I’ve often wished DVDs and Blu-ray has an audio track where sound was compressed. The wider ranges of volume are fine for cinemas but absolutely terrible for casual viewing (which is 99% of home viewing). It’s even worse when you have kids who are trying to sleep while you watch your movie.
Dolby Digital audio tracks are supposed to support dynamic range compression in your A/V receiver for exactly this reason. There is a dialog normalization field in the audio data that says how loud dialog is, and then the receiver is supposed to apply compression using predefined curves based on that value. Try looking for a DRC setting.
The problem with that is you need a receiver that supports Dolby Digital and most homes won’t have that. In fact my lounge TV doesn’t even have external speakers nor amp attached. So DD does t really help the casual viewers I was describing.
DVD and Blu-ray players that do internal decoding of the DD soundtrack (most DVDs and Blu-rays will have a DD soundtrack, plus others, last time I checked a few years ago) are supposed to apply DRC. Some might have an option to change the DRC strength. If you're watching over-the-air ATSC broadcasts in the US, those will have DD (AKA AC3) audio, and the TV should be applying DRC based on the same metadata.
Streaming services have taken a massive step backward in this regard. TVs should have better signal processing options for this (and some do). I have a custom "night mode" set up that deals with mixed streaming volume levels in my system, but I'm using highly customized pro audio gear in ways that the average user won't want to pay for or deal with.
Good point. Most of my movie consumption these days is via streaming services.
I am fortunate enough to have a home cinema room with a projector and some pretty beefy audio gear hooked up. But most of the time we watch in the lounge where it’s a more casual affair.
Some speakers (Sonos comes to mind) have a "night mode" that basically does that, compressing the dynamic range. There is also a dialogue mode that emphasizes the human speech frequencies.
I really dislike post production dynamic equalisers because they’re altering the sound in a way that wasn’t intended. Sure it sometimes sounds better, but it doesn’t always. You get a lot better results when the compression is added to the tracks before they’re rendered down to a single master.
