Hi @spbonzo 

Welcome to the Sonos Community! And, apologies for the delay.

This is a common question, and a common occurrence - and not just with Sonos.

Basically, how loud a movie sounds is up to the director and the sound engineers. No director (apart from those making TV movies, I suppose) designs the sound of their movie with Home Theatre in mind - they are only interested in cinemas, and in cinemas, regardless of how much lower the dialogue is than other effects, it is still loud enough to hear clearly, and any explosions in the movie are then likely to put wind in you hair - they do not have to worry about noise levels with the neighbours, of course.

When a movie is put on a streaming service or a DVD/BluRay disc, the original soundtrack is often put on, and untouched - especially with the higher bitrate formats like Atmos. Often, however, a lower-quality (but still sounding good) Dolby Digital track will be included - it is this track that is more commonly remixed with a home experience in mind, but even then only some of the time. Different distributers and streaming services may do things differently, resulting in many ways in which one movie can sound louder than another.

Sonos Home Theatre solutions have 2 settings that can help with this: there are the Speech Enhancement and Night Sound settings, both available from the Now Playing screen when TV audio is playing to e Home Theatre device. Speech Enhancement will amplify the frequencies used in speech to higher levels, and Night Sound will compress the dynamic range so that quieter sounds are louder and louder sounds are quieter.

The new Sonos Arc Ultra uses additional AI processing to further isolate and amplify human speech. 

Make dialogue easier to hear with Speech Enhancement

Reduce loud TV audio with Night Sound

For what it’s worth, I change the volume of my system with nearly every piece of content that I watch!

The methods available for managing the levels of multiple sources so they all sound the same alter the audio experience in such a manner that we do not like to do it - it typically results in the volume perceivably dipping up and down as you listen and is very distracting and not at all enjoyable as a result.

I hope this helps.

Thanks Corry - I contacted Sonos support who recommended a few changes (most of which I’d already done apart from swap the HDMI cable) but the variance still exists.

I don’t mind changing the volume between Netflix and Disney but I am getting tired of having to up\down the volume incessantly in the same movie - one minute I have to turn the volume up because I can’t tell what people are saying and I suddenly have to turn it down because a train has just appeared.

Hi @spbonzo 

If you find yourself adjusting the volume throughout a movie, then that will largely be down to the studio mixing - basically, the director has correctly shown that a train is much louder than a voice, though arguably less important when following the plot! Both of the settings I mentioned can help with this, but only to an extent.

If there are alternative sound tracks available for the movie (that are in the same language), you may find one that is better than the others (my bet would be on Dolby Digital (also known as AC3)).

I tend to watch most content at volume 12 - 16, but recently I watched some movies that needed volume 40 for the dialogue to be heard - it’s a fact of life, unfortunately.

I am not doing a hard sell here - just informing you of all the options - but were you aware that Sonos Ace headphones can play the audio (including Atmos) from a newish Sonos Home Theatre solution (Beam, Beam Gen 2, Ray, Arc & Arc Ultra)? This would make things easier to hear and less likely to annoy your neighbours in the evening. The sound field even rotates as you turn your head, making sure the dialogue always sounds like it’s coming from the screen.

If you are using a streaming box (like nVidia Shield) there may be additional settings available to you that will boost a movie’s volume.

I hope this helps.

Corry,

After a weekend of testing I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s the Loudness setting that results in the wide volume variation. It accentuates ‘loud’ noises as you’d expect but for some reason it seems to revert to a lower volume immediately after. This actually may not be the case as it could simply be our ears having to adjust to the lower volume.

Things are definitely better with it turned off.

Thanks again.

Hi @spbonzo 

Thanks for sharing your findings, and I am glad to hear that you have found a way around the problem you were having!

This is interesting though - generally, Loudness is just a bass boost, in effect. I did hear someone else say something similar, however - I will report this as I really don’t think it is something that is expected.

Thanks again for updating the thread!