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.

incorrect. movies are streams of multiple layers of content.

1. video
2. environment audio
3. effects audio
4. vocal audio

environment audio are things in the background like cars, birds, children playing.

effects audio are sound effects like breaking glass, car crashes, explosions.

vocal audio is just that, the dialog between characters.

streams MUX these together into a playable movie on the fly and is how it's possible for them to use the same movie with different language dubs.

it's completely in the realm of possibility for them to create a control to manage the volume of each of these layers before muxing. that would break their caching strategy though.

physical media like Bluray should be able to do it though. BD players never implemented such a feature that I am aware of.

¿que?

¡Mis oídos están muertos!

You could on laserdisk, but dvd got more popular

It's called compression, and most players have it in the settings somewhere. Quick and dirty is to up the volume in vlc to like 120% and lower it in system.

Commercial: DO YOU OR A LOVED ONE HAVE MESOTHELIOMA????!!!!

Alot of it is... pretentiousness?

Like, there's a lot of high-brow thinking in the movie industry where stuff is mixed for movie theaters. You know, theaters that have good surround speaker setups, but also turn the volume way too loud. It's "as its meant to be experienced" if you ask the Hollywood producers. I think Netflix and more small-screen oriented producers are better about this, where even surround mixes are much more reasonable.

Irionically HDR for video is new and a mess, but audio has long been "high dynamic" range, which is why its so awful in non-perfect listening environments.

Are you willing to pay through the nose?

Getting decent audio out of a TV with basically no bezel is a hard engineering problem. Read: expensive.

There are some crazy schemes that have been tried, like embedding a piezioelectric layer on top of the display, but the reality is no one wants to pay a grand or two for that when they could just plug in a soundbar. What TV makers should really do is bundle soundbars with the TV in a combo pack, which I think they already (sometimes) do.

Just run the audio through a dynamic range compressor. Then everything will be just as loud as the commercials.

Sometimes there's also a random high pitched buzz in the background that's louder than anything else for one whole scene. How heard would it be to just remove that frequency range or maybe see that it is louder than every other scene?

#High Dynamic Range

Sounds like you need a simple soundbar then

Subtitles on, dumbass.

Some of us can't use subtitles. I want to actually watch the cinematography and the actors. If text is on-screen I can't not read it

You can record multiple channels, you already have left and right recorded separately. Other channels could exist for different things, it would just need a standard to follow to be useful

Blind people don't exist.