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RE: Need advice, please!

Posted by David Aiken on August 24, 2007 at 17:53:15:
Don't know what your "DRC" is, it may be something like "Night" mode on my Denon receiver which is a compression setting that reduces the range between the softest and loudest sounds.

Compression doesn't usually introduce distortion to an undistorted sound unless you also turn the volume up to the point where the amp or speakers distort noticeably but the cause of the distortion there is the volume level rather than the compression. On the other hand compression doesn't remove distortion either. If you compress a distorted sound, it will still be distorted after compression. Compression will result in you listening to softer sounds at a louder level if you maintain either average or peak volume levels as they were before applying the compression. That MAY make speech more audible and legible in some cases. On the other hand, if the background sounds/music are of a sufficient level and in a similar frequency bandwidth to the speech so that they were masking the speech to some degree before compression, compression won't help there and it's always possible that it may make things a little worse. I suspect what's going to happen in any given case is going to depend on the soundtrack and the respective levels of speech and sounds/music within the track to some degree.

Part of your problem may have to do with room acoustics, especially if your room gives a bit of a boost to high and low frequencies relative to the mids. You may want to play around with tone controls a little, and also any EQ options available on your player. Some Dolby/DTS decoders offer a 'Cinema EQ' option which rolls the high frequencies off slightly and that may help. Alternatively, introducing a little high and/or low frequency cut with tone controls may make the voice range a little more prominent and help with speech intelligibility.

David Aiken