My brother is having issues with dialog and I'm looking for a few suggestions.
His setup:
VP180
M60s
4 QS8s
SVS PB13 Ultra
NAD T765
He's having trouble hearing dialog, particularly during movies. With the system set up and calibrated properly, dialog seems quiet and hard to hear, but when the bullets start flying, the overall volume in the room gets quite loud. I can't turn up the overall system volume to hear voices because action scenes get overly loud.
He's resorted to turning up the center volume. He's at +4 now. We calibrated it to +2 and even that was a tiny bit higher than the measurements showed. At +4, the sound stage collapses to the center channel.
His seating positions are off-center a few feet since he wanted two love seats so I am wondering if I'm getting too much combing from the VP180. It's particularly hard to hear female voices.
Or I was wondering if I should enable Dynamic Range Compression in order to bring up the low volume scenes, and knock down the loud scenes. I'm not even sure if his NAD can do that since it tends to leave out extras that nobody uses.
1. Wow, beautiful rooom.
2. If you calibrated for the front row then the dialogue will be disproportionately softer and the effects disproportionately louder when sitting in the back row.
3. A few feet off centre is not your problem, I can sit 11ft. off centre and still hear my VP180 crystal clear.
4. Having your SVS underneath is not your problem, but having both in an enclosure may be. Try testing the VP180 with it out of the enclosure.
5. Not angling the VP180 up enough is not your problem, it has outstanding vertical off axis performance.
6. Use Dolby PLIIx / Cinema instead of DTS.
7. DRC/Night/Dynamic Volume can all help if you don't mind the limited dynamic range.
8. Good luck and let us know what you find.
