Why are music channels so much louder than TV and movies?
Maybe it's the Windows PMC but it seems true on the ROKU too..
The MUSIC channels are typically MUCH MUCH LOUDER than the TV channels and movies.
I have to turn the sound way down before starting SHOUTCAST or PANDORA or I'll blow a speaker or a neighbor.
Typical movie volume setting on my AV system for "normal listening": 61%
Same audio level on typical TV channels in PMC: 52%
My receiver setting for the same perceived level for MUSIC channels: 30%.
It sounds fine, no clipping, but so loud... (I'm using digital audio output from the computer motherboard).
FYI, other common sources (Sony BluRay, DirecTV): about 55% give or take 5%
It's PLEX MUSIC that is way out of line. It's worse in practice since movies are lower than average, switching between them is really jolting.
I don’t think this is necessarily an issue with Plex, but just the nature of the two different types of content.
Typically any audio that is being broadcast via shoutcast or on Pandora is going to be massively compressed – both in terms of how it’s mixed, and a lot of times additionally compressed (or worse brick wall limited) when it’s actually being “broadcast” (moreso with shoutcast channels than Pandora). This lends to lots of audio having a very tiny dynamic range (the difference between the loudest and quietest parts). On the other hand movies tend to have a very large dynamic range. This means that only the very loudest bit of a movie (i.e. an explosion) will be as loud as typical music coming from one of those channels. To a certain extent the same holds true for TV content, especially if it’s something that’s surround sound mixed, which most modern TV is. There’s also inherently perceived volume loss on most setups when downsampling multi-channel audio into stereo, which doesn’t help this situation any.
So again this is not necessarily something in Plex that’s going on here, it’s just the nature of the two different types of content. If your amp/AVR has an FM tuner try this: leave the volume exactly where it is at when you are listening to a movie and then switch to a good strong FM radio station and you’re probably going to see similar results loudness wise between the music and movies/tv. If you don’t keep in mind that a lot of AVRs may also have an audio limiting or volume adjusting capability (sometimes called “night” mode) which may be affecting things too, sometimes they leave them always enabled on the tuner portions of the AVR to prevent this exact sort of thing when you switch between the inputs.
If you want to visually see this in action try loading up the audio from a movie or TV show into an audio editor that shows you the actual waveforms and compare it to the waveforms for broadcast music.
Anyway, just on movies alone I do see a big difference in volume myself between movies with AC3 5.1ch audio and MP3 2.0ch audio. “Boost Volume Level on Downmix” is set. Guess it would be worse if it wasn’t.
It's not an "apparent" difference, it's fairly massive. I've been a professional audio engineer (radio and recording studios) and I do know the difference between compression loudness and uncompressed audio. That's not it here. We are talking about 10 DM or more difference, all content.
I thought maybe my rips were to blame, but video file content from many sources plays about the same. And the music, including virginal CD rips from my collection, is always WAY WAY LOUD.
Ok riddle me this then ... what's the typical dBm of speech within a movie? And how much headroom does that leave in the audio track? Now how about an explosion or the other loudest part of the movie? How much headroom does that leave? Now a typical rock or pop song, how much headroom does that have? So is the rock/pop song any louder than the explosion when played back at the same volume? Load up the audio tracks in any editor and take a look for yourself.
Actually never mind. If you're convinced it's a bug then I probably can't un-convince you at this point, but I do suggest googling this for yourself. I have a similar setup and get nothing unexpected on my gear.
This is definitely not a bug, and it could be an android thing but I don’t have this problem in the android app only using other clients (PHT/Rasplex/Web) Surely there could be an option to help this?
