Sound distribution

[Cully]

I have had two different home surround sound systems. Every time I play a DVD the sound in the background is super loud and the voices you can barely hear. What's wrong? They sound should be somewhat equal, right.

 

[lovinthehd]

What are the details of your gear? Brand and model of everything and how connected. Then we can kind of know what you've got to deal with.

The gear is one thing, how you actually set everything up and position your speakers and subs has a great impact. So details on that would help for each room. Some avrs have auto setup routines that can help a lot.

 

[BMXTRIX]

It has also been my experience, that much of the time you need to turn up the center channel quite a bit to get better dialog. Some movies are so overblown on effects vs. dialog, that I have switched over to stereo just so that the voices can be intelligible. I've seen this in many systems I've setup as well. I almost always raise the center channel quite a bit to ensure decent vocals.

 

[highfigh]

I have had two different home surround sound systems. Every time I play a DVD the sound in the background is super loud and the voices you can barely hear. What's wrong? They sound should be somewhat equal, right.

If you can't hear dialog, it's likely that the AVR is set to use the wrong surround mode or, as the others mentioned, the level of the center channel is too low.