I live in a small place and have surround sound home theater speakers with my TV setup.
It seems that especially with Blu-Ray movies, I have to turn up the volume for speaking parts and then when action happens, it’s like a jet is taking off in my living room and I have to scramble for the remote to turn it the hell down. (I’m sure my neighbors hate me)
I’ve fiddled with the volume level on the center/left/right/rear speakers to no avail- if I crank up the center speaker volume then the sound is distorted (there are limits to the volume levels on these anyway)
Am I missing some basic setting that will even out the volume swings?
does the player or receiver have something called “night mode?” If it does, it’ll “compress” the dynamic range to make the soft parts louder and the loud parts softer.
I just complained about this same problem myself in the other home theater thread.
If you have a relatively modern receiver it should have a dynamic volume setting. Onkyo Late Night, Yamaha Adaptive DRC, THX Loudness Plus, Audyssey Dynamic Volume, etc. Doesn’t always work well but worth a try.
I actually don’t have a receiver, or well, the receiver is built into the blu-ray player. It’s a Panasonic Blu-Ray home theater setup- it all came in one system (SC-BT 230, I believe).
I don’t remember ever seeing a “night mode” option. I have the following equalizer options: Flat, Heavy, Clear, Soft. There is a setting called “Whisper-mode surround” and the manual says “you can enhance the surround effect for low volume sound- convenient for late night viewing” - maybe this is it!
I just looked up your manual (pdf) on the panasonic website, and Dynamic Range Compression is in the Setup->Audio menu. It doesn’t say what the available settings are, but you’ll want Heavy or Full or something like that. Page 36 of the linked manual.
ETA: The whole rationale is that TV shows and old VCR tapes used a lot of dynamic compression - so when you watched a show loud enough to hear the dialog, the car explosion 2 scenes later didn’t blow your socks off. But DVDs & Blu-rays don’t use dynamic compression, because if you’ve got a full home theater setup you just may want the explosion to blow your socks off, as it would in real life (or the movie theater). So the source material offers the full dynamic range, and the compression is user selectable.
Are you sure your center speaker is connected and working properly at the correct volume level?
This happened to me once (center speaker disconnected) and before I figured it out I had the same scenario as you - had to bump volume way up to hear voices.
Another option is to watch at a lower volume but with the subtitles on. The dialogue might not be crystal clear but it won’t matter since you’re reading it.