I’m getting annoyed with newer movies having dialogue scenes so quiet you have to crank the volume to hear it, and then action scenes or gunshots or what have you are so ridiculously loud you have to turn it down. Then comes another dialogue scene where things are so quiet again, it is annoying. Also hard to watch with sleeping people in another room or kids without waking them.
Am I imagining this? Is it a by product of mixing for fancy surround sound setups?
Not imagining it. Sound mixing and levels suck about 75% of the time
My last receiver, and possibly my current one have the ability to level that out. Or rather, if they sense something really loud coming though, they knock the volume down.
If you have surround sound, it could be the way your speakers are balanced (the satellites are set too loud or the center is set too low) or whoever mixed the sound is sending explosions and car crashed through the center channel when most of that should go to the front speakers.
If you have surround sound a fix might be to jack up the center channel’s volume and/or move the speaker physically closer to you. Even if you can pull it forward a foot or two, inverse square and all that. That’ll let you turn the overall volume down.
Also, and I know this is silly, make sure there’s nothing blocking the center (or any) speaker. For a few weeks I was having a problem with my sound, after a while I realized there was a glass shelf, that I couldn’t see, leaned up against the center speaker. It was amazing how much that messed with the sound.
This has been a well known and long running problem for many years.
It is set this way for people with a particular subset of surround sound systems. Don’t have that type or not have it at all? Tough.
They know and they don’t care. That’s all there is to it.
Balance your surround system for the primary watching spot. (Most people never bother doing this.) It’s often worthwhile to then turn up the center channel a little (2-3 db) for better conversation levels at moderate volume.
What get reputations for being crappy surround systems often just have crappy default setup.
Play with your audio settings, even if you don’t have a fancy surround sound system. Decent TV’s have a variety of audio settings.
This happened to me recently while watching Doctor Who. It was the first program I’d noticed this problem with, but it was really really bad. Once I made the adjustments, it was fine.
How am I supposed to adjust things for my ordinary TV hooked up to a plain ol’ pair of bookshelf speakers? What is there that can be changed aside from playing with a standard equalizer? Serious question, I’ve also had trouble listening to voices on recent seasons of Doctor Who in particular.
In my experience American TV is the worst for commercials jacked loud and for sudden overly loud scenes. But British productions are the worst for just bad audio. Like too much ambient noise, or the music is too loud. When I’m watching British productions I’m always anticipating the commercials, as I watch over US stations, it’s a one two combo, I’ve turned it up because it’s British, and now an American commercial break pops up and your ears almost bleed.
Many TVs have a “dynamic” setting in the audio menu. It may be called something else depending on make and model. This will reduce the dynamics of the signal so there is less of a volume difference between the soft and the loud parts.
Even if it’s an older model. I used to have a Sony that was bought new in '93 and it had this.