HDTV and audio volume woes

olasek

olasek

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olasek
About 1.5 yrs ago I purchased a new HDTV and a Blue-Ray disc player. All is fine except I do have a weird problem with audio volume and I am not sure whether it is normal or only my imagination that something is not right.

When I watch cable TV audio is great, I barely use 20% of the available volume range because at 20 it is already way too loud. But when I play DVDs all of a sudden I have to crank up volume to like 60-70% and even at 100% it is not even close to being too loud.

My installation is perfectly standard, I don't have any other devices hooked up except the box from my cable company.

:confused:
 
I hate to be the bearer of "bad news" but it's because there really wasn't a good digital reference standard for audio levels when HDTV started becoming popular.

SOME... not many... Cable and/or Dish boxes have a setting buried deep in the menus where you can change between the couple of standards that became more commonplace later on. Dish Network DVR's for example, had this setting that attempted to help with this.

The movie industry uses a completely different standard than the TV broadcast folks too. Playing a DVD or BluRay will be at an overall different audio level than watching OTA TV. And if you're watching from Cable or Dish, most of those providers dork with the audio levels too, sometimes running the whole audio feed they're getting through a compander in real-time to "squish" the audio from a audio dynamics point of view. OTA TV commercials (well, commercials in general) are raised up to be as loud as they possibly can while not clipping. Magnavox even made a TV that tried to detect this and turned the audio down when it did.

If you're already HDMI to/from everything that's a good start. Dig in the manuals for the devices. My Toshiba DVD-R has a setting for output levels too. You can dig yourself way down into Alice's rabbit hole on this one. There's test DVDs that allow you to calibrate the crap out of everything with inexpensive test gear, and many "audio/videophiles" either do it themselves or pay someone to do it at install or later.

My gear here isn't fancy enough to bother, I just messed with it until it sounded good to me. I played with the above-mentioned audio settings for weeks until finally factory-defaulting everything and starting over just listening more acutely.
 
p.s. I only know too much about the audio level stuff above because my last job was in videoconferencing. Those setups are even worse, with most conference rooms being an awful glass "fishbowl from hell" completely with significant acoustic echo to contend with, and sometimes tons of mics in a large auditorium.

And there were scant actual ratified engineering standards... TV and Hollywood at least have them.
 
Nate's right. See if there is a setting for audio output level somewhere in the DVD machine menu. There may not be, especially if it has a full digital path from disk to HDMI. I'd also look in the TV menu for an audio level setting for the HDMI input. If there are multiple inputs, you may want to try a different HDMI input. One of my TV receivvers has a "audio leveler" function that's switchable... intent is to address thhis kind of issue.
 
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