We received an email the other day that echoed the findings of the UNSW’s recent survey into the most common gripes in strata living.
Right at the top, was the issue of flat-screen TVs attached to apartment walls. Flat screen TVs are tailor made for apartment living. They offer bigger pictures without taking up any space (unlike the old monster CRT tellies) and can look very cool on the wall of your lounge or bedroom.
The problem is that there’s a good chance that the wall they are on is also the wall of the next door neighbours. This wasn’t a problem with the first plasma and LCD TVs because the speakers in them were tiny, tinny and generally crap.
But now manufacturers are offering better, louder and ‘bass-ier’ sound as one way of differentiating their TVs from all the other apparently identical flat screen units on the market. Result – your wall is the vibrating with the sound of your neighbour’s TV.
And it’s not just the lounge. Many neighbouring apartments are designed to have matching use of rooms – bedrooms next to bedrooms, for instance. And if your bedroom wall is throbbing with whatever’s on late-night TV, in all likelihood, so is your neighbour’s.
So what do we do?
Banning TVs on walls is a bit harsh but you could insist that, in any TVs mounted on common walls, the internal speakers must be switched off and separate speakers be used instead.
That way the owner has a choice. Mount the screen on the wall and pay for better sound or keep the screen on the furniture and use its speakers. And you can’t fix speakers to walls or ceilings either.
The reality is that most buildings will have enough general rules on noise nuisance and common property (which adjoining walls are) to deal with this. By why not save everyone a lot of grief by warning people there might be a problem before they start building their own wall of sound?
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