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AppleTV 4K box with the new Enhance Dialogue feature has been working great for me. Raising the center channel never sounded great to me, because there are so

AppleTV 4K box with the new Enhance Dialogue feature has been working great for me. Raising the center channel never sounded great to me, because there are so many other sounds in the center channel as well. At least now I can raise only the dialogue levels on demand.

mrandish 1y ago
I have no doubt that Dialog Enhancer features, which are available on many streaming devices and AVRs, can work well. They are basically variants of multi-band dynamic compressors tuned to target vocal frequencies on the center channel. Both my streaming device and AVR each have their own flavor of dialog enhancer and they do help improve the problem substantially. But I don't feel 'good' about just leaving this kind of post-processing feature on long-term and certainly not as a widely recommended best practice (except for hearing impaired users). I guess the reason for my reluctance is more in principle than practical. It's just not the right technical approach to solving the root problem, and any automatic algorithm, no matter how adaptive, dynamic or clever, will sometimes fail to do the right thing. It also bothers me that every implementation of dialog enhancer I've seen is opaque and undocumented. I've been in and around video and audio engineering for most of my career, especially on the broadcast tooling side creating new gear. I go way back to the analog days when we could only dream of having such a pristine digital signal throughout the entire signal chain. We were always battling generation loss and noise on the production side and on the home theater side, we spent time and money slathering various noise reduction and other 'enhancement' processing to fix the worst aspects of the degraded analog signals we received. At long last, today we live in that sci-fi future nirvana where the same levels the director approved on the mixing stage can be exactly what you hear at home. So, yeah, I have some PTSD about still needing to slap some post-process on at home to fix issues that should not be there in the first place. We waited decades for this tech to arrive, so the engineer in me wants it to work - without fixes or user patches. And that means addressing the issue at the source.

mrandish 1y ago

I have no doubt that Dialog Enhancer features, which are available on many streaming devices and AVRs, can work well. They are basically variants of multi-band dynamic compressors tuned to target vocal frequencies on the center channel. Both my streaming device and AVR each have their own flavor of dialog enhancer and they do help improve the problem substantially. But I don't feel 'good' about just leaving this kind of post-processing feature on long-term and certainly not as a widely recommended best practice (except for hearing impaired users). I guess the reason for my reluctance is more in principle than practical. It's just not the right technical approach to solving the root problem, and any automatic algorithm, no matter how adaptive, dynamic or clever, will sometimes fail to do the right thing. It also bothers me that every implementation of dialog enhancer I've seen is opaque and undocumented. I've been in and around video and audio engineering for most of my career, especially on the broadcast tooling side creating new gear. I go way back to the analog days when we could only dream of having such a pristine digital signal throughout the entire signal chain. We were always battling generation loss and noise on the production side and on the home theater side, we spent time and money slathering various noise reduction and other 'enhancement' processing to fix the worst aspects of the degraded analog signals we received. At long last, today we live in that sci-fi future nirvana where the same levels the director approved on the mixing stage can be exactly what you hear at home. So, yeah, I have some PTSD about still needing to slap some post-process on at home to fix issues that should not be there in the first place. We waited decades for this tech to arrive, so the engineer in me wants it to work - without fixes or user patches. And that means addressing the issue at the source.