Most players (and if not in the player, in your receiver or TV) have a dynamic range setting to narrow the difference between the loudest and softest sounds. The narrowest range is sometimes called the “Nighttime” setting, the idea being that you are watching a movie at night and want to hear all the dialogue but don’t want the [del]sex scenes[/del] explosions to wake up your family.
I loathe that too (apartment dweller).
Also hate mumbling actors and bad sound mixing that makes dialogue hard to make out at normal volume. We’ve resorted to using subtitles/closed captioning, and both of us have normal hearing.