How to reduce loud sounds on disc?

Home Theatre
1

So I use my Atom HE to also run my TV sound through the speakers via optical.

Issue I am well aware of is present here as well. Unfiltered movie sound has the issue that when voices are at a normal level action scenes tend to want to blow the rear wall of the room away.

I do most viewing in my Apple TV and there I have the setting to reduce loud sounds on and that works perfectly.

But does anyone here have a solution of for when you want to play from disc with something like a PS5? Is there a setting I don’t know about or some other solution?

2

It’s an expensive solution, but most av receivers denon etc will have a “night time” mode that achieves what you want; a better balance of the channels keeping dialogue audible and crash bang wallop less dynamic. You would then feed the output to your atom via rca input.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the idea. But as my Apple TV does most of what I want I was hoping there would be a workable solution that does not include more hardware. Ok if it was something small to put in the sound path I may bite.

4

Thats what we did too. Combined with adding a centre speaker it made TV/film viewing much better as it helped with dialogue clarity and avoids the louder part of the soundtrack from being too loud.

1 Like
5

This loudness issue is something I mentioned about 3 years ago when setting up my tv with a soundbar. Using optical out gave very loud background ‘effects’ and the voices were drowned out. I don’t know of the reasons, but I suspect it’s a combination of the surround sound settings and audio mixing to generate what they think is good. Cinema has problems like this too. I found; something like people chatting in the street, that the background street noise was so falsely loud, that I strained to hear what they were saying. I only have stereo, so thought I’d try the analogue out from the tv and hey presto all the horrible issues went in one go. Lovely smooth voices and no weird loud background. Everything sounded balanced. Never looked back since.

Worth looking at.

1 Like
6

Good idea and yeah you gotta have something that mixes it that way. I use Apple TV for that but then of course all discs will not be processed that way.

Unfortunately I am already using the analog input on my HE for my record player and like involving the DAC of the Atom in the mix.

1 Like
7

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.