Major,
If you are mostly having trouble hearing ambient background sounds like rain and wind you might be having the same problem I had with the background noise of my appliances was drowning out the more subtle sound on movies. If you turn up the surrounds to make up for this other more intense sounds will be way to loud. Not sure if you have any control over background noise but if you can tame it some it will help everything sound better.
I’ve also noticed that many movie soundtracks are mixed differently with various channels at different volumes when switching from movie to movie. For one of the Matrix movies I had to turn up the center channel about 3db just hear it over the mains. I second Hutzal’s suggestion to test your system with “Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring,” many good scenes throughout the movie. One I particularly like to use are the scenes in the Mines of Moria. Very cool echoes for the surrounds and nice bass when fighting the Balrog.
I generally leave my surrounds turned up about 3db above calibration levels for movies and about 5db for most games, sometimes a little more or less depending on the source. For my favorite movies/games I keep 3x5 cards in the case with the speaker level settings for that movie/game. This may sound excessive but found it necessary to avoid having to recalibrate by Buttkicker for each movie. As an added benefit I also started tracking the other speaker level settings.
In the end the best thing about home theater is that you can do whatever works best for you.
Dean
