I don't buy it, much recent content is nearly unintelligible on my pretty good 5.1 setup with a real AVR and real speakers, thats set up and tuned reasonably well. Older movies, from the 80's and 90's don't have this problem, just newer content. And so often it's not even a level problem, it's like the dialogue is deliberately muffled by an EQ or something. I can boost my center channel or use the AVR's speech enhancement control and it's still hard to understand. I kind of buy into the common complaint that it's the actors and actresses that don't know how to project their voices any more.