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Comment by morecoffee | Hacker News Reader

Tangential, but for the longest time I couldn't figure out why VLC always played music / DVDs at such low volume. Setting the system volume to max and overdriving VLC's volume slider was the only way I could actually hear the soft parts.

Recently I found out about the volume compressor, which with a single check box does exactly the right thing. I asked myself "why the heck isn't this box checked by default?" I think the answer is with audio purists wanting to stem the loudness war.

When reading about CD mastering maxing out the volume, It seems like it is the right decision. Most people do want the loudest setting, no mess with the EQ, compressors, etc. Only a tiny population wants to preserve the fidelity of the amplitude.

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I think the reason it's not on by default is that so much music is already compressed to insane levels that sounds terrible - double-y compressing things doubles the terribleness.

I love music, but I wouldn't call myself an audiophile (heck, I'm listening out of my lappy's default sound card with cheap headphones) but in this case I totally agree with the audiophile's term "fatigue". Music that is over-compressed doesn't sound bad to my untrained ear, but it's just fatiguing after a while. The silence that finally comes is a pleasure!

But having it double-compress by default is like hearing those people who want to play there car stereo louder than their system can handle and it distorts like crazy: they are obviously still enjoying it - but it's not the song the artists recorded. (Ok, maybe an exaggeration... but I still don't think we should encourage it!)

Actually if the music those crazy people were listening to was overcompressed, they'd be able to turn it up louder without distortion :)

Movies generally have a wide dynamic range so that loud action scenes are very loud. You don't want your normal dialogue to be at the same volume as your explosions, unless you're watching at home with the volume down.

Much to the chagrin of people like my wife, who, during scenes with just dialog will remark, "I can't hear it, turn it up!" and then when the action starts, "Too loud!" I end up adjusting the volume up and down over and over throughout a 2-1/2 hour film. As much as I appreciate good dynamic range in recordings, I wish my sound system had a "constant loudness" function that I could just engage and put the remote down.

Most good quality receivers sold in the past decade have a volume limit setting. It also sounds like you might not have the gain set right on your center channel. Two things to check which might help!

Just give her the remote.

That function exists generally in audio, and is called dynamic compression or just compression. I've seen some TVs with that functionality and I know Apple TV can do it, so I would guess you might have that option lurking somewhere in your system. When you turn that on, you're taking a wide dynamic range and squishing it, which essentially just pulls up quieter content, so you have to consider how pure and accurate you like your content playback to be when doing that. Well-crafted films in particular occasionally play with audio level for effect (Interstellar being a dramatic example of that), so you might subtly suck a bit of air from a director's intention which might matter to you.

If you have a nice 5.1 setup, try boosting your center channel, too. That might help.

That is almost definitely related to the center channel being either too low, not existing, or some element of the sound setup mixing the center into the left and right.

I have the same problem and I have not fixed it yet because I have yet to purchase a sound system with a center channel.

I have this problem too. I'm assuming it's because I don't have a center channel, just to big stereo speakers. Even with the receiver set to know that there isn't a center channel, it doesn't seem able to compensate. I guess movies are just mastered assuming 5.1 now and if you only rock stereo, you get compromised sound.

This is what subtitles are for.

Somehow I suspect that the same people who like overcompressed music (to drown out everything else) love a big dynamic range in movies (gut-shaking explosions when dialog is at comfortable listening volume) and that those who like music with silent parts really would not mind being able to leave a cinema without a minor tinnitus. It's a confusing world.

> I wish my sound system had a "constant loudness" function that I could just engage and put the remote down.

Any half-decent A/V receiver has this option. My Marantz receiver for example can scale the compression automatically depending on volume. The more you turn down the volume, the more it will compress, if you turn it up to max there will be no compression.

> unless you're watching at home with the volume down.

Is this not the most common scenario, though?

Super high dynamic range is great in a cinema but terrible if you're watching at home and want to hear the dialogue but also not wake the neighbourhood when it flicks to an action scene.

My upstair neighbour stopped banging on the floor when I started using reclock's dynamic audio compressor in MPC-HC.

It sometimes end up slightly unnatural, but it beats having to constantly change the volume throughout a movie - something I didn't do too well anyway, evidently.

I still prefer the media to have better dynamics and have control over how much compression I want to apply.

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