Hacker News Reader

The best thing I ever did for my den was put one of these between the TV and the speakers: https://www.fmraudio.com/rnc.html

Twiddle a few knobs and now everything is the same volume and I can keep it at a nice low level and not wake the kids, but still hear everything.

Interesting. Audacity has various compression settings. Have you tried that?

Sure, but my TV can't run Audacity :)

Admittedly I haven't tried this so probably misguided, but if you can stick that box in front of the TV, could you not put a computer instead?

Yes, a computer with a good low-noise ad/da converter can be an excellent compressor. But it's likely to be much more expensive than a used RNC.