u/alparius

I'm looking to get a pair of passive floorstanders. Context:

• 35 m2 living room
• apartment building; fairly thick walls and only have neighbors above and across, but still a bit worried about bass
• source is a wiim amp pro, which means no separate center/sub anytime soon
• usage is equal amounts of movies/series and music, with some gaming sprinkled on top
• especially for music, I wouldn't be sitting in a pencil-marked sweetspot, so I'm looking for something that needs no toe-in and sounds great in the whole room
• in terms of sound signature, I'm looking for something clean-ish, not extrabass party stuff. For reference I'm using Sennheiser HD 560 and Adam Audio D3V at my desktop. Still, I wonder if here I might need something a bit more bassy and less analytical for movies? - but still with good midrange for dialogue
• budget would be up to 1000 EUR for the pair

So far my frontrunners are Elac Debut Reference DFR52 (€700), Dali Oberon 5 (€630) or 7 (€830), Dali Sonik 5 (€900). But I'm looking at many other models too, like Wharfedale EVO 4.3 (€800 today) or Diamond 12.3i or Linton 85, Q Acoustics 3050 i/c, Monitor Audio Bronze 200, Canton GLE 70 S2 or GLE 90 etc, but I'm open to brand new suggestions as well.

I am really torn between a couple options.

Reflections are kind of my pet peeve. I didn't personally have a TV for the last few years due to moving around a lot, but I've noticed and hated glare on friends' tvs a lot more than they did (tcl c7k, some LG C series etc).

So I love the coating on the samsung QN90FAT. That TV to me looks so much better than almost anything else in the showroom. It doesn't seem washed out to me, and not being jumpscared by my fat face getting choked on popcorn in dark scenes will probably mean a lot more to me than marginal panel or processing improvements.

As for other TVs, my main runnerup-s were TCL 8 series, but I couldn't view a C8K or C8L live though, I'm not sure how much better they are than C7K. But Hisense U8Q also seemed bad, and the U7Q Pro is unfortunately heavily nerfed in the EU. And then even if I were to pay the sony tax, the bravias are straight up mirrors with built in netflix. LG G6 looks acceptable, but still super expensive.

So then my big problem with Samsung is the lack of Dolby Vision. I can't with good heart bring myself to drop the money for a TV that will default back to some inferior HDR10 picture most of the time, because HDR 10+ is so niche (whether streaming or "plex").

What do you guys think I should do?

So I'm looking to buy a mini-led TV. First, I was hooked on the value of TCLs, but their upscaling is behind other brands', and I don't think I will always have all the highest quality subscriptions and sources everywhere. But then I am also afraid of stuff like the LG ad hell and other custom OS bs.

Hence the question:

1. If I have a google streamer 4k connected to a tv and watch a random Netflix standard (fhd?) stream, or a 720p YouTube video, or some old local movie file over the Jellyfin app, is my tv getting 4K signal all the time, or the raw original one? So would the full suite of my TVs built-in upscaling and processing apply in this case, or only when using the native OS and apps there?
2. Or in other different words, is there a quality disadvantage to using a google tv stick vs using the native OS on something like a Samsung or LG?
3. Same questions with Apple TV 4K, if the answer is any different. I am not an iPerson, but I am open to it as I've seen good reviews.

Anywhere I look I find different and contradicting answers.