Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion Technical Questions Sound Lost in Movies

I am almost finished with my HT system. I am running Axiom M60 for my left and right channels, Axiom VP150 for my center, SVS sub PC12-NSD, Martin Logan Motion 4 for my surround and Pioneer Elite SC-35 for my receiver. I am new at all this so my question is does music play a lot louder than when you're watching movies? When I'm listening to music I would have my receiver on about -25 and it is really loud. When I am watching a movie it seem like I have to turn it up to about -10 to get it to produce the same volume as get setting the volume at -25 for music. Even at -10 the center channel seem to be very low. I understand that there are a lot of variable that can cause this but I was hoping someone can narrow the problem down for me. Do I need a better center speaker? My HT room is 11ft wide and 33ft long. Thank you guys.

If differences in perceived volume are the only issue, it's probably not a problem. What kind of music are you listening to? A lot of music has a narrow dynamic range. Movies tend to have a much wider dynamic range, which means they can go from very quiet to deafening depending on the scene. The music might generally seem louder simply because there's not that level of variation in the signal. It's like when you're watching a TV show and then it goes to commercial and it seems like it's much louder. The commercial might not actually be louder than the peaks in the television program you were watching. It's just that the commercial is ALL peak.

Some people do run their centers a few dB above the calibrated level, so you might try that to see if it satisfies you. Also, how is the VP150 situated? You might experiment with placement to see if you can get better results. If you can get the front of the VP150 out a bit so it's not buried, it might help.

I'm sure other people will come along with other suggestions.

Johnny, what you've described isn't anything unusual. If you're talking about pop music, much of it is recorded as loudly as possible, since it's believed that loud sells. A setting of -10 for movies is quite common. So, there's actually no "problem" to "narrow down". As long as you can get adequate volume on source materials, don't worry about what setting is used to get it.

As to the dialog in the center channel in movies, it often isn't recorded at a high enough level to be clearly understandable, and as CV mentioned, raising the center channel level a few dB in such cases can help.

To add to the excellent comments that have already been made, my Denon has 2 menus, one for multi-channel and one for stereo that allow me to setup my system differently. I'm not sure about the pionneer but it is worth it to check, maybe the levels are set much higher / lower in one case vs the other.

Thank you guys for the quick responds. I just wanted to make sure that my system is running properly. I forgot to mention that both my M60 and VP150 are in-wall mount, and I have already mounted the VP150 underneath my screen. I will definitely try to raise the dB up on the center channel to see if it sound and better. Thank you again guys!

I have to adjust the level on my receiver between music, TV and Blu Ray to maintain the same relative (to my ears) volume.

You can save up to 6 different eq settings on the pioneer elites.

I am assuming here that when you are talking about music listening it is 2 channel. As has already been mentioned, 2 channel Cds or equivalent media are always going to be louder than movies inasmuch for movies we are moving to 5.1 and/or 7.1 audio which is always going to be not as loud as two channel. Obviously the sound has to be distributed over several channels as opposed to just two, hence, a drop in volume. One of the reasons for this is to allow for more headroom with the significant fluctuation that occurs in the volume of movies(especially of the action variety)that you don't normally hear in 2 channel music. The only exception to this that I have ever noticed is with SACD or DVD Audio discs. The multi-channel soundtrack I have heard on these discs are quite often as loud as 2 channel CDs.

Casey, keep in mind the additive nature of having more speakers playing(not necessarily the same sounds)simultaneously. For example, if one speaker is playing at 80dB ans a second one is added at 80dB, the net is 83dB, and if two more are added at 80dB, the net is 86dB. Likewise, if the level of each of the four speakers was reduced to 74dB, the end result would be the original 80dB level from the one speaker.