Low volume and bass ONLY watching DVDs

[Green Gigs]

My new vista 32 machine is working well but when watching movies I wasn't happy with the sound volume or bass levels. So I installed an Audigy 2 because its what I had on my old pc which rocked the house with movies. The new card is working well, but again only when watching DVDs I feel like the volume is slightly low and bass is very low. Then it hit me, on my old PC I had installed nero show time and Power DVD when I installed my dvd player. On my new PC I am letting windows codecs do the job. Is this most likely the cause of my problem, are the Vista Home Premium codecs horrible for DVD playback?

 

[alcoholbob]

Unless you have the master volume set to a lower setting than on Windows XP then the volume should be more or less identical.

So are you saying that in XP DVDs were louder? I would test this hypothesis by booting up your old system or installing a dual boot partition (which is a good idea anyway with Vista's problems) and seeing if things are any different.

Otherwise my assumption is your speakers/built-in amplifier is having trouble with DVDs. As you know DVDs have a wider dynamic range which is why the sound levels are lower to accommodate higher peaks. The only solution to this is get bigger speakers/more powerful amp.

 

[Green Gigs]

Im using the same speakers on my new pc. Everything sounds identicle between my old pc and my new one except for DVD's. My old computer which was running xp had Power DVD and Nero installed. I am trying to figure out if these offer better codecs for handling sound in DVDs. Basically on my new computer with vista and using the codecs that came installed with it , it seems like the channel for bass is missing as if surround sound wasn't being handled correctly, but I have it setup correctly in my sound options panel just like I did on my old xp machine.

 

[Green Gigs]

I didn't want to have to install this old Power DVD software on my new vista machine if I didn't have to, but I think I will because I just viewed some Apple Movie trailers and the sound and bass was great....so much better than a DVD in media player. The apple trailers sounded like what I used to get watching DVDs on my old computer as I would expect.

I'll report back what I find out. I hope this old Power DVD from 4 years ago doesn't screw with Vista haha.