I hooked up a TV in my father-in-law’s “sick room” (he’s bed-ridden with MS). So that he can use the DVD player, I put it next to him and connected it to the TV with 12 foot cables. The video works fine, but the audio is weak. When you go from broadcast to DVD you have to turn the audio way up.
Is this because of the cable length, or just an inconsistency between the two units? Of course, the definitive test would be to use a shorter cord, but that’d be a bit of a pain. Would higher quality cables help? I didn’t use Monster Cables, but used Acoustic Research cables that seemed high-quality (pretty packaging).
I’ve yet to hook up the VCR which will also have to be near him, and am wondering if I’ll go through the same sound issue there.
I suppose an amp might help, but don’t want to spend the money.
This is completely normal. Typical volume on DVD is much lower than broadcast TV.
This is because DVD has much more dynamic range than is possible in a broadcast signal and much better signal to noise ratio as well.
The idea (especially with action films) is to leave lots of room for the exciting parts (depth charges, bombs, machine guns, train wrecks, etc…) to get much louder than the normal voice level.
On a big system, this works quite well. The dialog comes out conversaional levels and the fireworks rock the house.
There is something that you can probably do that will make it better for just watching through a TV. Look in the DVD player book/manual or DVD player menus for something labeled with words like “dynamic range control” or “compression”.
If it says “dynamic range”, set it to minimum… if it says “compression”, set it to maximum. These settings should be associated with the audio settings inside the DVD player.
This will bring the really quiet and the really loud parts of the DVD much closer together. It will also make the level for dialog closer to what you get on broadcast TV.
I concur with scotth in principle, but the true test would be to temporarily connect the components with shorter cords. However, twelve feet is not exceptionally long.
12 feet is nothing. Input impedance for standard line level input jacks is 50Kohms. 12 feet of patch cable offers what, an extra few tenths of an ohm to the signal source? I doubt you’d even be able to measure a signal loss with an oscilloscope.
I used to do AV installation work. The only time we’d run into cable problems using standard, commercial equipment was if we were running long cables-- more than 30 metres and some stuff would give us issues, but usually we could run up to 60 metres without problems, given half-decent cables and connectors.
If you’re going 12 feet, you should not have a problem.