What is wrong with my sound?!?

[NewShockerGuy]

I find this to be very weird... and I haven't seen this happen to anyone so I'm gonna ask for some help.

I have a Sound blaster Audigy with live drive. My speaker setup is klipsch 5.1's... anymore when I watch dvds on my system it is pretty quiet... I have to turn up my speakers QUITE a bit... IE: volume 50 to hear what is going on in the movie... Right now I am watching batman begins, and I don't hear much of anything coming out my rear speakers..... BUT.. as soon as someone instant msgs me, it scares the crap out of me because it's so damn loud..? Why is the movie quiet and the AIM sounds loud as shit?!

When I test using Audigy Head quarters software, and test all 5 speakers the woman clearly says, front left, center, front right, rear left, rear right... all at a nice normal volume level...

I am using windows media player for the program to watch movies... should I be using something else so that the sound is more powerful? Or do I need a decoder?!

I'm confused.

Thanks
-Nigel

 

[spine]

DVD's are just stupidly quiet, that's all.


If you use Media Player Classic to play your DVDs then you can boost the volume by 500% to make it equal to the rest of windows's sounds or whatever.

 

[GeForceX]

I have a Sound blaster Audigy with live drive. My speaker setup is klipsch 5.1's... anymore when I watch dvds on my system it is pretty quiet... I have to turn up my speakers QUITE a bit... IE: volume 50 to hear what is going on in the movie... Right now I am watching batman begins, and I don't hear much of anything coming out my rear speakers..... BUT.. as soon as someone instant msgs me, it scares the crap out of me because it's so damn loud..? Why is the movie quiet and the AIM sounds loud as shit?!

I've experienced this. There wasn't really any fix except turning the volume up. I have 5.1 Klipsch as well and 50 is actually normal to me.

-J.

 

[Chastity]

Adjust the dynamic range in your player to compress the dynamic range. This will make softer sounds louder.

 

[AdamW]

As everyone else has said, DVDs are all just mastered with a lot of dynamic range (which is a _good_ thing), and because every movie generally has just a couple of REALLY loud bits, the rest of the movie is quite quiet in comparison. This is a good thing from an audio quality point of view. I think spine's solution would be the best, use a DVD playback app that lets you adjust the volume independently of other apps.