m a total convert to Ambilight – it makes the picture feel much bigger than it is, which is probably ideal for a TV like this that aims to bring a solid home theater experience to people who don’t want the scale of gadgets and installation that a more complex setup requires.
We rated 2024’s version of this TV, the Philips OLED+909, very highly – and with the new panel, new processing, and re-engineering of the sound system with its own better processing, I think this looks like a strong contender if you want one of the best TVs for sound.
We’ll see how it holds up in testing, relying on its own sub, around the time of its June launch. There’s no confirmed pricing yet, but last year’s model started at £1,999 for the 55-inch.
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