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Comment by TacticalCoder | Hacker News Reader

> Rather than mixing for mono (one-speaker) and stereo (two-speaker) audio—which makes audio sound clearer on basic TVs—sound engineers today often design for a higher number of speakers and then scale audio down for less-capable systems.

Does anyone know if moving to a "3.0" audio setup is sufficient to fix this? That'd be left+right+center channel. Several speakers brands, if I'm not mistaken, do name the center channel as "vocal" or something like that.

Do people with a 3.0 speakers setup or more also have this problem of voices behind harder to discern than they used to?

Or is this just affecting people watching movie using whatever stereo setup?

I'm asking because I've got an "audiophile" stereo setup but don't really want to go to the trouble of moving to an home cinema amp + many speakers.

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I have a Marantz receiver (same company as Denon) which feeds a 9.1 system with Dolby Atmos. I still have all the problems this article says, including visual issues with dark scenes in a dedicated, dark video room. The system has been tuned and retuned and nothing can be done about the terrible inputs from these misguided filmmakers, IMO. It is similar to the modern music mixing style of compressing the heck out of everything and minimimizing most dynamic range.

One thing that helped a lot was to add 6dB gain to the center channel. Sometimes that is enough, since the voice is usually put on that channel. I became an expert in navigating the menus to change that one volume, then discovered the Android app that makes it easier.

Unfortunately, I'd say the answer is no.

I have a quality 5.1 setup and I have all the problems everyone is talking about.

The mode I usually use for dialog intelligibility is Mch Stereo, which is basically stereo but using four speakers (the front and sides). I think it's only better because the side speakers are closer to your ears than the fronts.

Also, just having it in 5.1 mode and turning up the center channel 6dB or more works as well, and is probably the best sounding solution because you get the surround audio sounding correct.

But I find it annoying to do that because then I want to listen to music and I have to go through the rigmarole of turning the center channel down again.

I think you would get some value out of a 3.0 or 3.1 setup though, because then you could raise the center channel volume, which is where the majority of the dialog audio is.

yes it is. But it can also be solved by simply getting a quality amp that will remaster it for you.

The problem with your setup (if its build for stereo) is that you will have to replace the amp

How would adding a 3rd speaker change anything? The broadcasted signal is still a 2-channel audio, right? Is the amp just going to transform it to M/S and use mid channel for the center speaker?

Well actually what we mean is that some content is not in stereo and therefore you have a missing component.

You can always set your system to dolby sorround even though you dont have the speakers for it, but what will happen is that you will miss a Channel.

So lets say you are watching 5.1 content over 2 speakers and your amp does not break it down for you, you will be hearing the content of the people speaking weirdly low and all effects REALLY loud.

This is because your tv is trying to send you audio on a speaker you are laking and thus it swallows it. This makes the voices of characters sound further away and can be freaky :D

I see, thank for explaining. Yes if you have the option to receive more than 2 channels then I can see how that would give some flexibility. I didn’t realize that TV channels offer 5.1 (I don’t own a TV set).

Saying that if you are receiving a stereo signal - which I expect is the default option - then adding another speaker or changing the amp won’t make any difference, right? Or is there some amp processing technique that improves even a stereo signal?

Yes! but the "problem" here is that some services will send you sorround sound by default trying to get a 5.1 signal to speakers that dont exists.

Its quite a weird feeling if you figure out you did not connect the center speaker after a month, only to realize that "how you could have lived with yourself remains a mistery" :D

I bought a Vizio 3.0 soundbar to see if it would help, and it did a little. But really helped was downmixing to stereo (using Airflow). That was a major improvement.

I don't know how a sibling responder claims having a 3.0 setup fixes the problem for them but it definitely does not improve anything for me.

I wonder if we are discussing different broadcasting options. If the incoming signal is stereo then adding a 3rd speaker shouldn’t make any difference. If the incoming signal is 5.1 then you either have to downmix or to add more speakers for a better experience. Just using 2 speakers for 5.1 might result in a noticeable signal loss.

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