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Dolby Digital 5.1


Lone Palm

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I have La Scala fronts RC3 center and Heresys rears.My Kenwood receiver has a pink noise generator for balancing sound levels.When I get them equal and start a movie it seems I always to adjust the center and rears. Usually I have to turn the center down. My question is should I set the levels and leave them alone,and accept the fact that the sound engineer is correct or am I forced to tinker with the sound during the movie and not be able to sit back and enjoy it? Is the sound levels standardized or all sound tracks different? Does anyone else have these problems or am Ibonkers?

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Hi Lone Palm, you're not bonkers!

When you set your speaker levels with the receiver's noise generator, did you use a sound pressure level meter? Radio shack makes one, for about $30-35 bucks, that is worth its weight in gold! When I bought mine, and used it at home, I couldn't believe how far off I was in the volume settings I'd done by ear. I think part of the reason I was so far off was that my center, at the time, had a much different tone that my front L/R speakers and that threw me off in judging the same "loudness" between the center and fronts.

Noting that you're using an RC-3 with your La Scala/Heresy setup, you might very well make the same mistake if you're doing your setup by ear. The RC-3 isn't an ideal match for the other speakers.

As far as volume levels being standardized, they should be *balanced* in a standard manner but they may have different overall volume levels. To compensate for differences in center channel/dialogue volumes, many receivers now have a "dialogue normalization/equalization" function that should happen automatically to temporarily adjust the center channel volume (in a properly set-up system).

But, of course, no setting is "standard" or "correct" if it doesn't sound good to YOU. So, use the settings as a guide but adjust the actual levels to work for you in your room.

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