A lot of content is (unfortunately) mastered for a very quiet room.
This means they expect a low noise floor (say, 35dB). Which means for 45dB of dynamic range, you have a max volume of 80dB.
If your listening room isn’t perfect (no deadening, cars passing in the street, someone vacuuming), your noise floor could be 45dB to start with.
And if you go for the same range, suddenly you’re up in the 90s. Or, as this comic shows, you crank the volume in the low sections to hear things over the noise floor, but you don’t want it that loud at peak.
There are probably already 50 comments about dynamic normalisation in the comments. And it’s the right answer for generic environments.
That, and boosting the centre channel (either with a real channel, or virtually). As the centre channel tends to have a higher percentage of use for dialogue.
A lot of content is (unfortunately) mastered for a very quiet room.
This means they expect a low noise floor (say, 35dB). Which means for 45dB of dynamic range, you have a max volume of 80dB.
If your listening room isn’t perfect (no deadening, cars passing in the street, someone vacuuming), your noise floor could be 45dB to start with.
And if you go for the same range, suddenly you’re up in the 90s. Or, as this comic shows, you crank the volume in the low sections to hear things over the noise floor, but you don’t want it that loud at peak.
There are probably already 50 comments about dynamic normalisation in the comments. And it’s the right answer for generic environments.
That, and boosting the centre channel (either with a real channel, or virtually). As the centre channel tends to have a higher percentage of use for dialogue.