There's already a solution to this. Limiters / compressors. TVs should have them built in as software with easy to use controls. Whenever I watch movies via VLC I turn the compressor on.
And then suddenly an advert at a volume loud enough to ablate the skin right off your face
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I remember one movie I tried watching that was exceptionally bad in this department. I want to say it was Interstellar from 2014? I gave up not long into it because it was just torture to watch.
Dune comes to mind.
Common complaint about Christopher Nolan films, of which interstellar is one
Tenet?
TBF this always ends up with a lot of misplaced blame on the consumer
TV manufacturers decided/figured out long ago that Joe public cares more about a screen being thin, at time of purchase, than it having any semblance of audio quality. And they assume anyone who cares about audio will buy a set of speakers or (increasingly) a sound bar anyway, so they just need the bare minimum included.
This has gotten to the absurd point now where the speakers included in your average TV aren't much better than a particularly loud phone speaker.
It's basically impossible to get something that sounds even audible on those speakers, without doing what adverts do and compressing the shit out of the signal, which has the bonus of sounding loud and bad for everyone, there's no bringing the detail back that was squashed out. Movie studios aren't going to mix a movie that sounds bad on a system designed remotely properly (e.g. a cinema or reviewer's TV), so we're in the current situation.
The unfortunate situation today is you basically need some kind of separate speaker(s) with a TV because the manufacturers all have cheaped out across the board and don't include anything good enough any more. The consumer shouldn't be expected to know this and have to pay extra, the TV should come with speakers capable of producing audio properly.
How much do you need to spend on a sound bar for something decently better, how much difference does it even make with a fairly cheap one?
Honestly you shouldn't need to break the bank at all to be better than the built in speakers in most cases. I don't want to say definitively because I'm sure there's some basically scam products out there, but pretty much any sound bar will be an upgrade in 99% of cases.
A quick search shows a number of well known brands with offerings under £100, and one from a company I don't recognise that apparently seems to have a number of positive reviews and available for £40
You'll obviously get a further improvement if you go above the budget level, but that's definitely not to say you can't get a decent improvement over not having one at all.
Its just so hard to know what something will be like and I dont want to spend a lot of money for minimal improvement. While display specs are far easier to read.
I’m just happy the Apple TV has a “reduce loud sounds” setting. It’s not perfect, but it’s definitely helped! I imagine the Nvidia Shield might have similar?
Large dynamic range is a good thing, in audio and video. There are a number of ways to reduce dynamic range, if you really need to. Expanding dynamic range after capture is possible, too, but more fraught.
Shannon information theory gives us ways to perfectly reconstruct the lower range version from an expanded range version, but it also guarantees that reconstructing the higher range version from a reduced range version cannot be perfectly accurate across all inputs. (Assuming a fixed output range capability.)
Large dynamic range is a good thing, in audio and video.
a good thing for accurately reproducing the original signal.
But many people watching a show at home would like to just watch the damn movie without anything being particularly loud or resorting to subtitles. Decent range compression achieves that. Applying information theory to a Sunday night movie is stupid.
When someone left the TV on max volume and I load up Netflix whilst everyone is in bed.

I can feel this in my bones…I love how the animation never matches the sound though. The tada is always unexpected
It's very weird how many pro audio people knowingly fail at their core job in this way
Maybe we should have more anti audio people? Go back to silent movies and show?
(insert lengthy explanation and complaint about compression and audio mixing here)
Subtitles!
What did you say? Was it important?
[EXTREMELY LOUD NOISE]
ᵗᵘʳⁿˢ ˢᵘᵇᵗⁱᵗˡᵉˢ ᵈᵒʷⁿ
I had this with ads. It made me hate whatever product they were advertising.
This is because Reptilians don't have human ears, and can't tell how to balance audio correctly
The ad people explained that they do not mess with the volume! It's that "movies have soft and hard sound pieces and ads have more hard sound pieces." To me, that sounds like they mess with the volume and know it.
It's compression. (As in audio processing not data storage) Loudness is a perception thing. Pure decibels don't tell the whole story about how your mind perceive audio.
It's the same principle as the "loudness wars" in music.
Audio equipment still has upper limits, but music is produced to sound louder.
This is also why modern standards of measuring loudness is more complex.
But in the end this is sort of just being pedantic. Yes commercials make their stuff sound really loud and will always push up against what ever limit you put on it.
Movies and TV shows care more about quality of audio and dynamic range (that's is sort of the issue made funny in the comic above, when your equipment is unable to create audio clarity at the full dynamic range something is made for)
Actually quite a few TVs, soundbars, and audio receivers have a "night mode or quiet mode" that will compress or limit the dynamic range of what you are watching to avoid this scenario
(Yes I know... I'm ruining a perfectly good funny comic :P )
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