I feel like the real issue, is that we only get one volume bar. If it was normal to define both the minimal and maximal volume setting and have the players stretch the given dynamic range into that then it would all be good.

Play around with your settings, you might be able to fix it.

Subtitles!

How can we set volume of music, SFX and voice separately, in games but not in movies?

TENET has entered the chat

Because a video game is a program that can change it's behavior as it's running.

A video is a recording. It's already been recorded.

In games these categories of audio are calculated and mixed locally in real time, for movies they are mixed down to a single track and compressed ahead of time.

These days having three audio tracks would not be a significant problem, compared to the high resolution video track. But I guess the industry never changed.

If you want your TV to have an audio system on par with the 4k OLED display it's going to cost twice as much and weigh three hundred pounds. And be gargantuan. Speakers need space to move air and resonate.

A sub would help, it would divert some of the responsibility away from your driver's there. It could then focus a bit more on dialogue, and you could probably tweak the EQ to be more friendly towards the mids. That being said, play with the EQ in general, you might be able to squeeze a bit more out of your current ones

I could already hear the forums filling with desync complaints

My TV has a "Night" mode that caps the volume at a certain level, so you can make the dialogue audible without having action be way louder. And also a "Volume Levelling" setting that has a similar effect, by trying to make all the sounds roughly the same volume rather than only quieting the ones that were louder to begin with.

Adjust the audio stream settings. It's probably on 5.1 surround sound if you have this issue, and that means terrible audio on stereo speakers.

Sure, modern stereo mixes are still awful, but in a lot of cases, switching to an audio stream appropriate for your setup fixed a lot of ambiguity.

I have dabbled in video editing and it is SO easy to manipulate and level the audio track so that dialogue is louder than music and sound effects.
This has led me to believe that movies where this is a major problem like Tenet are absolutely mixed this way on purpose, and the only reasonable conclusion to draw from that is that Christopher Nolan is insane.

I looked into this. I'm not paying 300 euros for a decent speaker set if I can get the same results by not having 5.1 surround sound selected.

Hey totally fair, whatever works. I built out the surround system because, after experiencing someone’s home theater when I was a kid, I’d always wanted to.

I don't need high-powered, audiophile-grade surround speakers. Just maybe something a little better than a landline phone. There's a pretty wide spectrum, and TVs come with shit tier audio. They don't have to, but they do.

It does function reasonably. It plays audio. That is all it needs to do. If you want high quality sound, but a device that specializes in sound.

My ass plays sound too, but nobody want to pay to hear it.

They may as well just sell them without speakers at all. I don't need specifixally high quality sound, just not-garbage sound.

https://youtu.be/j0m4rcx0of4

Mostly, it's a downmixing issue.

The movie is mixed to have Music, Speech, SFX spread out through 5.1 or 7.1 The speech and primary important sounds come through center. General music is a mix of L,R and Surround.
When you feed that audio track to a dumb tv, it does a horrible job at turning it into L and R sound only.

If you feed it through a good 5.1 or 7.1 receiver or soundbar, you get options for Speech and surround and you can mess with levels individually. But the speech is front and loud.

If I just plug my roku into my tv, the center channel is almost at, all I get is the light intermixing of center in L and R so speech is horrible. you jack up the volume to hear the speech, then all the other sound is way too loud

Likewise, in most cases just taking an AAC and convert it to mp3 without adjusting the levels, it ends up sounding like trash.