I’m constantly having to turn the volume up and down depending on the what the scene is. It’s not just me either. A lot of people I know have resorted to just turning on the closed captioning so they can hear what they’re saying. I don’t remember this being an issue before.
In: 2005
I’ll take a risk and speculate that you’re sitting in your living room and want good sound, but mostly just want to hear what people are saying. The problem is that maniacs like me want explosions as big as what we get in the theater in our home. I’ve got speakers taller than my mother-in-law, and I want to exercise them. Movie theaters spend orders of magnitude more on their sound systems than I do, and they want to exercise those to get a good ROI. Theaters and maniacs pay more and shout a LOT louder than regular people, so our opinions carry more weight than they probably should.
One of the easier ways to exercise good rigs is what’s called high dynamic range. Which is to say, making the soft parts as soft as possible and the loud parts so crazy they blow out your windows. Back in the day the limitations of what was in the average person’s home meant engineers had to compress things to the point loud and soft weren’t that far apart.
But that’s not the case today. Flat-screen TV speakers suck so badly almost everyone has a basic home theater setup. And so engineers think it’s ok to cater to maniacs like me, because folks like you have the same basic ability to get the high dynamic range that I do.
What they don’t get is that you’re not a maniac. You’re not gonna optimize your room to reduce the reflections that make those loud parts so painful. Tbh, cheap theater owners don’t do it either, and that’s why it feels like I’m getting foil rammed into my ears whenever I go watch a movie in most theaters.
And you’re right, it has gotten worse. I didn’t used to need to turn my rig up to the point I know it’ll get complaints from the non-maniac parts of my family (i.e. everyone else) when things start exploding. I need to do it all the time now. I *like* it being loud, but the rest of the fam, not so much. My girls out-vote me 2-1, so I end up pumping the volume up and down the same as you.
I’m not sure what the solution is.
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