I've got some decent stereo speakers connected to my TV. Music sounds great, but it does not fix this issue at all.
A soundbar might actually be better cause it has no base I assume.

You can get an audio compressor extension on most browsers too. It functions by reducing volume above a threshold and increasing overall output to compensate.

On the flip side, if a poor audio mixer overly does this to make their track sound louder, services such as YouTube penalize the volume of the entire audio track.

Human ears are more sensitive to certain sounds, so boosting certain frequencies can make something sound louder without necessarily increasing the overall amplitude of the sound waves (air pressure).

Right now TNG. I'm re-watching it with my fiancé. The sound of the ship whooshing past is deafening.

It's been a minute since I've seen the rest of the shows. So I don't remember how good their mixing is.

But it's funny because it's true.

Or films from Spain. They whisper in a mumbled accent, then all of a sudden they start SCREAMING at each other.

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.