TV remotes, computer speakers, car radios, etc must have two sets of volume up / volume down controls. One for upper volume limit, and one for the lower.
Now I can hear what the characters are whispering to eachother, without waking up the entire apartment complex when there’s a gunshot on screen.
Or hear the quiet parts of music when I’m driving without blowing my eardrums out when the contrasting high energy part kicks in.
Do I not amplify the background noise when I turn it up myself? I think they’re looking more for a “variable volume” option rather than any actual audio engineering
You wouldn’t turn up the volume when you know the scene is meant to be quiet. Or at least, you wouldn’t turn it up so high you can hear the background noise at the level you want to hear dialogue.
It frustrates me to no end that you can customize audio levels for vocals, music, sound effects, etc in video games, but you can’t individually customize anything volume-wise on a TV.
TV remotes, computer speakers, car radios, etc must have two sets of volume up / volume down controls. One for upper volume limit, and one for the lower.
Now I can hear what the characters are whispering to eachother, without waking up the entire apartment complex when there’s a gunshot on screen.
Or hear the quiet parts of music when I’m driving without blowing my eardrums out when the contrasting high energy part kicks in.
That’s called a compressor and you could run your stereo through one or use a mobile app to do the processing on your phone.
All of my my windows machines that are hooked up to screens have Loudness Equalization enabled, which works a dream!
My Linux boxes have another software I can’t remember the name of, which do the same thing but does require more tuning.
I couldn’t watch anything without it.
If you have a surround setup, try boosting only the center speaker. Dialog is usually played through that.
Someone else mentioned a compressor. If your tv/hifi has a night mode, it’s doing that exact thing.
This is not as straightforward as you might think. If there’s an actual quiet part it would amplify the background noise.
Do I not amplify the background noise when I turn it up myself? I think they’re looking more for a “variable volume” option rather than any actual audio engineering
You wouldn’t turn up the volume when you know the scene is meant to be quiet. Or at least, you wouldn’t turn it up so high you can hear the background noise at the level you want to hear dialogue.
It frustrates me to no end that you can customize audio levels for vocals, music, sound effects, etc in video games, but you can’t individually customize anything volume-wise on a TV.
If you play videos through VLC player, you can adjust the dynamic range, which sounds like what you are looking for.
If you run Linux, you can even do it at the system level.