Tuesday, July 7, 2009

The Problem With HD and Blu-Ray

This is completely and entirely off topic, but I felt like complaining about it here.

Why the hell is it that every time I try to watch a Blu-Ray movie on my fancy new player that the sound effects and music volume is turned way up (deafening really) but the dialogue is turned down so much that I can't actually hear it at all and have to rely on captions.

It's the same, though to a slightly lesser degree on HD television channels.

Is this a common thing across all HD sources? Is there some special fix that I don't know about? Or is this an example of stupid movie studios who assume "louder is better" and "people don't really care about what's being said on screen anyway"?

5 comments:

  1. I have the same problem with normal DVDs on my TV, but not the TV channels, and not a problem playing DVDs on my computer. Drives me up a wall.

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  2. Glad it's not just me then.

    Funny thing is, standard DVD's work just fine, it's just the Blu-Rays. Guess I ain't buyin' anymore of them in my lifetime.

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  3. It might be a quirk of your audio setup - dialogue is usually mixed primarily to the center channel, so if you're sitting on your couch with the rear left and right speakers near your ears, the sound effects coming out of those could be drowning out the talking coming from the center speaker all the way up by your TV. Or do you just have two speakers, but the DVD defaults to 5.1 or 7.1 sound? It would try to push the dialogue in that case to a center channel that doesn't exist. I would poke around in these areas to sort things out, and if possible, maybe just make the center channel a little louder (my amp allows for that kind of adjustment, your mileage may vary.)

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  4. Maybe that's it. I'll give it a whirl at some point.

    The only thing is, though, that I'm just trying to play the sound through the television. Don't have a big fancy audio setup.

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