I prefer for actors to mumble then their character is supposed to mumble, and just use subtitles. Maybe it's because I've gotten too used to subtitles from all the anime I watch but I always enable it for anything on YouTube or any other video content I consume.

Agree on the lightning part though, at least for action scenes, bad lighting is often used to cover for bad CGI. For narration scenes of the place is actually dark, I don't really mind for me to basically only see silhouettes, it's appropriate.

For me Star Trek is one of the worst offenders of this.

Nobody should expect a product to function reasonably out of the box. That would be insane, right?

Spacing a tired-ass joke over several shittily drawn panels does not magically make it funny again

Which series? All of them? Serious question.

But you better enjoy our voice actors, we have about 3!

It is why I enable "Loudness Equalization" on every audio device in Windows.

It makes soft sounds louder and loud sounds softer.

Can't stand it otherwise either.

Been there the hard way. I got Tubular Bells II, and listened to it via headphones (I had no speakers).

There is one passage where the music ends, and a child speaks. It was hard to understand, so I turned the volume to 11, and heard the end of the sentence like "and nothing was ever heard of him again but the sound of tu-bu-lar bells." The next sound was the BANG of the tubular bells, making my eardrums meet somewhere in the middle. somewhere...

Watching a Christopher Nolan movie I see.

192kHZ/24bit audio vs 44.1kHZ/16bit

My guess is the newest movie trilogy. Maybe the newest shows? Picard and/or that Netflix one? Discovery?

What about the HDR on my HDR TV that just makes all colors darker when enabling HDR?

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!