I received another email today from BeoCare indicating that they are aware of the problem and developers are working on a fix.

I'll chime in that I definitely must raise the audio level to be what I had used for listening to the same source on my Beosystem 4, Beosystem 3, and Beovision 10. @Geoff, Please do listen to what your real-world users are reporting. Also:

1. We are unable to use ALL front-firing speakers of the Theatre for the Center role.
2. Without allowing us to assign other Dolby speaker roles such as "Wide" we cannot take advantage of the TrueImage upmixing for speakers beyond 7.1.4. Why not just allow this as you did with the Beosystem 4?? This seems like a diminishment of the TrueImage concept.

I think the volume thing is not a hill of beans, just a muscle memory thing where the eyes tell you one thing but the ears say more. Once you get used to to 50-ish, it becomes second nature.

 

Yeah….I know. I meant that to me, it wasn’t a deal breaker for me demanding my money back.

Rest assured, I’ve been keeping Beocare fully occupied since receiving my Theatre telling them of the same bugs I’ve observed.

link

@Geoff, Please do listen to what your real-world users are reporting.

I can absolutely assure you that I do - even when I don't directly respond here. :-)   With respect to the question of the volume setting, please remember that a 1:1 swap of a Beovision Something to a Beosound Theatre doesn't mean that all other things are equal. For example, it's quite possible that the switch from a 5.1 or 7.1 Dolby Digital-encoded stream to a Dolby Atmos-encoded stream, may not necessarily have the same levels or identical metadata. It is also possible that Theatre's automated setup resulted in different values for the Speaker Levels settings than was the case in the television it replaced. And of course, there are other things that change, including the total number of loudspeakers and outputs. I should have been more specific in my first response: when fed identical input signals on a single input channel fed to a single output channel, with all other parameters being default or equal, then the Beosound Theatre will have the same output as a Beovision television or a Beolab loudspeaker. However, any changes in (for example) the Speaker Levels, adjustment parameters, numbers of outputs, or input signals will have a resultant effect on the total perceived output level. Sometimes, this can be very tricky/deceiving. For example, if you connect an Apple TV to a Beovision Harmony and play BTS / Coldplay performing My Universe" using the Tidal app, then the result will be about 12 dB louder than if you do exactly the same thing with a Beovision Theatre instead. The reason for this is that the Harmony (which does not support Atmos decoding) will play the 2.0 PCM mix. The Theatre will play the Atmos-encoded mix of the same track, which is mixed considerably quieter. The only VISIBLE way to see this difference is to look at the Sound Info on the two products. Cheers -geoff  

Hi Geoff,

So one thing to "add-back" perhaps is the dB gain function in the eclipse which allowed to the User to try an match different source outputs to the same general level. I understand that watching Live TV, a volume setting of say 50 is required. On Netflix, 48-46. Amazon Prime I think has lots of people with hearing difficulty because I have to wind that down to 40-42. Again, as you indicate, it probably has something to do with the "quality" of the Title and its format.

This volume normalisation feature is employed it seems in Mybuttons but in a dark room, my muscle-memory of what is 1-2-3-4 Mybutton is not intuitive. Better just to press TV, curser down and select the most appealing blue writing on the screen. Sound levels pre-matched of course!